Power Women, United for a Cause

By Jennifer A. Kingson

March 10, 2006

Leslie Rahl has been running a hedge fund advisory firm for a dozen years, after a long career running the derivatives desk at Citibank.

A typical day might be spent meeting with clients from Japan and Norway, but one recent afternoon she was accompanying Dasharah Green, a fifth grader from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

"What do you do?" asked Dasharah, who is 10 and wants to be a pediatrician, while waiting to tour the NBC studios in Midtown Manhattan with some classmates and an equal number of high-powered women.

"I actually run my own company," said Ms. Rahl, who is 55 and wore an electric blue coat with fur trim.

"What is it about?" Dasharah asked.

The hedge fund business is about many things, but it is mainly about men. Women manage money at just a tiny fraction of the nearly 9,000 hedge funds, the lightly regulated partnerships that invest in everything from stocks to exotic derivatives. Not only is it a business dominated by men, but it is also known for its aggressive testosterone-driven trading.

So it may not be surprising that women in the hedge fund business have been active in forming connections among themselves, primarily on behalf of philanthropic endeavors.

Last year, Ms. Rahl helped set up High Water Women, which supports several charities for women and children through fund-raisers and events like monthly outings with children from poor New York City neighborhoods. High Water Women is meant to be a local offshoot of a similar national group called 100 Women in Hedge Funds.

Although members of High Water Women tend to focus on the tasks at hand rather than on shoptalk, there is a tacit solidarity among them.

"When I first heard of 100 Women in Hedge Funds, I thought that there was one woman in hedge funds and I was it," said Kathleen M. Kelley, who founded High Water Women with Ms. Rahl. "People at hedge funds don't tend to interact with one another."

Ms. Kelley, 40, who is the global macro portfolio manager at Kingdon Capital and a mother of three, including an infant, and the other hedge fund women say they do not see much discrimination in their industry.

But Ms. Rahl says that the way the deck is stacked in her field can sometimes work to her advantage.

"The discrimination that exists -- in terms of High Water Women, it's a plus," she said. "We've found it much easier when we're trying to do fund-raising to get the attention of men, to get the attention of big institutions. And hedge funds are also something that are pretty hot on the Street," which helps prompt some wallets to open.

A consultant to the financial services industry, Charles B. Wendel, said that in terms of charitable works, "I don't see guys doing a lot of that, hedge fund guys."

"They don't do much of that except writing checks -- just after they buy the Ferrari," Mr. Wendel said.

Ms. Kelley said it seemed to be true that women were more nurturing in this respect. Several years back, when she started a mentoring program for 65 students in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the I Have a Dream Foundation, she said, "the women were just unbelievable, the amount of concern and time they put into it, and the men just -- well, there wasn't as much interest in it."

High Water Women derives its name from "high water mark," the industry term for the investment return that hedge funds or managers must produce to earn incentive fees. Thus, in philanthropy as in business, "we're going to constantly be striving to do more than we have done in the past," said Ms. Rahl in describing High Water Women.

Not all the women are in hedge funds or at the apex of their careers. At the NBC studio tour recently -- which brought nearly 20 students from P.S. 44 to see where the nightly news and "Dateline" and "Saturday Night Live" are produced -- one mentor was Heather Neal, a 26-year-old office manager at a hedge fund, who said she volunteered because she used to be a first-grade teacher.

Another was Lynda Feld, a personnel recruiter at Aavis Resources who said she did a lot of charity work (including weekly kitchen prep for God's Love We Deliver, a meals program) and wanted, for professional reasons, to meet women in hedge funds.

"There are several clients of mine that have been hedge funds, so I'm always looking to increase my reach" in the industry, said Ms. Feld, who is 50.

The students were participants in an outreach program run by Partnership With Children, whose clinical director, Barbara L. Cavallo, was on hand for the tour. She said that many of the children came from troubled homes and craved one-on-one attention from an adult; for some of them, a High Water event was their first visit to Manhattan.

"Their parents are all for this," Ms. Cavallo said. "It's an opportunity for the kids to meet new people who talk to them about college, careers."

Ms. Rahl says a career in financial services has changed radically for women in the last three decades.

"I grew up in a generation where there weren't very many senior women" in financial services, she said, adding that she was one of 50 women in her class of 1,000 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1972, "when I went to work at Citibank, there were two women vice presidents in the entire worldwide bank, and they were not allowed to eat in the V.P. dining room."