To the women of the Gabelli School, though, it’s business as usual.

“The environment is open here,” said Rosa Romeo, a clinical assistant professor of accounting and taxation, who is the faculty moderator of Fordham’s chapter of Smart Woman Securities (SWS).

“There’s a tone at the top that as long as you do the work and you get the grades, you can accomplish what you want. There is no ‘you can’t do this because you’re a girl’ sentiment. You want this role—go for it. You want this internship—go for it.”

One needn’t look further than SWS to see this attitude in play, Romeo said. A nonprofit organization with chapters on 21 campuses around the country, SWS focuses on investment education for undergraduate women. The Gabelli School’s chapter is among the oldest—Fordham and Yale, which launched in January 2009, were the third and fourth colleges to form chapters following Harvard, where SWS originated, and Columbia.

“SWS is definitely shaping my experience at Fordham,” said Lauren Kelly, a sophomore finance major who joined SWS during her freshman year. “It’s about mentorship, building networks, and educating others. Basically, it’s an environment of women helping women.”

With more than 50 active members, SWS is one of the largest clubs on campus. Each new recruit is paired with an upperclassman member, who serves as a mentor in anything from club activities to classes to internships to interviewing.

“We encourage people to go for coffee with their mentors, to not be afraid to ask questions,” said Erika Schwartz, a junior accounting major and the chief operating officer of Fordham SWS. “The business world is competitive, so we emphasize supportiveness and being there for one another.”

Throughout the year, the group offers numerous educational seminars for its attendees, covering themes from résumé building to investment minutiae. Their cornerstone activity is an investment project, in which the students learn to research and analyze stocks and present their recommendations to a panel of judges.

In December, a group that included Elizabeth Fonger, a junior at Fordham College Rose Hill, Lorem Basile, a sophomore at the Gabelli School, and Kelly took their stock skills to Boston for the national SWS stock pitching competition. The group pitched Lululemon, and came in second place, behind Harvard.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot opportunities [from SWS]and have been the beneficiary of good mentorship. And I’ve been able to then pass that on to younger members,” Kelly said.

As chief development officer for SWS, Kelly recruits speakers for the group’s annual Women in Leadership Conference, which takes place this year on April 8. In past years, the group has hosted speakers such as Barbara Desoer, CEO of Citibank, N.A., and Andrea Jung, former CEO of Avon Products, as well as Fordham alumnae MaryAnne Gilmartin, FCRH ’86, president and CEO of Forest City Ratner, and Patricia David, GABELLI ’81, global head of diversity for J.P. Morgan Chase.

Their talks—which draw both male and female students—are reliably empowering, Kelly said. Last year, Liz Ann Sonders, GABELLI ’90, the senior vice president and chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, spoke about her business education at Fordham and the successful career that followed.

“Someone asked her why she wanted to go into finance, and she said to us, ‘I just thought it was the coolest thing ever to be a woman on Wall Street.’ We all loved that!” Kelly said.

“[SWS] isn’t only about education and building a network. It’s about smashing the perception that there aren’t women in senior-level positions in the business world.”

“Business is, in many ways, still a man’s world. So, if you’re a woman, it is more important to project knowledge, to be curious and confident,” said Donna Rapaccioli, PhD, dean of the Gabelli School. “To this end, there are opportunities around every corner at the Gabelli School for women to learn and to take on leadership roles.”

The business world has come a long way in working toward gender equality, Rapaccioli said. Still, in many areas there remains a “subtle bias” both about women’s ability to fulfill high-level roles and their interest in pursuing such roles in these male-dominated, high-intensity environments.

“What will finally eliminate this bias is a critical mass of extraordinarily talented women surprising the field—planting a stake in the ground in areas where people expect to see men,” Rapaccioli said.

“Our female students are these women. They are making me extraordinarily proud now, and I cannot wait to see what they are accomplishing when they are 25, 35, or 50.”

A finance veteran, Rieder is the managing director and Chief Investment Officer of fundamental portfolios at BlackRock, as well as a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Investment Advisory Committee on Financial Markets and a recent inductee into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame.

The market will be much more volatile in 2015, Rider predicted in his Feb. 3 talk to an audience of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends.

One factor spurring this volatility is demographics, he said.

“We’re going through a demographic evolution like nothing we’ve ever seen before—the population is aging faster than it ever has,” said Rieder. “This means that the global economy is growing slower than it ever has historically, because when more people draw from the economy than contribute to it, you break the potential growth in the system.”

For fixed income, slower global economic growth will mean lower interest rates, he said.

Another factor that Rieder linked to increased market volatility was technology, which he said is a major yet “grossly underappreciated” dynamic. Increasingly sophisticated technology has led to decreased cost of production, reduced cost of labor, and deflated prices overall.

“I’m an avid believer that technology is changing the ecosystem today. I don’t think central banks, markets, or even investors appreciate just how big the effect of technology is,” he said.

He offered the iPhone as an example of how drastically a new technology can influence a market. A single $650 phone has displaced $2,200 in collective worth of other products, such as cameras, camcorders, calculators, and even flashlights.

“Two-thirds of the products in this system were extinguished all because we have this item we carry around in our pockets,” he said. “And it not only replaces them, but also does the job better.”

Formed in 2010, the Fordham Wall Street Council fosters collaboration among business faculty, staff, students, and friends interested in various sectors of the capital markets.

America’s failure to commit to Afghanistan and Iraq for the long haul has created an environment in which extremists are once again creating chaos in the countries we sought to liberate from despotic regimes, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Fordham University audience this week.

“When you go in and occupy a country, when you occupy Afghanistan, when you occupy Iraq, you take on a 40- or 50-year responsibility,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace on Nov. following a leadership lecture at the Fordham Law School. “Not four years or five years. Not ‘let’s go in, topple the government, give them a little bit of help’ and then say ‘good luck’ and leave.”

Pace served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Bill Clinton and chairman under President George W. Bush. Both men, he said, made thoughtful, considered decisions on the use of military force, but Bush’s decisions were not accompanied by a strongly made case to his constituents.

“President Bush could have done a better job of educating the American people about what this really means,” Pace said of the wars.

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“I have a simple philosophy for investing: It’s all about the people,” the 79-year-old Langone told a standing-room-only crowd at Fordham University on Oct. 27. “A great person doing a great job will be a great investment.”

That was just one of the lessons of a lifetime spent building businesses that Langone, a co-founder of the Home Depot home improvement chain, sought to deliver to the approximately 400 people who gathered at the Rose Hill campus to hear from a man who said he wanted to “tell it like I see it.”

Langone — joined on stage by Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of Fordham’s graduate and undergraduate schools of business, and Gabelli School senior Lou Murphy — delivered his gospel of people, passion and persistence, but he admitted that, despite his wealth and fame, not everything he touched turned to gold.

“Home Depot is one of my successes,” he told the audience. “But if you gave me six months I couldn’t list all my failures.”

Langone, who early in his career dug ditches for the Long Island Expressway, has been playing the big leagues of high finance and business for decades. He served previously as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, and he worked with Texas entrepreneur Ross Perot and his company, Electronic Data Systems.

In the 1970s, Langone founded a boutique investment bank, Invemed Associates, which was designed to finance medical business startups. But he soon turned his interests toward home improvement, co-founding Home Depot with two others in 1978.

Home Depot’s orange signage has since become ubiquitous throughout the country. Langone donated some of the money he made to charities, including the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City.

In his opening remarks, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called Langone “one of the leading lights of the American financial scene.”

Langone was not shy about pointing out what he said was a “poisonous and destructive” regulatory environment under the Obama Administration that was stunting business growth in America.

“We’re going to pay a terrible price if we don’t fix it,” Langone said.

“Tax me all you want,” he continued. “Just open things up so there can be opportunities for creative people to start businesses and be who they want.”

Langone also had practical business and life advice for the students in the audience:

On launching a business: “We had challenges but we kept the focus on what it should be: the customer.”

On employees: ‘I’m a believer in attitude, enthusiasm, passion, and humility. In business, I’d rather have a well-rounded worker with curiosity.”

On education: “Study everything in college you’ll never get a chance to study again. I look back and wish I was a history major.”

On integrity: “When you lose your integrity and your belief in yourself, you’ve lost everything.”

On the future: “You have opportunities in this country beyond your wildest beliefs. Our greatest days as a nation and a society are ahead of us.”

Langone’s appearance at Fordham, sponsored by the Gabelli School of Business, was a President’s Council lecture.

Written by John Schoonejongen
Reported by Joanna Mercuri