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 light went on for Snell.

“I realized then that we had built an organization that was an amazing manager of multi-generational poverty, but we did very little to actually solve the problem. There’s a big difference between the two.”

Snell, founder of the Midwest Social Innovation LLC and co-founder of the Midwest Consortium for Social Innovation at Marquette University, described his foray into social entrepreneurship at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus on Sept. 9. The event celebrated the creation of the William J. Loschert Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, one of five chairs established in Fordham’s Schools of Business and funded by a gift from William Loschert, GSB ’61, with help from Mario Gabelli, GSB ’65. Gabelli’s endowed chair challenge partially funded the four other chairs in the Schools of Business as well.

Jesuit institutions such as Fordham and Marquette, which ground their pedagogies in the Jesuit mission of educating “men and women for others,” are well-poised to form students with “the wiring to be agents of positive change,” Snell said. A keen sense of social justice and an understanding of their own agency instill in these students the drive to tackle the world’s most pressing social problems.

To do that, he said, entrepreneurs (as well as innovators from any discipline) must confront a basic question:

“Are we managing the problem? Or are we investing in solutions?”

An example of social entrepreneurship is the Appleton, Wisconsin-based Community Outreach Temporary Services, which converted a defunct country club into public green space and gardens to provide job training for individuals from halfway houses, homeless shelters, and other community services.

Another example is The Ability Center, a gym equipped specifically for people with disabilities. Created by cancer survivor Damian Buchman, the gym makes fitness possible for the disabled population, thereby helping spare them from costly yet preventable problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

And the list goes on, including the Cristo Rey Network, which provides college preparatory education to urban students with limited educational opportunities; Marquette’s Humanoid Engineer & Intelligent Robotics lab, which makes robots that interact with children to help curb childhood obesity; and a smartphone app that scans clothing labels to screen whether they were produced by child labor.

Snell said that he has seen over and over again that once students are introduced to the concept of social entrepreneurship and shown real-world examples, their capacity to innovate proves endless.

“The students run with these ideas,” he said. “As an administrator or faculty member, you have to know when to get out of the way. Help them unleash their passion, and then let them go. It’s fun to watch.”

The Loschert Chair celebration was the second event in what is shaping up to be the year of social innovation at Fordham’s Schools of Business. A week earlier, author and The New York Times contributor David Bornstein urged Gabelli School of Business freshmen that their entrepreneurial innovation can help to solve the world’s most pressing social problems.

In addition, Fordham this year was named a “changemaker campus” by Ashoka, the largest global network of social entrepreneurs. The University joins 25 other colleges and universities around the nation—including Marquette—to be recognized for its efforts to change the world through social innovation.

“Fordham can rock this space. You’ll make contributions not only to the Jesuit cohort, but to higher education and around the world,” Snell said.

Undergraduates in the Student-Managed Investment Fund course showed they were equal to the task; the fund returned 4.5 percent over three months, ending on April 30.

“It was excellent. It all worked according to plan,” said James R. Kelly, lecturer in finance, who designed the course.

Although Fordham’s treasurer retained final control of the money, decisions on how to manage the fund were made entirely by the students, who were chosen for the class from dozens of applicants.

“We had students who were analysts and others who were portfolio managers,” Kelly said. “The analysts did research before investing. Then over the course of the semester we evaluated new recommendations to rebalance the portfolio, take some profits and make new investments. It was very realistic.”

That’s exactly what Kelly wanted in designing the course—to replicate the structure of a real asset management company as a supplement to the portfolio-management theories learned in other finance courses.

“It’s as if the University subcontracted the money to the students and they ended up getting a good performance,” he explained.

Throughout the duration of the two-semester course, which began in the fall of 2009, students were expected to generate investment ideas, investigate investment opportunities and make recommendations based on their analyses. The first-semester students were the analysts. They were mentored by the more-experienced second-semester students, who were the portfolio managers.

Research was performed individually in an equity—or macro-team—environment. Students were responsible for initiating research ideas and recommending investment actions.

While the class bounced some ideas off of Kelly, he did not take part in the decision-making process.

“They actually chose a conservative asset allocation with more bonds than equities,” Kelly said. “Neutral would be 50 percent equities, 40 percent bonds and 10 percent hard assets.

“Typically, students tend to be aggressive. You would expect them to have 55 to 60 percent in equities, but they weren’t like that. They saw the risks in the market as a result of the downturn and they wanted to protect the University’s money.”

Student-managed investment funds (SMIFs) are well established at other major universities, yet most SMIFs allow students to invest only in domestic equities, Kelly said.

“Our students were able to invest all over the world—in foreign equities from emerging markets or domestic and foreign bonds,” Kelly said.

All of the investments were sold in May during the market decline and the proceeds invested in a money market account pending reinvestment this month. The year-to-date return of the fund is currently 1.2 percent.

“Last year’s group did a great job, and I’m sure the next group will do the same,” Kelly said.