Congratulations to Maria for 25 years!!
Maria Bartiromo says Wall Street ‘boys club’ made her NYSE gig rough at first
Maria Bartiromo has revealed how the Wall Street “boys club” made her life tough when she first broadcast live from the NYSE.
The Fox Business vet was the first to go to Wall Street to report on TV when she was only 27 in 1995. She was among just a few women on the floor, and told Page Six: “I really had to be sharp-elbowed to become respected. A handful of people didn’t want me to be there, and they made it hard for me,” she said. “I remember going home being very upset.”
She recalled, “One guy yelled at me to get out of his way, and another pushed into me. But I made a commitment that I was going to own this job, I wasn’t looking for their approval … I knew my stuff.”
Bartiromo, who will ring the exchange bell virtually on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of her 25 years in the business, added: “It was a Wall Street boys club, and I turned up there, a young woman with a camera, and they had to get used to it. At the end of the day, I’m proud to have had the courage to go down there and face this sea of suits.”
Brooklyn-raised, she said she had a “little bit of an edge” that helped her.
Bartiromo said she was so ambitious to get on the air that she made her own tapes while working at CNN as a producer for Lou Dobbs, now her Fox colleague. She landed at CNBC and was there for a year when she was asked to cover the floor of the stock exchange. “It was a huge thing, and I remember all my old colleagues on CNN calling me and telling me, ‘You look terrible, they’re making an idiot out of you.’ But I liked it. Three days later, CNN and Bloomberg, they all wanted their own person down there.”
Bartiromo also said she made friends for life there — and the traders even treated her to the tradition of putting a ball and chain on her ankle when she got married in 1999.
She’s currently the host of “Mornings With Maria,” “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street” and “Sunday Morning Futures,” and she’s about to release her latest book, “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
https://pagesix.com/2020/08/03/maria-bartiromo-says-wall-street-boys-club-made-her-nyse-gig-rough-at-first/