dog. She is expected to keep on hand a complete supply of light bulbs, to make sure that ginger ale and soda are always on tap, and to keep herself and the children as well clothed as the family next door, who may have twice the income.
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Men joked in days past about chuckle-headed women who thought that banks used red ink because it's such a pretty color. Such jokes indicated what men thought about women's ability to keep on the right side of the ledger. Many a man even today has an exaggerated notion of the number of times his wife's checks rebound from the bank; perhaps hazarding that his wife's checks bounce ten to a hundred times more frequently than his own. Yet, while in the years after the turn of the century men did the bookkeeping for the banks of the country, nowadays women have largely replaced men as our banks' bookkeepers. Throughout the country, thousands of women bank officials are acting in a supervisory capacity, and the figure is growing. Their jobs range from chairing the board to heading departments.
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It is inevitable that women play an ever larger role in banking and in the investment world, since they have long been up to the tops of their pocketbooks in ownership: In 1952, according to a survey made by the Brookings Institution, women owned almost half of all privately owned stock in large corporations. Of the 6,490,000 owners, 3,260,000 were men and 3,230,000 women; men owned an estimated 1,763,000,000 shares, while women owned 1,308,000,000. Fifteen years later, in 1967, these figures had almost trebled in favor of women. Of the 18,490,000 shareowners, 9,430,000 were women and 9,060,000 were men; as of January 1967, 51 percent of individual shareholders were women; 3.2 billion shares, or 17.8 percent of the total, with an estimated market value of $119 billion, were registered in the names of women. Sixteen percent of the total adult female population were shareholders, and of those 6.4 million women shareholders, more than half were housewives. This same year Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She was the nation's first discount broker, and the first woman to serve as Superintendent of Banks for the State of New York.
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By 1990 the change in the representation of women in every branch of the world of finance was dramatic. For example, in a field that was virtually completely closed to women, namely,
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