Jenny Just, co-founder of Peak6 Investments, made her fortune in the high-risk world of options trading, and did it against all odds in a male-dominated industry. Little has changed. She just says that in the early 1990s, when she was on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, she was one of the few women. "Today is not that different," she said. There are still very few women in finance and fintech in general, she says, but adds, "There is no reason why women shouldn't be equal in the distribution of money."
But it's not the CBOE floor she's conquered that Jut is turning to now when she thinks about how to prepare girls for a professional world where the chips are always against her. it's poker And he accidentally got into the card game as a form of education for girls.
Just's daughter was missing out on a tennis match in 2019 when it became clear she wasn't strategizing on the court, learning to play based on analyzing the flow of the game and what was likely to happen next. This led to the experience of playing poker with her daughter, her daughter's friends and their mothers.
She has just had her breakthrough moment in the experience of watching girls learn to play cards. An internal Peak6 Investments program to empower women in finance has brought 36% of capital allocation by women, an "extraordinary number", I said, in a world of finance where even the largest banks have only the 4-5% of women in the most profitable positions. Some important lessons poker can teach:
1. Practice taking risks
Two. Having a top-down strategic approach
3. Having a seat at the table and having faith in it. "In any industry, it doesn't just matter in finance, the money on the table is incredibly important," Just said. "Even in the smallest detail, coming to the table ... the first lesson is how much courage it takes for a woman to sit at that table," she said.
I just mentioned an estimate of over 100 million people around the world who play poker today, and less than 10% of those players are women. Practice going to the table to overcome one obstacle, to move on to the next, ”he said. .
Poker, after all, is not just about making money: each lesson is geared towards a higher level mission.