By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“I see myself riding a wave,” explained Wanda Eriksen, Assurance Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Zurich office and founder of its Women’s Initiative. “I think that I’m really part of the change. Looking back, I’m going to be in that group to really have more opportunity.” Eriksen sees a shift in attitudes regarding women in the workplace – an acceptance that grows larger with each generation.

She recalled how she had been approached to spearhead the Women’s Initiative for PwC Switzerland. “Until about four years ago, I was not even remotely informed about gender issues. I was like, ‘I don’t want to start any trouble!’” she joked. “In the beginning I needed to be convinced. [In Switzerland], we were probably about 10 years behind the U.S.,” regarding gender activities.

“I don’t want to say there are barriers… there aren’t a lot of women in leadership positions,” Eriksen explained, attributing this to the “little me” syndrome, in which leaders (usually men) promote people who are like themselves or take someone similar to themselves under their wing. “It’s more related to behavior than barriers,” she said. “I also see that things are changing, solely through the increasing volume of women choosing to have a career.”

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By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Growing up as a little girl on a farm in Arkansas, Gena Lovett, now Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, knew instinctively that she belonged on Wall Street. There was something about the ringing of the opening bell each day on the morning news that left a lasting impact and kept her dreaming of a high-powered career in New York City. Lovett’s mother, Beulah Lovett, the most influential person in her life, worked herself to the bone and dedicated her life to ensuring that she and her three siblings were taken care of after their father died when Lovett was just ten-years-old. Despite being a single, widowed, working mom, Lovett’s mother was able to keep her children on the straight and narrow after they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Eventually all four children would graduate from college, Lovett herself receiving a B.A. in Business Administration from Philander Smith College.

Fast forward just over twenty years later and Lovett has served on numerous boards, accrued years of financial services experience, developed a wide range of expertise managing front, middle, and back office operations, and currently finds herself in the esteemed position of being the first Black American Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, an alternative investment advisor managing assets of approximately $500 million. As if that didn’t keep her busy enough, Lovett is also acting President of the New York Junior League (NYJL), an organization of 3,000 women volunteers who work to address some of the city’s most critical issues through volunteer services. Each member of the organization is dedicated to working just as hard as Lovett does, as 85 percent of the volunteers have full-time jobs and contribute more than 250,000 service hours.

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By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When Mara Topping, a partner in the D.C. office of White & Case, was a young girl, she lived in five countries on three continents, moving wherever her father, a high ranking USAID official, was stationed. Her childhood abroad—and her experiences with the beauty, diversity and poverty in Africa in particular—triggered a lifelong interest in other cultures and in international development. She applies this passion to her role as the head of the fund formation practice in the D.C. office of White & Case. “Emerging markets are a good part of the focus of the work that I do in private equity fund formation. I feel very good about seeing foreign capital mobilized into emerging markets where there is tremendous economic opportunity and a great deal of need.”

But the road to fund formation was not a direct one—Topping originally pursued a career in archeology. “Between Rome and Tunisia where I lived when I was younger, there are some of the best classical Roman sites in the world. It would have been hard for me not to be an archeologist. The experience of living in different cultures and the cultural diversity and issues of international development and social and cultural change were what I grew up with. And that’s what archeology really is—looking at long term cultural change and how societies develop and why.”

She completed her undergraduate archeology degree at Cornell University and a Master’s degree at the prestigious Institute of Archeology at the University of London. Topping went on to earn a Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Chicago, using two of the three Fulbright Scholarships she’d been awarded to do her Ph.D fieldwork in the Fiji Islands. There, she excavated one of only two known large pre-historic South Pacific ocean-going vessels.

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By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Called the “Princess of Perseverance” by many who know her, Diane Garnick brings her positive attitude to everything she does. “When people ask me what I am doing right now,” says Invesco‘s Investment Strategist, “I tell them I am in wild pursuit of lifelong dream to provide financial security for as many people as possible.” She added, “My greatest accomplishment is when clients who are senior people—the sophisticated investors—call me and ask ‘can you please explain this to me?’. That is the best feeling in the world because if I help them and they do a better job managing pension assets, every single person who worked, and is relying on that money for their retirement, will do better.”

It would be an understatement to refer to Garnick’s beginnings as humble. “We were very poor,” she said. “There were many times we didn’t have enough food to eat, many times we didn’t have hot water or heat, and other times that the house would be locked by the bank.”

Garnick remembered, “Someone gave us a very small black and white TV that if we adjusted the antennae just right we could get PBS. On Friday nights [while I watched the Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser program on PBS], I would think to myself, ‘wow these people who understand Wall Street…their kids are the luckiest kids in the world because those kids probably always have food. They never worry about whether there is going to be heat.’” She would ask herself, “Could you imagine being one of those kids?’” She vowed that, if she made it through those tough times, she would make sure that her kids—and children everywhere—would never suffer the way she and her siblings did.

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