A Wall Street Pioneer Makes Her Mark Harnessing Data Cushing’s Math Mentoring Helped Launch

Helen Frame Peters ’66

Helen Frame Peters ’66 was one of the early female members of the original old boys’ club — Wall Street.

As the first woman to earn a PhD in finance from the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she was a trailblazer. Starting in the 1970s, she was often the only woman in high-powered rooms, where she introduced new quantitative methods for investments. Peters eventually returned to academia as the dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where she continues to serve as a professor of finance.

For Peters, as for many Cushing women, her time at the Academy was a turning point. Her local high school in Ipswich enrolled few girls who had their sights set on a top-tier scientific or Ivy League university, which was Peters’ goal. Peters knew she wanted an academically rigorous, coed boarding school, and there weren’t many in the early 1960s. Cushing fit the bill.

“My first memory was having done very well before in school and thinking like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I got in this place in the first quarter and had the shock of my life, which is what I needed,” Peters recalls. “It was a challenge that I went there for and it was a wake-up call.”

She also remembers her terrific Cushing calculus teacher, Minoo Shroff, who challenged the two girls in the class, Peters and her roommate Carol Moffitt ’66, to excel, pushing them to a higher level. Plus, socially, there were others with shared ambitions beyond just finding a husband. Peters strongly respected her mother, who was head of public relations for WGBH in Boston — her father was an editor at The Boston Globe — and wanted the control over her life that she felt her mother enjoyed because of her work.

Af ter Cushing, Peters went on to the University of Pennsylvania and was there when the world began to change radically. When she started, women had to wear skirts to the library and to class. By her senior year, the rules barring visiting dorms of the opposite gender had been dropped entirely. “That was a dramatic change in four years,” Peters recalls. “It was very strict when I arrived and very liberal and open when I graduated.”

Still, Peters remained one of the only women in her field. She studied economics because math at Penn was very theoretical and “I was really a practical problem solver,” she says. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she shifted over to the Wharton School and earned a PhD in finance. “I had one professor who, every time I asked a question, his answer would be, ‘Well, because you’re the only girl in the class, I guess I have to answer your question,’” remembers Peters. “That was part of it. You just sort of bite your lip to get through it, and I did very well.” Sixteen students began in the program and Peters was one of just three who finished.

She headed to big-name Wall Street firms where she developed models to price mortgages using computer analysis. She was among the first to use those high-level quantitative tools.

As the times changed, Peters looked ahead and saw that the power was going to shift to the buy side, so she moved to jobs managing money. As chief investment officer of the Global Bond Group of Scudder Kemper Investments, for example, she was in charge of $150 billion in assets and a staff of 300 around the globe.

Eventually she yearned to take spots on corporate boards and to manage her own money, things that are forbidden for investment professionals. (She also served a stint on Cushing’s Board of Trustees.) That prompted her move into academia, where the dean post at Boston College provided a new challenge. Today she still loves teaching tough, practical courses that get students ready for careers in industry.

“I had one student who took my course as a junior, which is rare — a very bright student,” says Peters. “She went to her junior internship and the boss said, ‘Does anybody here feel comfortable looking at a deal? We’re just overloaded with so many things right now.’ Everybody, from all these good schools, panicked. After a while, [the female student] said, ‘You know, I’ll try.’ And she did it.” Peters savors successes like that.

She has also raised a family, including two biological daughters and three foster daughters from Sudan. Peters credits a very supportive husband and the resources to hire help, such as a live-in housekeeper, as vital to having made it all possible.

All along, Peters has looked for ways to improve opportunities for other women. When her daughter was a student athlete at Penn, she saw that, even after Title IX, women’s sports got fewer resources, so she advocated for equity and eventually

—HELEN FRAME PETERS ’66

won a coveted Alumni Award of Merit in 2013 for encouraging the university to do better. “Your excellent sense of humor, Peters, and gracious demeanor belie the seriousness of purpose with which you approach your work, your family, community, and the University of Pennsylvania,” said Chuck Leitner, a fellow alumnus, in presenting the award.

Ever the problem solver, in 2005, Peters wrote an article for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on five concrete ways to improve opportunities for women. With her quantitative mind on full alert, Peters’ first suggestion was to publish the data about where women are now in terms of representation in various realms. “Taking these steps,” she wrote, “will help move us from a society in which women have the opportunity to succeed to one in which women do succeed, in equal measure with men.”