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ABOUT ROCK THE STREET, WALL STREET
OUR MISSION
Rock The Street, Wall Street is a financial and investment
literacy program designed to bring both gender and racial equity to the financial markets and spark the
interest of high school girls into careers of finance. Girls learn about saving, investments, budgeting, stock and capital markets and their role in maintaining the welfare of their families, communities and the economy, while simultaneously helping them see the real world application of the math content they learn in the classroom.
Rock The Street, Wall Street believes to close the gender gap in the wages, wealth and in the financial services sector, we have to inspire girls to pursue the M in STEM and finance, by exposing them to real life role models. The number one reason why girls are not
choosing STEM professions - they don’t see women in
those professions. The number two reason - they don’t see their friends choosing those majors in college. We engage female financial pros who walk the talk on all matters financial. They teach and motivate the next generation. Our students see girls in their RTSWS cohort choosing finance, economics or a related computational field as their majors/minors. Whether they choose the profession, or head into another field, our students are far better prepared for critical decision making on all types of financial and career prep matters.
OUR VISION
Rock The Street, Wall Street hopes to break the cycle of multi-generational financial naivete so that girls have a better chance at improving their lives, their households and their communities. Fifty years after the adoption of Title IX, women continue to confront barriers to full equality at all levels; most critically of which is in their financial lives. This is even more egregious for women of color, where they earn, save and invest at lower rates. In college finance and economics classrooms, girls are few in number. As a result, their opportunities in pay, promotion and life are unequal. Equipping girls with financial skills is a vital part of ensuring equal opportunity. Financial literacy is The Great Equalizer.
Rock The Street, Wall Street is reaching young women at their local high schools. We offer young women a flight path to a financial education through hands-on financial projects, workshops, role modeling, mentoring and real-life Wall Street experiences. Girls are introduced to financial concepts such as savings, investments, post-secondary and college financial preparedness, budgets, stocks, bonds, financial analysis, venture capital and private equity.
OUR HISTORY
Established in 2012, this year Rock The Street, Wall Street celebrates 10 years. There is a financial and investment illiteracy epidemic. Student loan balances are the highest they have ever been and women own two-thirds of the outstanding college debt. Young people are putting less and less away in their retirement accounts than ever before. Two out of three women state that they know little or nothing about finance or financial products. Seeing that the needle hasn‘t moved in the last 30 years in regard to the number of women in finance and the lack of women in leadership roles across all investment sectors, it was time to Rock the Street!
RTSWS brings together high school girls with female financial and investment professionals in classroom and industry settings. At a minimum, RTSWS would like to see girls not be afraid of finance, so that they can make better informed decisions which will lead to better lifestyles for themselves, their families and their communities.
RTSWS conducts programs before and after school, during lunchtime and within school courses. Girls participate in financial, hands-on projects while in high school to overcome their fear of math and finance, and see career opportunities that lie ahead for them should they choose to enter into the financial services industry.
OUR LOCATIONS
Since our launch, more than 4,000 girls have graduated from our year-long program.
RTSWS offers its programming in over 60 high schools across 35 cities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Our current locations are shown below. Atlanta, GA Austin, TX Boston, MA Charlotte, NC Chicago, IL Columbus, OH Dallas, TX Denver, CO Des Moines, IA Gallatin, TN Greenwich, CT Honolulu, HI Houston, TX Indianapolis, IN London, England Menlo Park, CA Minneapolis, MN Nashville, TN Newark, NJ Newport, RI New Orleans, LA New York, NY Omaha, NE Pasadena, CA Philadelphia, PA Pittsburgh, PA Portland, OR Raleigh, NC Salt Lake City, UT San Diego, CA San Francisco, CA San Mateo, CA St. Louis, MO Vancouver, Canada Washington, D.C.
There are three components to the academic year program - financial and investment literacy workshops, “Wall Street experience” field trips to local financial firms, and a unique, formalized mentorship program. A fourth component emerges post-graduation, the RTSWS Internship & Job Portal.
1. FALL | Financial and Investment Hands-On Workshops
RTSWS offers financial and investment literacy workshops on high school campuses. The workshops are led by volunteer female financial professionals. In addition to the curriculum, our instructors rip from the financial headlines to bring current events into the classroom, showing their connection to stock and bond market movements. Our students learn about saving, budgeting and investing from women employed by local investment firms, pension funds, banks, accounting firms and treasury departments. Who better to teach financial concepts than those individuals who work in the industry on a daily basis?
2. FALL | Wall Street Experience Field Trip
How better to inspire young women to work in financial services than taking them on an eye opening “Wall Street experience” field trip? Our students will visit a company in the local financial services industry, corporate finance department or a treasury department. These experiences offer students an opportunity to see positive female financial role models at work, ask candid questions and visualize their own financial career paths.
3. SPRING | Mentorship Program
Our financial female professionals offer a first-hand, and very often a first-time view, into the world of business. The mentor provides guidance to the protege about career preparedness, college major and minor choices and life challenges. Mentors find ways to spark girls’ interest in being financially responsible for themselves. Mentors, too, can serve a dual role as teacher and connector. RTSWS volunteers provide social capital - the critical, yet often missing ingredient in STEM career prep programs, that allows for industry discovery and networking at an early age for our students.
4. ALUMNAE & BEYOND | RTSWS Internship & Job Portal
The RTSWS Internship & Job Portal is a resource for RTSWS students and alumnae seeking internships and job opportunities in finance, economics and related fields. Firms looking for emerging financial talent have access to posting opportunities. Our high school students have completed financial project-based activities, which unveil financial independence along with the exploration of financial careers. We find and develop talent early. We make the unfamiliar, familiar. Our students focus on their interest in financial careers for one simple reason - because they are aware of them.
V
OUR GOALS
• Close the gender and racial gap in wages, investments and wealth accumulation for all women.
• Increase financial and investment literacy of girls at a young age so that they are aware of the financial responsibilities AND opportunities of post-secondary life, college life, at work, at home and in their communities.
• Teach girls on how being financially independent is key to living a self-determined life.
• Open girls’ minds to math-focused fields of study as compatible with a career that has a positive impact on the world.
• Spark girls’ enthusiasm for finance at a critical age and make them aware of the societal benefits personal financial knowledge and mathoriented careers can have.
• Create the social capital between students and female financial professionals that will enable students to get a jumpstart on their personal money management behavior and on their college and work lives.
• Increase the number of women studying finance, economics or related computational business fields. • Create an early pipeline of female talent so as to increase the number of women who enter into the financial services industry.
• Provide a pathway to better lifetime money management, academic performance and college preparation.
• Coach students on resume building.
• Provide career discovery and preparation by offering job shadowing and/or industry summer internships.
• Foster students’ continued growth in finance through their college years and into the workforce.
• Create a longitudinal cohort of girls who can network with each other across cities, states, countries, socio-economic lines and industries.
• Become the go to internship and job portal for emerging, diverse talent in the financial services industry and beyond.
AN OPEN LETTER TO VOLUNTEERS
Dear RTSWS Volunteer,
You will now be making a difference in your professional life as you join the ranks of women who will make math, personal money management and a career in finance more relevant and appealing to high school girls. You bring your time, leadership experience and social capital to local high school girls. Girls, who, until the day they meet you, have no idea what you do for a living, nor have any idea of how being financially independent is key to living a self-determined life. You will be helping girls view math-focused fields of study as compatible with a career that has a positive impact on the world. RTSWS sparks girls’ enthusiasm for finance at a critical age and makes them aware of the societal benefits personal financial knowledge and math-oriented careers can have.
As you are probably already aware, women still represent only:
• 6% of senior investment roles across ALL financial firms • 2.5% of Hedge Fund CEOs • 8% of Venture Capital professionals • 11.7% of Private Equity professionals • 14% of the employees in junior investment roles- so, the pipeline is still not looking good
Change will only come about by making a long-term cooperative arrangement between the private and public, (schools and non-profit) sectors. It will depend on the coming together of schools, principals, teachers, students, banks, investment firms and financial professionals who understand the need for this type of program – a program that brings the relevance of finance to girls’ everyday lives.
You will share with them the excitement that lies ahead for those girls who choose a career in finance. Through this concerted effort, we can begin to move the needle on the number of women confidently handling their finances AND being heard on the world stage on financial matters as we build the pipeline of female talent coming into our profession.
Endless gratitude,
Maura K. Cunningham Founder & CEO - Rock The Street, Wall Street
ARTICLE
Women suffer from ‘math anxiety’ more then men do - here’s how to reverse it
By Alessandra Malito, MarketWatch (October 24, 2019)
This teacher-turned-financial adviser on the different ways men and women approach math and life Many Americans suffer from “math anxiety,” which inhibits their ability to solve problems — a potential issue when it’s time to balance a checkbook or save for retirement.
Math anxiety may start in the classroom during childhood but it has a way of following students throughout their lives, said Maddie Parker, a financial adviser at Parker Financial Group in Overland Park, Kan., who started her career as a high school math teacher before switching to financial planning. She has seen people postpone their financial plans and refrain from saving for retirement because they don’t want to deal with the possibly complicated equations and complex investing topics.
A fear of math can be debilitating — and not just because it could result in poor math grades. Many students, especially girls, may avoid careers that include a heavy amount of math, especially those in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields.
Girls made up just 30% of the top 5,000 ninth-graders in the American Mathematics Competitions, according to research distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2017. Just 18% of the top 500 ninth-graders were girls, and only 8% of the top 50. That gender gap worsens as they age — by senior year, only 22% of the top 5,000 are girls (compared with the 30% in ninth grade), followed by just 12% of the top 500.
Parker, 30, taught Algebra II and geometry to high-school students before switching to financial planning and working with her 76-year-old father, who has his own firm. She also became a Certified Financial Planner. “I have a math background and the CFP puts me in a good position to do financial planning in a way that educates people about the planning and why,” she said. Their age difference also helps them work with clients of all ages and provide their own perspectives, she added.
Parker spoke with MarketWatch about her education background, why people are so worried about math and how to mesh the two:
MarketWatch: How exactly would you describe math anxiety?
Maddie Parker: A lot of people would say “I have that” and to a degree, a lot of people do, but it’s more than feeling like you don’t do well on exams. Kids who have math anxiety almost always have a physical inability to respond to being tested or asked to perform on math-related tasks. It is just built up over the years of different experiences, and it stops them from being able to learn any further.
MW: Is it something adults face?Parker: It translates from kids to adulthood. When you get out of school, you’re less exposed or have less experience being tested so the anxiety may seem like it’s gone away but any time math or that skill is required, the anxiety comes right back. I think it has been perpetuated as a weird acceptance in our country, that it’s OK to be bad at math. Like, “oh, math is hard and it’s OK not to get it.” It definitely follows into adulthood and affects people dealing with finances, because they have to do math and they don’t know how to do it, and they’re stressed or embarrassed to ask for help.
MW: How can math anxiety impact personal finances?
Parker: In high school, you’re not required to take personal finance and the math you’re doing is unrelated to what you do in real life. And that real life math in your brain is still tied to calculus so you think, “I couldn’t do that at 16, I probably can’t handle finances now.” But it is different math. It’s not to say it’s simple, but it’s different, and it is applicable in such a way that people do find it easier to understand. It is not quite as challenging as graphing logarithmic equations. It’s a lot different.
MW: There are many people who say women generally are more likely to have math anxiety than men. Is that something you’ve seen?
Parker: There are great articles and podcasts and TED talks about the same concepts, of how we’re raising our girls to be perfect and raising our boys to be brave. And there was one example at a girls’ coding camp, where they have to learn to do coding and the girls specifically would type up all this stuff and then if they couldn’t figure it out they’d erase it all and call the teacher over. The teacher would press undo and show all of this work and that they were really close, but because the girls couldn’t make it work they wanted to tell the teacher to show them from the beginning. They didn’t want to show this not perfect work.
It is just a good example that demonstrates that girls are being raised to be perfect and not in the same way as boys, who may say (like in that example) that they don’t care and at least they’ll get partial credit. The only way to learn is by making mistakes, but that gets lost on girls when they feel they have to be perfect.
MW: Does that concept translate to adult couples in financial planning?
Parker: It is more apparent for women when they are single individuals. They’re more comfortable saying “I don’t get it” or it’s more
evident. They’re not as afraid to ask for help. It’s when they’re with their spouses it is easier to be quiet or let them talk and pretend you understand things because your partner is helping you, but it is still relevant. I always work with most clients together and I will ask them both “do you understand this?” or make sure they’re both on the same page.
MW: How would you say your background as a math teacher benefits you and your clients?
Parker: One of the biggest ways is in my ability to explain things. It’s funny, I majored in math and decided to be a high school math teacher, but when I was in high school, I struggled with math. I had good grades and I didn’t have math anxiety, but I wasn’t some freaky Einstein genius kid who got it all. It made sense when I didn’t get something right and because I liked it so much I worked hard to understand it. I was good at explaining things to my friends. But my own struggle made me good at explaining it. A lot of math teachers are geniuses who understand it, and that makes it hard to explain it to students who are struggling.
That ability translates nicely to doing financial plans. I can see what is probably going to confuse them and where they’ll get lost.
MW: Are there any math-related topics that clients typically have a hard time understanding?
Parker: It varies, but one big thing we talk about is inflation and compound interest. The need to factor in inflation because a dollar today is not going to be a dollar 10 years from now, and that it is a slow climb. People are amazed at how different the numbers look when I factor in 2.5% inflation.
MW: Is there any way to overcome math anxiety?
Parker: It is important that there be no stigma about it. There’s this expectation people have of themselves that they should know more about finance because it applies to their life. I am a financial adviser and I don’t know how to fix my car, so I bring it to be serviced by professionals. I don’t feel stupid because I didn’t focus on that and I know nothing about it.
It can be scary if you don’t know who you’re going to and unfortunately there are some bad people out there, but if you do your homework to find the people to help you, you don’t need to feel ashamed or embarrassed. That’s the whole reason you find a professional to begin with — someone who is trained. That’s their job.
