The Next CEO Of Wells Fargo Will Be A Female...Human Shield

No woman has ever been the CEO of a “Big Four” bank.

Every chief executive of every “Systemically Important Financial Institution” ever has been a man, dating back to well before SIFIs were even a thing. Men have been at the helm for every bull market, every bear market and every crisis since the dawn of American financial history and today women sit in the corner office at only three of America’s 50 largest banks. That will almost certainly change in the next few weeks when a woman is named as the next CEO of Wells Fargo.

A woman taking the helm of America’s fourth-largest bank will be a significant moment in the gender politics of American finance…and it will be a terrible day for women.

Don’t get us wrong, we fully support any concerted effort to bring gender parity to the highest rungs of power in American banking. Women hold senior executive roles at every major financial institution and it’s patently absurd that only a handful are in charge. If anything, we don’t even hate the notion of forcing financial institutions to keep things 50/50 in the C-Suite. It might not seem fair to some, but neither are the absurdly patrimonious fraternities that still govern hiring practices throughout the sector.

What we’re saying is that Wells Fargo’s nakedly performative hunger to put a female in charge of the bank right now is very bad for women because the CEO job at Wells Fargo is an unprecedentedly terrible job destined to crush the reputation and soul of whoever takes it.

For almost three years, the bank has been beset by a constant stream of scandals that have laid waste to the bank’s reputation. Its net assets have plummeted almost as quickly as its stock price, and an inability to evince even the hint of wanting to make real changes has claimed the jobs of two CEOs. The next driver of “The Stagecoach” will have to contend with a plethora of legal issues; regulators breathing down their neck, a board that needs to be systematically destroyed, a board that needs to be rebuilt, and Democrats in Congress hellbent on making sure Wells Fargo remains the poster child for corporate greed and malfeasance post-2008. So poisoned is this particular chalice that the OCC has decided it will invoke its rarely-used power to potentially veto the next Wells Fargo CEO after making the candidate submit to a vetting process so invasive that it stops just short of physical probing.

It’s agonizingly clear that Wells Fargo’s board of directors is looking at Elizabeth Warren and thinking “She wouldn’t hit a girl, would she?” Well, we’re here to say that yes, she definitely will, because the CEO of Wells Fargo is going to get hit regardless — because they will be running Wells Fargo. In fact, we wouldn’t be even a little surprised if Warren went particularly apesh!t on said next CEO for agreeing to be a female human shield for the least-trusted bank in America.

The names we’ve heard bandied about for the gig are impressive: JPMorgan’s Marianne Lake, Google CFO [and former Morgan Stanley exec] Ruth Porat,Bank of America’s Cathy Bessant, and KeyBank’s Beth Mooney. All of these women are more than capable of running a megabank [Mooney pretty much already does], and all are extremely worthy of such an opportunity. Unfortunately for Wells Fargo, all of these women are way too smart and capable to accept a fate as the first female CEO of an existentially screwed Big Four bank.

Simply put, most of the women that Wells Fargo wants for the gig are too good for it, and anyone who takes it is proving themselves to be capable of power-grabbing so venal that Wells might as well just hire another man.

It’s insulting to the intelligence of anyone paying attention that Wells Fargo wants to turn its emergency CEO hiring sh!tshow into a staged moment of civil rights “progress,” but it’s downright callous to assume that women in finance are so desperate for power that they will take an objectively impossible job just to make a point.

And that’s our whole point here. When and if Wells Fargo finds a woman candidate amenable to making that leap, it sends a signal that the bank has a new leader just as capable of overlooking the kind of obvious and fatal flaws that got Wells Fargo in trouble to begin with…only this time, she’s a woman.