'Not-charming' top female hedge fund manager says men bet she'd last 3 days

John Waldron, the chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, is charming. Known for being thoughtful, calm and heavily family-oriented, Waldron built his career as a client-facing guy in investment banking. Earlier this month, he interviewed Dawn Fitzpatrick, the female CEO of Soros Fund Management, who has said that her own lack of charm saved her career.

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Fitzpatrick manages $28bn at Soros Fund Management, where she's been CIO since 2017. It could have been very different. Speaking in 2022, Fitzpatrick said that during her early career as a trader at O'Connor Associates, there was an attempt to shunt her into the sort of sales job that banks love to move young women into. She only escaped when a trusted (male) advisor pointed out that she was a "natural investor" and "not that charming." 

Speaking to Waldron, Fitzpatrick said this wasn't the only affront she suffered early in her career. In 1992, when she started out as a clerk at the American stock exchange, Fitzpatrick said her male colleagues bet that she'd only last three days. This was partly because she was dressed in a pleated skirt and cardigan and looked like she was going to "Catholic School." When she discovered the existence of the bet, Fitzpatrick said she became all the more determined to succeed. 

On balance, though, Fitzpatrick told Waldron that being female has been neither a positive nor a negative for her career, even though it's had its beneficial and detrimental moments. If she were designing a program to benefit young people of either gender, Fitzpatrick said she'd ask senior people to identify three high performing individuals outside their reporting lines and to make them responsible for those individuals' success over a period of years, making it clear that their compensation would be tied to the outcomes. If this were the case, she said the senior individuals would "say great things" about the chosen juniors, take them to play golf with "people they should know," and give them all-important critical feedback. 

Fitzpatrick said one of the most important things in her career now is sitting next to people she "likes and trusts."  She said George Soros isn't the kind of boss who calls every week or even month with an insistent investment idea, simply because those kind of ideas don't exist very often. Like Steve Cohen, she added that Soros is also very good at disassociating from ideas that don't work out. 

Fitzpatrick said she's wary of some of the bets being made on private credit. "- If things go badly you will be long that private credit for 10 years…. You just need to be make really conscious to make sure you’re paid for that optionality."  

She also said that while contrarian views are often the ones that will make you the money, those views will need to become consensus for the money to come in. "You can be right and yet wrong for a very long time."  

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