All About Money: Protect Your Credit | Meet America’s Top Female Wealth Advisors | Sallie Krawcheck’s $1 Billion Achievement | And More

Plus: Twitter, Mattel And Adobe Sign Equal Pay Pledge

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that its contents don’t typically fall into one neat theme—and in fact, I seek to include as many topics as possible—but this week, I have just one subject on the brain: money. 

This is partially because the biggest news stories of the last week, as you’ll see below, involve women raising money, managing money, and hitting new financial milestones. But it’s also because Wednesday was Equal Pay Day, the day until which all women must work in order to earn what white men earned in the year before. 

We’ve been observing Equal Pay Day since 1996, when women earned 73 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Today, that figure is 82 cents. Progress, but hardly parity. And what these statistics don’t illustrate is the long term and pervasive effect of underpaying women. As Lilly Ledbetter, the fair pay advocate who was paid thousands of dollars less than her male counterpart at Goodyear, recently put it: “I lost so much overtime money. … And my retirement today, my social security, all is too low. There’s not a thing I can do about it.” 

We can’t change what Ledbetter was paid, but we can change what we’re paid, and what the next generation of women is paid. As Time’s Up CEO Tina Tchen told me this week: “ It's not going to happen by itself, so we have to be the change. I really believe we're in that transformational moment.”

Cheers to that!
Maggie

P.S: How do you feel about the phrase “female founder”? One founder recently went viral for railing against it, and while her points are well taken, I have to say it bothers me less than “She-E-O” and “shero.” *shudder*

ICYMI: Stories From The Week

Meet America’s top female wealth advisors: the women on this new Forbes list have navigated their clients through unprecedented market challenges over the last year and oversee hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets.

Fintech company Ellevest hit a new milestone: $1 billion in assets under management, a landmark achievement for a company that is founded by, led and for women. Founder and CEO Sallie Krawcheck spoke exclusively to Forbes about it—and what’s next for her company.

BBG Ventures has closed its third fund, for $50 million, report managing partners Susan Lyne and Nisha Dua. More institutional-sized than their previous two $10 million funds, BBGV’s new fund debuts as the largest pre-seed- and seed-stage fund solely—not just partly—investing in startups led by women. 

There are 528 active SPACs, but only 17 of those have a female chair or CEO and none has a Black female CEO—until now. Phyllis Newhouse and Isabelle Freidheim took Athena Technology Acquisition Corp., a $250 million blank-check company, public last week and spoke exclusively to Forbes about the process and their goals for the company.

Elsa Peretti, the acclaimed jewelry designer whose work has been a crucial part of Tiffany & Co’s business, died at her home in Spain last week. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Peretti’s designs at Tiffany: as of 2012, her designs accounted for 10% of the company’s sales worldwide.

Sakara Life founders Danielle DuBoise and Whitney Tingle once delivered their company’s dishes to customers on CitiBikes. Today, they’ve posted three years’ worth of 60% sales growth and are now announcing a $15 million series B round of funding.

Check List

#1: Forget sales and discounts. If you’re running a business and trying to achieve profitability, be careful about heavily discounting your wares: you could give your customers a sense of inconsistency around the value of your products.

#2: Check your eligibility. To take part in President Biden’s $1 billion student debt cancellation, that is. Learn all about how to qualify here.

#3: Protect your credit. If you’re among the Americans who’ve used the pandemic to pay down debt, boost your savings or improve your credit, protect your financial progress by following these tips.

Across Forbes