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Woman Cop in Mexico Offers Wall Street

Model: Susan Antilla
By Susan Antilla - Nov 1, 2010
Bloomberg Opinion

If heroes could be publicly traded as stocks, the chasm between supply and demand would
dispatch shares of Marisol Valles Garcia on a bull-market tear.

Valles Garcia, 20, is the college-student mom who took over as police chief of the drug-
ravaged Mexican town Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, near the Texas border, on Oct. 20. As
this column was being prepared for publication, the number of Google hits on her name had
topped 800,000. Before the news that she had been sworn in as top cop of a town of 8,500
terrorized by drug lords, Valles Garcia didn’t even register as clutter on the media radar
screen.

The decision by a criminology student and mother of an infant son to put herself in harm’s
way -- in a town that could make the bloodiest scenes from “No Country for Old Men” look
like a romp through Disneyland -- has captured the world’s attention.
Is that because Mexico is under attack by drug cartels? Nope, that story was out there
already. Because she is young and pretty and thus indulges readers’ prurient interests?
Unlikely, because there’s nothing about her demeanor or dress that suggests she’s prepping
for a Playboy magazine spread. If she’s a player in some sinister publicity stunt or a front for
the drug lords, she’s bamboozled me along with a heap of admirers worldwide.

I think what’s really in back of the fame and admiration she’s garnered is how starving we
all are for a hero. Or rather, a heroine. Valles Garcia is a woman putting her life on the line
to stand up for families locked behind closed doors out of fear. She has guts.

Rare Women

From my perch watching the comings and goings of women on Wall Street, I guess I’m
particularly sensitive to the dearth of women willing to step up to the plate.
When’s the last time you can remember any of the tiny cluster of C-suite women on or off
Wall Street speaking publicly about discrimination and harassment? Or making enough
noise about gender inequities that they embarrassed their male colleagues into making
substantial changes in company policies? Moves like that aren’t even life-threatening. But
they would take guts.

I wish our top women had some of Valles Garcia’s bravery. Why are there so few people like
her?

I asked that question of Lois Shapiro-Canter, a former president of the New York State
chapter of the National Organization for Women who today is president and chief executive
officer of the Saratoga Foundation for Women Worldwide Inc., a group based Saratoga
Springs, New York, that advances human rights with a focus on women. Shapiro-Canter
says leaders like Robert Kennedy or Bella Abzug rose up during trying periods.
“In suffering and depravation, people rise to what the time commands,” she said in a
telephone interview.

New Approach

That perhaps accounts for the emergence of Valles Garcia. Conditions in her tiny town are
extreme. Rather than requisition ever-larger supplies of weapons, she and her lieutenants
will go through the town, unarmed, to visit homes and, among other things, send a message
to children that there are careers to be had apart from the ubiquitous drug trade.

When readers post messages on the Web to comment on articles about her, some say she is
naive. A more common reaction, though goes something like this: Stocking up on bigger and
better guns hasn’t worked so far, so why not try something different?

“Something different,” or at least a diversity of voices and approaches, is one of the often-
cited reasons to get more women into boardrooms and top managements at companies to
Valles Garcia’s north. Sadly, it is usually nothing more than talk.

Falling Behind

When women do speak up, usually in the form of discrimination lawsuits, two new twists
have emerged. One is that statistics are showing not only that women aren’t moving closer
to parity on pay and promotions, but that they actually are slipping even after decades of
lawsuit settlements that promised changes in the workplace.

The other is the suspicious rise of the female employee or former employee from the
accused company who comes forward with the “I never saw that stuff happen” argument
after a lawsuit is filed. “I made lots of money there and was treated fairly,” the woman will
say to a reporter, or in an op-ed column. It of course strains credulity to think that a senior
woman, say, at a Wall Street firm, could spend a career unaware of the sometimes barbaric
behavior of her male coworkers.

Too bad some of those same women don’t think to follow a more courageous path, but the
fact that they don’t isn’t surprising.

“The price of admission to the club is that you make no public criticism,” says Christine
Sgarlata Chung, an assistant professor at Albany Law School in Albany, New York, who has
written about Wall Street’s cultural response to women.
Still, a brave woman in Mexico has reminded us that there’s something powerful about
taking a stand and taking a chance. I hope she stays alive and thrives.

(Susan Antilla, a Bloomberg News columnist, is the author of the 2002 book, “Tales from
the Boom-Boom Room.” The opinions expressed are her own.)
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To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net