A math whiz, she scored a job at the secretive Chicago-based financial firm O’Connor & Associates right out of college after the interviewer asked her to do a complicated equation in her head and she nailed it. The Milwaukee-born financier rose to success without the benefit of poker-but with a decent amount of risk. “They are going to have to take risks with things.” I just don’t want women in the backseat,” she says. “The world is going to change and evolve. The way to build confidence, she believes, is to play at taking risks. “My goal is to get girls learning before that first rung on the ladder, where the guy already has comfort taking the risk for the next job,” she says. She puts it down-mostly-to a confidence gap. Just is familiar, as are all executive women, with the statistical glitch wherein more women than men get bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees than men, and almost half of the MBAs, but the C-suites are still dominated by men. But if you can understand options, you can sit at any table in any industry, in any position, and understand what’s going on with the money. “I tell women, ‘You don’t have to be a trader the rest of your life. Options trading, she admits, isn’t an automatic ticket to power, but it’s a useful skill, and one that she has worked hard to introduce to more women. In Just’s mind, poker mirrors the options market, where you have imperfect amounts of information, but you invest on probable outcomes, and then change your strategy as more information comes in. “The biggest weakness for women has been around money.” I can see it when I listen to them trying to raise money for investments,” says Just. “I can see it when I try to bring them in for trading. That is, they lack the confidence to make the calls on when and how much to invest when they don’t have all the information in front of them. She has noticed two main shortcomings: they’re extremely risk-averse and they’re poor at capital allocation. She started her career as an options trader and has had a close-up view of how women perform in high-pressure situations as she has tried to hire them into her investment firm, Peak6. Just, 55, believes it’s no accident that the gender breakdown among competitive poker players and options traders is pretty similar: less than 10% women. And if you don’t understand the money and how you as an individual tie back to it, you’re not going to sit in that seat of power.” “But if women don’t get in positions of power, all those other things are going to continue to happen. “I’m not saying is the be-all and end-all,” she says. Since 2020, she has started a company, Poker Power, hired a staff, woven together a network of female instructors, built an app, bankrolled a number of high-profile events, and introduced about 32,000 women and girls to poker across 40 countries from Monaco to Kenya. On the list of challenges that most people acknowledge women are facing in the second quintile of the 21st century-from being shut out of corporate boardrooms to untreated fistulas-the inability to play Texas Hold’em does not rank very high, but Just is all in.
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