Betsy Cohen, a lawyer, financier and entrepreneur, has been smashing glass ceilings since Richard Nixon was president—and she’s not slowing down.
In the summer of 1965, 25-year-old Betsy Cohen was wrapping up her internship at a prestigious Philadelphia-based law firm and entering her final year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A top student who had excelled in the job, Cohen might have expected to be offered a full-time position. There was just one problem: She was a woman.
“They told me the senior partner at the firm wasn’t ready to offer a woman a job,” Cohen recalls over a video chat with Forbes, from her office in New York City. “I said to him what I was really thinking, which was, ‘I think it’s your loss.’”