Pennie George made a big life gamble. Perhaps for someone who’d worked in the upper tier of the financial industry, it came with the territory.
“Twenty-five years ago, I was working in finance and there were way more men than women. Here I am back at UBC, and there are still more men than women going into this very rewarding career. I thought: Why is this still happening?” says the adjunct professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
Returning to her alma mater, George is now the program director and founder of UBC SWIFT—an extracurricular, cohort-based training and mentorship initiative at UBC Sauder that selects a group of women and non-binary commerce students each year to learn investing through a hedge-fund-style paper portfolio, gain industry exposure and secure internships with finance employers.
Now integrated into George’s academic work at UBC, the SWIFT program is modelled after a program she herself was part of as a student back in the mid-’90s: the UBC Portfolio Management Foundation, a fund set up for students to practice . The original fund, which was seeded with $312,000 in 1986, has since reached $13 million, while the SWIFT program works on paper trades—simulated investing with a mock portfolio where students pretend to buy and sell stocks and track the performance as if it were real.
After graduating from the UBC, George landed a job in securities at TD Bank in Toronto, then became senior vice-president at then-powerhouse investment bank Lehman Brothers in New York.
Then, the big gamble—George quit her job in New York and moved back to Vancouver to raise her family. It’s the classic story: a woman exiting her work life to rear children.
But, for George, it paid off—soon after she cashed out her stock in Lehman Brothers, the company went bankrupt—and she was able to comfortably bring up her kids while being a stay-at-home mom. That is, until she was called back to UBC as professor, directing the same program she used to attend as a student.
At the end of March, George retired from her post—so perhaps her latest gamble is an aspirational one: pave the path for women coming after you so that they, too, can make smart risks cushioned by good investments.
What was your first job?
The churro and pretzel stand at BC Place.
What word do you tend to overuse?
Idiosyncratic.
What is one misconception about your industry?
“People think business and finance people are greedy, but in my experience, they are very generous, especially philanthropically and with their time.”
