<div class="image-container float_right"><div class="image"><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/522888f669bedd36578b4569-400-300/louboutins-1.jpg?maxX=480" border="0" alt="Louboutins" width="480" />Julia La Roche for Business Insider</div></div>Question-and-answer site Quora tweeted a link this morning to a thread called <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-being-a-woman-on-Wall-Street">"What is it like being a woman on Wall Street?"</a> 
An anonymous Ivy League-educated woman, who says she worked on <keyword id="42111" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Wall-Street">Wall Street</keyword> for ten years, has a fascinating response full of anecdotes from her time in <keyword id="25455" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="finance">finance</keyword>. She left Wall Street more than five years ago and notes that things may have changed. 
In her response, she describes challenges she personally faced, like when men in the office would address internal mail with her bra size next to her name, or when married traders would get smashed and call her up late at night and hit on her. 
The anonymous former finance worker also says that it was difficult to report bad behavior in the industry because she was afraid she might lose her job. She writes about how one of her married superiors "got too physical" over cocktails and she slapped him in front of another male colleague. She said she was the one who had to apologize for the incident. 
Her response doesn't paint a totally grim picture for <keyword id="624" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Women">women</keyword> working in Wall Street. 
She says that she really liked working in finance and that she learned extremely valuable skills. She also says that there were several instances when male co-workers would stand up for her. 
Here's her full response <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-being-a-woman-on-Wall-Street">from Quora</a>: 
I liked working on Wall Street, in an industry overwhelmingly dominated by men, and very smart people who are amply rewarded. It's fast-paced, exciting, brash, and you have to be on top of your game, all the time. But there are many challenges. I worked on Wall Street for over a decade; and following is a very small sample of what I experienced:
<ul style="padding-left: 30px;">
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">I would get anonymous notes. We worked in a high-rise with many floors, so originally I thought there was an error in finding my correct mail zone. (good-natured speculation, I'm sure -- someone would write 34D? 36C? 38C! etc. on my mail, on the address label next to my name - got very annoying after about the 4th time, because we were on the 26th floor; there were only 30 in the building.). I finally spoke to the folks in HR about it; it stopped.</li>
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">I was regularly sexually "harassed" and felt up every time there was an office party. Harassed is probably going a little too far; a little teasing, maybe, more sexual innuendo, like that. Maybe "felt up" is a stretch, too. In case you were wondering, it's called "harmless flirting" and "being someone's good friend" when hands grope and go where they shouldn't, like on your ass, your thigh or brushing up against your chest, or when somebody has their arm around you, and then it slips. I see it happen all the time among my male co-workers - oh, wait, maybe I don't. This isn't Europe, they're terrified to touch each other, beyond a handshake, or a pat on the shoulder when they've lost their dog, or their mother.</li>
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">I got drunk phone calls at 3 am from time to time from traders wanting to "stop by" that I'd have to shut down; and then got to listen the next day as they talked to their wives about their $3M Darien remodel and then, on the next call, set up "dates" with Paris hookers -- good times. Never did get the chance to party with some of those guys.</li>
</ul>
There are many more stories like this; none particularly awful, I guess. Heck, that's why I got an Ivy League education and graduate degree, so I could learn how to brush aside that kind of nonsense. Right? These were a few of the lessons learned: 
<ul style="padding-left: 30px;">
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">Either going or not going to the strip club with the guys is a problem.</li>
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">Always apologize first. Men have egos, especially when it relates to women and sexual advances. One evening out, one senior married colleague's behavior got so bad and was heading so far out of line, I slapped him, because I didn't know what else to do, in front of one of one of his subordinates. He got too physical with me, and it wouldn't stop, no matter what I said. The next day, I apologized, laughingly, 'cause, you know, it was awkward and I guess I drank too much. And I ran the risk of losing my job if I didn't.</li>
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">If you complain about this kind of behavior, then neither men nor women will ever talk to you again. The men won't because they're afraid of becoming the next target; the women won't because they're just afraid. As one woman put it "I can't tell anyone! I'll lose my job". Simple, really, and true. And you can't sue, because if you do, your career in the industry is pretty much over, unless you have family in the business to protect you, or clients who will stay with you, no matter what. And then, people think you must be sleeping with the clients. You develop a "reputation". For some women, that's OK. For me, it just wasn't.</li>
<li style="padding-left: 30px;">Whatever the situation in your company in the United States, if you travel outside of Europe and Australia, especially, for business, you will encounter additional, higher levels of discrimination, sexual innuendo, and harassment. Or you will be ignored. It's good to travel with men who can help -- unless, of course you have your own contacts, preferable family or school relationships. I recall sitting in a very, very crowded first class lounge in the Sao Paolo airport, all business travelers. There were two other women there, traveling for a mobile carrier, out of easily over a hundred men in suits and ties, waiting for their planes. It shouldn't matter; but it does. It's difficult.</li>
</ul>
There are some clubs I don't want to be a part of, even if they're elite and powerful. I think similar rationales are part of the reason why there aren't more women, still, in the most senior ranks of Wall Street. There were also times when the men I worked with stood up for me, set me up for promotions and supported me professionally and personally, in ways that I can't begin to repay them for. One time, at a dinner at a very nice NYC restaurant, while we were waiting for a table and I was at the bar, some guy wandered over and started trying to hit on me. I could see my boss's boss watching from a table in the cocktail area. I couldn't shake the guy. So, finally, my boss's boss walked over, and said "hey buddy, can't you see she doesn't want to talk to you?" The guy looked at him and said "what's it to you? you like her boyfriend or something?" And my boss's boss just called the bartender over and said "this man is leaving. pick up the tab and get out of here". And the guy pulled out his black card, paid the tab and left. My boss's boss was very good at keeping expenses down. Some of those guys were like my brothers; and I respect and adore them and their families, and stay in touch. Occasionally, even positive feedback could be awkward; there's a slightly bitter flavor to the promotion or the bonus that comes with -" you're good at this, better than john and bill and bob. Our performance/numbers shows it. Plus, you're nicer to look at." All you can do is smile, and say "thank you." Because, you know - that matters. Things may have changed, or maybe it's just become subtler and more insidious. I left over 5 years ago, because my husband got a job offer in another place. He finally got to a point in his career where he was making close to as much money as I was; even though the opportunity for increased financial success in his career was much less than my potential earnings at the time, we wanted to have a family, and I wanted to have a family life. That wasn't possible so long as both of us were working in highly competitive, stressful jobs. For me, living a full life isn't about the money, or the adrenaline. The skills I learned while working on Wall Street were invaluable, and to some extent, transferable. Selling yourself, getting people to trust you, and making the client feel good about themselves has a lot to do with success in business. I learned how to do that with my co-workers and supervisors as well as with clients, on Wall Street. The real secret of success on Wall Street, as almost anything, is to persevere and consistently add value; and find a place and space that welcomes you, recognizes your contribution, and treats you with the respect that you deserve. There are some incredible female role models on Wall Street; they are extraordinarily talented, hard-working, and lucky, and often have made significant personal sacrifices. There are companies that have a culture that supports and foster talent, no matter gender. There are many sacrifices you make throughout your career, no matter what your gender is. What's acceptable and fun at one point in your life might not be so positive, later on; and vice-versa. Things change. And maybe, patterns of sexual harassment and discrimination on Wall Street have changed for the better, too; but maybe they've just gone further underground.
<a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-being-a-woman-on-Wall-Street">Read the full thread at Quora &gt;</a>

Former Wall Street Woman Says She Faced Improper Advances From Married Traders And Lots Of Boob Jokes

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<div style="width: 100%; overflow: hidden;"><a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v2|406D|0|0|%2a|s;269075486;0-0;0;95225327;31-1|1;53051265|52992675|1;;;pc=[TPAS_ID]%3fhttps://xedge.aperture.displaymarketplace.com/audmeasure.gif?liveconclientID=4363687804992&amp;CreativeID=50896005&amp;PlacementID=85605703&amp;EventType=Click&amp;rand=3316882&amp;RedirectURL=http://www.chase.com/business-banking/platinum-business-vtw.html?jp_cmp=bb/7331241/ext/linkedin/versatility" target="_blank"><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/512bd74069beddb03d000003-90-40/chase-logo-90x40.jpg" border="0" alt="Chase" title="Chase" width="90" style="float: left; padding-top: 20px; padding-right: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 3px;" /></a>
This post is part of the "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/big-ideas" target="_blank">Small Business, Big Ideas</a>" series, in which business leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators share their stories of overcoming obstacles and achieving success. "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/big-ideas" target="_blank">Small Business, Big Ideas</a>" is sponsored by Chase. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/big-ideas">See more Small Business, Big Ideas &gt;&gt;</a>
</div><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:341px"><div class="image"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/kno"><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/515ed0f869beddd50f000010-1895-1668/osman%20(1).jpg?maxX=341&amp;maxY=300" border="0" alt="Osman Rashid" width="341" height="300" /></a></div><a href="http://www.kno.com/">Kno</a></div>Kno CEO Osman Rashid started his company with a lofty goal: to change how people are educated by changing the way students study and interact with textbooks.
The company started out making its own <keyword id="6361927" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Tablets">tablets</keyword>, then changed to focus on <keyword id="6361043" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Software">software</keyword> as the iPad and other competitors emerged. And though it began only focusing on college textbooks, <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20120806/in-major-expansion-kno-adds-k-12-to-digital-education-platform-video/">it's made a major expansion</a> into the K-12 market.
And now, the company's software includes analytics that let students see how they study, or, with permission, mimic another successful student in their class. 

The company <a href="http://www.kno.com/">offers more than 200,000 interactive titles</a> and its textbooks and <keyword id="6355445" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Education">education</keyword> software are available all over the world.
The e-textbook business looks so promising that Apple jumped in a bit more than a year ago <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-19/apple-ipad-textbooks/52670256/1">with iBooks textbooks.</a> 
We spoke to Rashid about why he decided to take on such a big challenge, Kno's decision to stop making their own tablets, his advice for entrepreneurs trying to change the world, and how his smaller company can take on a giant like Apple.
Edited excerpts of our conversation follow.
BUSINESS INSIDER: How'd you get started in the education business?
OSMAN RASHID: It's actually a very personal story. I was walking down the stairs of my house one day and I saw my two daughters doing homework on the dining room table and I had a flashback that I used to study exactly the same way almost four decades ago. Nothing had changed in the way that technology was impacting education. My motivation was to do something that would change the way my own daughters would learn.
But before I'd founded Kno, I was also the co-founder and CEO of Chegg which was in the college textbook space and we had come up with a new model to help students rent their textbooks so we could decrease the cost. It was a transition from just being a software company to coming into higher education then eventually into the K-12 space and changing how kids can learn, so it's been a transition over time.
BI: What's been your biggest challenge in taking on such an entrenched business?
OR: Two years ago I would have said that technology just did not deliver a good enough user experience that educators would feel comfortable using it in the classroom. But with the advent of tablets, smartphones, cloud computing, great user experiences, and really innovative content, the mix is now finally at the place where things are rapidly changing all around us.
The issue today isn't that educators or schools or students don't want to embrace it; they do want to embrace it. Now the question people ask is, "How the heck I'm going to (transition)?" The problem has shifted from "keep this away from me" to "I really want to do this but I don't know how." So we fought through the cycle of trying to convince people of where this could go. And we're really excited now that there are pilots happening across the United States and across the world. Change is here for education, there's no doubt about it.
BI: What's your value proposition to publishers?
OR: Today we actually have every major publisher as a content partner. So we've been able to make a great value proposition to them. At our company, we fundamentally think about the user experience from the student perspective. When you break it down, the student wants all of their content in one place and a consistent user experience, rather than going to every individual publisher's website. So the fact that we took the technology and we made a great user experience really helped the publishers see that this is a product students like.
Second we made sure that the burden of the transition was on us rather than the publishers themselves. Anytime you're in a big organization, and these are big companies, there are committees, there are processes and it's hard for them to react fast. So the publishers saw the value. It's a combination of technology, user experience, ease of use, working with the publishers. If the publisher has 10,000 books, trying to digitize and trying to do all of these things by themselves could take years to do. If they give it to Kno within a few days it's all done because of the technology we put together. That's where the value proposition comes in.
BI: What's the response been to your efforts to bring analytics to education?
OR: The response has been really positive from students, they love the fact that for the first time they actually can see their own study patterns. We are able to share almost hundreds of learning parameters with the students. But we sat down with them and asked, "What is it that you really want to know at this stage?" And they said they really wanted five important ones for them to get started on. And in many cases, this is up to the students and they say "Wow, I can see how I'm studying." And they love the fact that they can follow, obviously with permission from the person, somebody else from their classroom who they may admire for being a good student. The fact that they could mimic them and figure out how other kids are studying created an extremely positive response.
Analytics are so important to the future of students and educators that eventually when you think of technology and you have a student touching a screen and taking action: it could be to highlight, could be to do a problem, could be to make a bookmark, could be to take a picture, do a video, or do an animation. All individual analytics eventually lead to a great engagement experience for the student where content will begin to flow based on their own personal choices. We'll be able to tell in the future, "This student learns much better when he look at video versus reading content." With every touch you have a data point. Analytics, which is the future, will reach a point where it can really personalize education for every individual.
BI: You guys started out making your own tablet, right?
OR: Initially when we launched the company even the iPad wasn't announced and we believed that you needed tablets for education. And we were ecstatic that we were proven right. The good news for us was that we figured out that we didn't actually have to be in the hardware business, because the iPad and so many other tablets were coming out.
We said, look, the magic of our product was how to interact with a tablet, that was the ultimate goal, how do you change that? So we refocused on the content and how to change the user experience and how to make it multi-platform.
BI: Was it a difficult transition or did it happen quickly?
OR: You know, two months after we made the decision to shut down the hardware side and launched our app on iPad, we became the number one app in education. We had a lot of software already, an application, and we were always mobile focused, so our transition was very seamless.
BI: What advice do you give to people trying to found a startup or change an industry?
OR: I think the core thing that we all focus on is, if you close your eyes, can you see see your user using your product clearly? When we think of it like that, we see the student sitting in their room with a tablet, trying to study. What kind of experience have we given them? Only then can you build a company around the core use case. This is exactly what we want to do. So my advice is, do you really know the what is the one thing you want to deliver? For us it's a great user experience on education content.
The second thing is that you have to break borders down. I find that people do not ask enough questions of themselves and their coworkers.
And the third thing is, you have to really focus on something that you can influence. If you really focus on what it is that you want to change and really go after it, your ability to make a bigger change will come automatically.
BI: How'd you respond to Apple's decision to enter the market?
OR: It was a fantastic thing when Apple came into the market because it brought so much attention to digital content and digital textbooks. Today people in our company don't have to go and explain "What do mean by a digital textbook?" But what really matters is how much content can you make available to the students and the schools and what kind of user experience can you give to them? We are maniacally focused on education, even the small things that we do we keep the students in mind. If you take a standard app that you use for reading novels, and say you can also use it for reading text books as well, that's not going to work, because students study very differently.
There was an article out a few months ago where the the CEO of McGraw Hill had mentioned that they have yet to sell an iTextbook to a school because you have to redo all of the books from scratch.
And if you take a look at the catalog that's available in many of these dot coms, they have like 25 books available which are targeted at K-12. And with regards to education in general we have 200,000 titles, so we have the broad content. So I think Apple has done well in education. They did an awesome job on iPads. I think iPhones are going to make a big impact on education as well. But a maniacal focus on user experience for the purpose of education is what is needed. And that's what we do.
BI: As a serial entrepreneur, what have you learned about leading a company over time? 
OR: So the biggest thing is: you have to maintain the same behavior whether the company is 10 people or 100 people. If you're scaling you need to figure out a way to cultivate a team of people who can help build the organization along with you. Can you cultivate a loyal group of people that you can trust to make good decisions. It obviously takes time to get there. If you hire B level people, they will hire C players. And if you don't have the right people making the right decisions then the company begins to lose over time. People say all the time that you have to hire the right people. You do need to hire the right people but also you need to let them grow with the organization and take some responsibility
Essentially you have to be aware of a crisis happening: "Can the company go on if I get hit by a bus?" That's I think how you build a great company and something that can scale.

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