Once advised against attending university by her career counselor, Saira Malik, a Pakistan-American woman, has been appointed to the post of chief investment officer (CIO) in Nuveen, a top US firm managing $1.2 trillion in equities, fixed income, real estate among others.  

Daughter of Pakistani immigrant parents, Saira drives the weekly market and investment insights and delivers client asset allocation views from across the firm’s investment teams. She has held various positions at the firms since 2003. 

“My parents are Pakistani immigrants. As a high-school senior, I was advised by a career counselor to skip university and go to community college", she was quoted as saying on a Nuveen website. 

A known face in US financial world, she appears regularly on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business. Kiplinger’s and Barron’s ranked her among the top 100 most influential women in US finance.

In the US, she grew up in Stockton, California, and attended Lincoln High School there. Her meteoric rise to the position of the CIO at Nuveen, however, was not so smooth. 

After earning her investment banker license at the age of 19, she had been rejected by almost every firm she applied for jobs at. Later, she took a master's course in finance, and only then she was hired by a large firm. "It’s important to be persistent and it’s fine to reject bad advice,” she said. 

Her family though has a history of women achieving positions, almost unthinkable for other women at times. Her grandmother, she informed, was among the first-class women who were admitted to medical schools in India, earning MD in 1934. 

“Her diploma hangs on a wall in my house. It wasn’t written for a woman; it was written for a man,” she said, emphasizing, “On it, administrators crossed out the preprinted words ‘him’ and ‘his’ and replaced them with handwritten ‘her’ and ‘hers.’ 

To this day, she said, that diploma inspires the women in my family.  

(SAM)