Pioneering Wall Street broker Norma Yaeger dies at 96

Norma Hason Nahmias Yaeger, who forced her way into Wall Street’s brokerage ranks when women were largely shut out of the business, died June 3, 2026, at 96. Born in New York City on May 5, 1930, she turned her fight for equal access into a career that helped expose how deeply gender exclusion was built into finance.

Yaeger entered Hornblower & Weeks’ stockbroker training program in 1962 and became the first woman to enroll. At the time, the New York Stock Exchange did not allow women on its trading floor, but Yaeger won the right to join the male trainees there anyway, pushing through a barrier that was both formal and cultural. She also demanded equal pay for equal work, a basic fight that defined much of women’s entry into the securities industry during the 1960s.

Her breakthrough came at a moment when Wall Street’s power structure was overwhelmingly male, and her presence was treated as an exception rather than a norm. Hornblower & Weeks later invited her to its Management Advisory Board, another unusual opening in a business where women were still rare in decision-making roles. Yaeger went on to found two securities firms, including Yaeger Securities, building her own place in an industry that had tried to keep women on the outside.

She later wrote a memoir, Breaking Down the Walls: 50 Courageous and Successful Years at the Forefront of the Women’s Movement, published in 2012, reflecting on the obstacles she confronted and the ground she helped break. Her story belongs to the longer history of women on Wall Street, alongside later trailblazers such as Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Yaeger’s path shows how access to finance was won case by case, and how many of the questions she faced, from pay equity to leadership, still shape debates over who gets to lead in banking and brokerage today.