A Singular Woman (40 page)

Business trips became field trips. When Ann and Nayar traveled together, it was Nayar's job to make sure Ann could get coffee at five a.m., as soon as she got up. In Jakarta, Ann took Nayar into the
kampung
s and in pursuit of the best street food: “Oh my God, my taste buds have finally come alive!” Nayar remembered her saying. In other cities, there were outings to anthropological museums and art museums and shops specializing in silver jewelry: “I will have to starve for the rest of the month, but I had to get this silver and turquoise thing,” Ann would say, according to Nayar. “Isn't it magnificent?” Several younger colleagues suggested to Ann that they should all live together in Bali. “We talked about Alice Dewey's house, so we said, ‘Ann, why don't you set up a house for us in Bali and we'll come there and do our dissertations together?'” Nayar recalled. “‘You can be one of our readers. We'll take care of you and you can take care of our dissertations.' She thought it was a brilliant idea.” Ann was a mentor to several younger women, but she had her limits. On the elevator one day, Brinley Bruton, who had been trying her hand at fiction, asked Ann if she would read one of her stories. “Which was, in fact, ‘I want you to read this story and tell me it's wonderful,'” Bruton remembered. Unapologetically, Ann declined. “I came out of it feeling a little hurt,” Bruton told me. “But in retrospect, I have respect for her. She wasn't going to pretend.”

Ann arrived at Women's World Banking during the long lead-up to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, which was to be held in Beijing in September 1995. To organizations like Women's World Banking, the conference offered an opportunity to promote their agenda. Discussions of the status of women had tended to focus on matters like health, education, and reproductive rights. But women made up the majority of the economically active poor in the world. Over the previous two decades, institutions had begun offering financial services for low-income women producers and entrepreneurs. As a result, their enterprises had flourished and the role of women in the economy had grown. Yet even the leading microfinance institutions were reaching only a tiny fraction of the women who could benefit. Women's World Banking saw the conference, and a parallel forum for nongovernmental organizations, as a chance to change the policies of governments, banks, and donors so that financial services to the poor could grow. Ann made the case to Barry that Women's World Banking ought to play a role in organizing many of the disparate microfinance institutions into a movement. If a coalition of organizations could agree on an agenda and demonstrate the contributions of low-income women to economic development, it could catapult the issue of microfinance into a prominent place in the “platform of action” that would eventually be endorsed by the nearly two hundred countries expected to be represented in Beijing.

Barry was skeptical about Ann's suggestion of a coalition. She saw the other organizations as competitors vying for the favor of a finite number of donors. Women's World Banking had worked hard in its early years to differentiate itself from the others, defining itself in part by what it was not. That is, it was not like Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, one of the largest and most successful financial intermediaries focused on the rural poor; it was not like ACCION International, another microfinance organization with a network of lending partners. Barry, who had been on the board of Women's World Banking during those early years, had been influenced by what she later called “that kind of insular, go-it-alone, we-are-the-best, we-are-different mentality.” She doubted that some groups would be willing to collaborate. She worried that time would be wasted trying to bring together organizations with divergent interests. Instead, she favored what she described as a more unilateral approach—that is, one in which Women's World Banking was in charge. “It kind of made me nervous,” she told me. “Even though I'm a big believer in building coalitions—coalitions that
we
lead, if you know what I mean.”

Barry was “a pretty tough character to deal with,” she told me, looking back on those years with a degree of self-knowledge and candor that was striking. She had grown up in a Catholic family in Orange County, California. One uncle was a priest who had marched with the labor leader César Chávez. A great-aunt was a nun. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School, Barry had worked in Tanzania for McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm, before going to work for the World Bank for fifteen years. At Women's World Banking, she was bent on results. She took dissent personally. Small things—say, the wrong word in a business plan—could set her off. She felt she had to manage everyone—the funders, the board, the affiliates. “It wasn't like Women's World Banking was the leader of the network,” she told me. “
I
was the leader of the network. So I was like the big brain, and everybody else was feeding into the big brain.” Younger women on the staff, swept up in the mission, tended not to challenge Barry. “If you're a young twenty-five-year-old and you're working with somebody that is working on something supercompelling, with unbelievably interesting people and with a mission to die for, you're a net learner, so you're kind of into it for at least ten years,” Barry said. “By the time you get ten years into it, hopefully you actually know that I'm a good-hearted person and you've learned how to manage me. But for Ann, who was also very strong-headed and strong-willed, I think it was not fun.”

Ann was not afraid to take on Barry. She had little patience with the shorthand that is useful and necessary in corporate life for selling an idea, and she was unwilling to make any claim—about, say, loan repayment rates and women—without the data to back it up. She preferred to acknowledge what was not known, then go find the answer. “She would sell an idea by saying, ‘Well, we don't know the answer. That's why it's important that you fund us,'” Nayar remembered. “There was no halfway. In the business of development, academics have a very limited role. You can't indulge in spending weeks and months on research. Oftentimes, deadlines are what we're led by. Ann didn't live by those rules. She would say, ‘If I have to get this thing ready, I am going to research it, I'm not just going to give you sound-bite stuff. If it's got my name on it, it has to be right.' It used to drive us crazy. We had to push Ann to do something. There would be much ‘Oh, c'mon, Ann. Get it over with.' But I understand. She would never produce anything that she was not proud of.”

The confrontations between Ann and Barry became, to Nayar, the clash of the Titans. “I had the luxury of being in on all their meetings,” she said. “It was horrible. I can understand Nancy, because I'm very much a can-do, will-do, do-it-now person. But I also related to Mother Ann.” Barry needed justification for the policy statements the organization was making. “For instance, ‘Women are good clients.' Okay, what are the ways that we can prove that?” Nayar said. “Ann would want to write a dissertation. And Nancy just wants, like, ‘For example, boom, boom, boom.'” According to Nayar, “Ann would say, ‘I can't whip things together into nonsensical bullet points. I need to have justifications for all my bullet points. So that's a paragraph!' And Nancy says, ‘Cut it down, cut it down.'” Colleagues joked that Ann had been in Asia too long. She had a different sense of time, and instead of arguing, she preferred to debate or discuss. Over time, it seemed to Nayar, the conflict forced Ann to become more confrontational and assertive. “Both are demonic once they get on their high horse,” Nayar said. “God can't turn them around. It was just two very strong women.”

At other times, Ann seemed to fret about not meeting Barry's expectations. “Nancy would be harping on her: ‘Are you done with that yet? You're still working on that?'” Kellee Tsai, Ann's office mate, remembered. “Nancy had her in tears so many times, it was horrible.”

As Barry herself put it, “Because of my pigheadedness, you actually had to be pigheaded to get your way.” Each person in the office had her own approach. Wanjiku Kibui, the regional coordinator for Africa, would call Barry out, in a way that Barry appreciated, when she was, as Barry put it later, “misbehaving.” Niki Armacost, the communications coordinator, would find a better time. “Ann would just stay,” Barry remembered. “She would stay and fight.” On the question of the coalition of microfinance organizations, she would not back down. In a series of long, uncomfortable meetings with Barry, Ann insisted that Women's World Banking use its influence for a greater good. To do otherwise would be small-minded and selfish. “We have to be grown-ups now,” Barry remembered Ann saying, in effect. “She would have used language like that.” Intentionally or not, Ann made Barry feel guilty: “I don't think she was ever mean-spirited or nasty, but she could not have been more direct about what was at stake and why it was the right thing.”

Eventually, Barry relented. In October 1993, Women's World Banking joined two dozen other microfinance organizations to form the International Coalition on Women and Credit. Its aim was to influence the opinions of policy-makers at a series of regional conferences leading up to Beijing. Coalition members would hold workshops, publicize the successes of microfinance and microenterprise, make policy recommendations, and lobby delegates. Finally, they would all converge on Beijing. At Barry's insistence, Women's World Banking became the secretariat for the coalition. It fell to Ann, as the policy and research coordinator, to marshal the data needed to back the claims that the coalition would be making and to take the lead in dealing with the other organizations.

That was not simple. The organizations were not merely competitive, they also differed as to how best to deliver financial services and the type of clients it was most important to reach. Now they were expected to put aside their differences and support a common objective. “It became like an infiltration,” Barry recalled. “If you picture all these regional and global meetings put on by the UN for the year or two in preparation for Beijing—complete chaos, all of these NGO leaders, strident, doing their thing, not at all respectful. If I'm in health, I don't want microfinance to get primacy. Ann got all these coalition members showing up to these regional meetings around the world and getting the health and education people saying one thing: ‘The poor woman has to have an income. Then she can pay for education.' So that whole bottom-up approach, getting disparate players to act to common cause? She pulled it off.”

Ann believed in it, said Lawrence Yanovitch, director of policy and research at FINCA, also known as the Foundation for International Community Assistance, a leader in village banking in Latin America, who served on the executive committee with Ann. That was simply her nature: She had little ego, he said, and she cared about the issues first. Barry told me, “She could be kind of a fat lady with big hair and a bohemian, but she was trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And she did it with great intelligence and very strong rigor in terms of preparation and methodology and thinking through strategy.”

At the same time, the secretary general for the Beijing conference asked Women's World Banking to chair an “expert group” on women and finance, to be made up of forty representatives of microfinance networks, development banks, government leaders, and others. In addition to Barry and Ann, the group included Dick Patten, Ann's friend and longtime colleague; Ela Bhatt from the Self Employed Women's Association; Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who would go on to become president of Liberia. In September 1993, Women's World Banking sent every member of the group an unusually detailed questionnaire on women and microfinance. The questionnaire bore the unmistakable marks of Ann's research methodology—a total of ninety-two questions, few of them amenable to short answers. (“I think we even had a conflict over the questionnaire,” Barry told me. “Something I really know how to do super-well is moderate meetings and create a process where you get consensus in a very robust and detailed way out of a messy process. So I'm very results-oriented. My recollection is Ann would have loved to have gotten more stuff from everybody.”) Two hundred pages of responses poured in to the Women's World Banking office. Ann and Nina Nayar, working with Barry, distilled them into an interim report. That report went out to every member of the expert group, along with profiles of leading microenterprise institutions and an analysis of government budgets and the flow of donor aid. Finally, the expert group met over five days in January 1994 to hash out and endorse a final report and recommendations—a framework for how to build financial systems that work for the poor.

“That was considered a huge achievement in the world of microfinance,” recalled Niki Armacost. “No one had talked about common standards before. No one had talked about the kinds of criteria that you need to evaluate microfinance organizations, or the policy constraints, or the challenges they would have to deal with, or why it was important to be lending money to women. None of that had been put together before. So it was a seminal document.”

Outside the office, Ann was increasingly worried about money and her health. When she had moved to New York, she had understood that she would not be able to live as well as she had in Jakarta. But she had hoped to get by, she wrote in a memo to Barry eight months after accepting the job, “modestly but decently, in a manner suitable for a grownup, meet my basic family obligations, and still save a small amount toward Christmas, emergencies or the future.” That had not happened. After less than a year, she was spending more than she was making. She was sinking ever more deeply into debt. After taxes, she expected to take home just $41,000 of her starting salary—a figure she expected to shrink the following year, when she would be eligible to claim fewer exemptions and deductions. The monthly payments on her ballooning credit-card debt had doubled to $600 a month. In her memo to Barry, she had asked for a raise. “To make a long story short, in the seven months I have been at Women's World Banking, I have been forced to exhaust my savings and I am now going further into credit card debt at the rate of about $500 a month in order to just get by,” she wrote. “There is no possibility of saving even a penny. Clearly I cannot continue this way, no matter how devoted I am to Women's World Banking or the mission.”