The women discussed their start in the business, the changes they've seen over the course of their careers and the role support networks play in helping them to achieve their goals. Looking back on their collective years in the industry, it's amazing to see how much has changed.

MERLE GROSS GINSBURG's career started in an unlikely manner. Growing up in a small town in Galveston, TX, she says she often left her mother dismayed because “I always wanted to do things that weren't considered feminine.” During a time when women became either teachers or nurses before settling down into family life, “When I graduated college I wanted to go to law school.”

Those plans didn't pan out and eventually she did marry, have children and become active in her community. She and her husband bought a rooming house in Manhattan's Upper West Side, which they ran by themselves. That rooming house, combined with a new Federal Government program that provided tax abatements to rent-stabilized apartment buildings, led her to more opportunities and eventually, Ginsburg wound up investing in the multifamily buildings and, in the process, stabilizing neighborhoods. “I ended up doing the first brownstone co-op in New York City.”

“I learned on the job and I was so young and naïve I didn't know I couldn't do it,” she admits. Things were going well, but when interest rates skyrocketed within a year and her husband's business faltering, “I realized I had to get a job.” A stint as an assistant at a small real estate firm led her to a bigger gig in 1974—as the part-time right-hand man, so to speak, to the president of a small real estate leasing and management firm, Edward S. Gordon.

In 1975, she relates, “I made a decision that the marriage was at an end and Ed was truly extraordinary. He understood that I was having great difficulties at home, and he said, 'You will always have a job here.' I started working full time because I had to support my family.”

In Ginsburg's words, Gordon gave her one of the most important lessons she's ever learned when he asked her to abstract leases for all the tenants in the buildings the firm managed. “So, I sat with this stack of 50 leases and after two hours of sitting and sweating I said, well, I guess that's the end of my job,” she relates. “I told Mr. Gordon, 'I'm terribly sorry, but I don't know what a lease abstract is and if you feel you have to let me go I will certainly understand.'”

And Gordon's response? “He said, 'Let me tell you something. I'm afraid of people who do something when they don't know what they're doing. I'm not afraid of somebody who says, I don't know what I'm doing. I would prefer that they ask for help. This,' she said, 'this is what I need.'”

After some tutelage, Ginsburg went back to that stack of leases and “found that it was like water on a ducks back. I understood them. I loved the whole concept of it and from that moment on, I tried to always respond to any challenge that was given to me, and there were many.”

During this period, all the leasing brokers in the office were men, with women serving as bookkeepers and secretaries. “I thought, gosh, I'd love to have somebody to talk to, but the men in the office thought of me as an attractive nuisance,” Ginsburg says. “And with leasing agents, they don't want to do anything that they can't make then a dollar right away.”

Everything that had to do with management fell in Ginsburg's lap. “I did everything and Ed was on a roll,” she says. “The more he did, the more he got.” They landed management of the Chrysler Building in 1977.

She was still officially an assistant, but she started the company's management division. “Because I was literally the only woman who was not a family member in a commercial real estate firm in the city and I was doing management and I was in charge of renovating the Chrysler Building, people knew me,” she recalls. “It was not that I was that big or successful, but they knew me. And I got a fancy title, director of property management.”

She built and ran all aspects of the property management operations. There were trials and tribulations—including dealing with a murder caused by a fight between two demolition companies—but she not only persevered, but thrived. Her success, combined with her reputation, led her to become a partner at the company.

Yet that doesn't mean there weren't hardships along the way. Ginsburg tells of her time with Ed Gordon; the firm had developed 400,000 square feet of space and was managing seven million square feet of office space in a period of four years. As the firm's reputation grew, so did its assignments. “The men running the corporations and big banks would come in to interview Ed and say, 'We know you do the leasing, but who runs the buildings? Who inspects the roofs or the walls or goes down in the basement and hires the engineers?' When he'd direct them to me, they couldn't believe it. They thought he was joking.”

“After about a year of dealing with this, he came to me and said, 'I really feel I need to get a man to run the division. I'd love for you to stay on and go into leasing or sales or whatever else you want to do.' That was truly, absolutely, honestly, heartbreaking.”

Gordon did hire a man to run property management. In fact, he went though four men in four rears and doubled the size of the department without doubling the staff. And Ginsburg went into leasing and sales and I did just fine. I was never as great as Mary Anne Tighe or Darcy Stacom. I mean did fine, but she “still really loved buildings. I really wanted to be a developer.” But, she's quick to add, “I don't blame Ed. He wasn't doing it to hurt me. And it wasn't because I wasn't qualified. He just couldn't sell an unknown entity.”

There were other disappointments. Ginsburg tried to join the Young Men's Real Estate Association, but the bylaws kept her out on account of her gender. She tells of the first Real Estate Board of New York dinner that she attended with Gordon, which consisted of 1,800 men and three other women.

Jokes about no bathroom lines aside, she acknowledged there was a major problem in the industry. Some time in the late 1970s, she and five other women were invited to speak on a panel of women who'd “made it” in the industry. “But I didn't feel that I had made it,” Ginsburg recalls. “The five of us didn't know each other. And if we're the women who have made it, we don't know each other, there's something wrong.”

As much as she wanted to get in touch with her counterparts, “there was simply no way to meet other women. And real estate brokerage is a very competitive field. The men, frankly, were not interested in helping a woman in management. It didn't accrue to their success. It didn't mean that they weren't nice people, but it just wasn't on their list of priorities.

“I never thought of myself as a feminist,” Ginsburg continues. “The whole feminist movement was going on at that point, but because I had three teenage children, a very demanding job and a new relationship, I didn't think about any of these other issues. I just thought I had to find a way to not only survive, but also make it easier to exist in the industry. So I had this idea about getting together with other women—but I didn't know how to do it.

“I read an article by Dr. Martina Horner, who was president of Radcliffe College, about why women do not put themselves forward as much as they should or could,” she explains. “Her thesis was it was because there was a fear of success. I thought about this and it occurred to me that it was not only fear of success, it was also fear of failure. We were raised in an era when girls were expected to be good and to be above the radar screen or take risks. We were afraid of embarrassing ourselves. I thought, that's just not right.”

While anxious over potentially appearing foolish, Ginsburg approached three very successful women in the industry about potentially forming a group to enable women in the industry to communicate with each other. It would be model on the Young Men's Real Estate or the Real Estate Board, but it would give women a forum to have their voices heard.

She recalls, “One was a woman who was the only successful real estate broker in the city at that time. She told me, 'I have fought and clawed my way to the top, why would I want to help another woman do that?' Another was a woman who'd developed the General Motors Building was now trying to develop the Red Brick Building on 58th Street. She said she didn't have the time. The third woman was simply not interested.”

She approached other women, who were skeptical, at best. Ginsburg's response to them? “Will there be a headline on the cover of Real Estate Weekly, saying, 'Women's Group Fails?' No. If we fail, we fail. But if don't try, how are we ever going to get ahead?”

That was the birth of the Association of Real Estate Women. The group was formed, and the women approached it on a very formal level—including writing bylaws, planning a formal meeting schedule with guest speakers and introducing a newsletter. About 175 women showed up for the first luncheon in 1978, which featured high-profile men to speak—including Ed Gordon and the then-president of Rockefeller Center and two other industry leaders.

That meeting did make headlines as front-page news. The group prospered and became more formal, with annual dues and an advertising and marketing plan. Every luncheon would have at least 125 professionals in attendance. Educational seminars were introduced. Scholarships were created to help women enter the industry. Committees were formed. “The whole point was to help women develop in the organization, help nurture leadership skills and to encourage them—once they were comfortable in the real estate business—to knock on doors and insist that the other organizations let us in.”

In 1980, the group became large enough to be independent—until then it was being sponsored by REBNY—and women's stature not only in real estate but also in the fields of finance and business had risen exponentially. “Sometime in the 1980s, I found I was no longer in need of joining the Young Men's Real Estate Association. It had become the Young Men's and Young Women's Real Estate Association.”

On the one hand, Ginsburg says it's shocking “that there is still prejudice among firms and many men that women can't be as smart, as financially equipped, as knowledgeable or experienced as men are. Consequently, they don't look to women to rise as high in their firms as they would look to a man. I still think women have to work harder and produce more to be considered equal to a man. They continue to have to prove themselves.”

On the other hand, that trend quickly diminishing. “Although there is still prejudice, there's a tremendous amount of respect for hardworking people that know what they're doing in the business,” she says. “If you're willing to roll up your sleeves and learn to assist someone and learn from them, you'd be surprised at how much further you can go in six months to a year.”

Comparing this new generation of women entering the industry to prior ones, Ginsburg notes that one big difference is the amount of education, experience and sophistication the younger cohort possesses. And it's particularly refreshing, she adds, to see the “enormous sense of energy, excitement and enthusiasm from the current crop of leadership. You can feel it, you can touch it; I don't get the sense that people are feeling defeated. Women are much more confident now than 30 years ago. It's very exciting.”

FRANCES DELGORIO came into the industry in what she calls “an unusual way.” Through the 1970s and early '80s, she was worked as a paralegal for two very well known matrimonial and family lawyers who were, in fact, “instrumental” in creating the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers. In that capacity, she did a lot of work with spouses dividing their real estate holdings, and continued to handle real estate when she moved into the health and hospital fields. It was here that she learned about the industry—at least, from a legal angle.

She was working as a paralegal in New York when she was approached by the head of the real estate investment arm of German electronics giant Siemans AG. He was looking for a full-time paralegal who knew real estate, since he was looking to invest Siemens pension fund monies in third-party assets, in addition to oil, gas and mineral rights investments.

“It's funny,” Delgorio recalls. “I ultimately wanted to go to law school, but now it's been several years and I'm knee deep in working on this portfolio and I was on the road about 50% to 60% of the time. I basically became a portfolio manager very early on in my career there.”

She remained at Siemens for 11-plus years, until it decided to divest of its real estate investment portfolio. She moved on to work for the Prudential Insurance Co. of America before it became public, initially working within the healthcare division to consolidate 46 remote call centers into four mega centers. That gig led to several others—including other Siemens operating groups, working on creating value from its corporate campuses nationally; the Ashforth family, which managed a suburban office portfolio for the General Motors pension fund; and Cohen Brothers Realty Corp. in New York.

Delgorio ultimately ended up with Jack Resnick & Sons as managing director of leasing, overseeing an approximately six-million-square-foot portfolio. At the same time, she was pursuing a Master's program at NYU when a colleague nominated her for a scholarship from AREW, for which she was chosen as a recipient.

“After I received the scholarship and went to this great luncheon where I was overwhelmed with the amount of women that were in the industry,” she recalls. “Until that time, I had no idea that there were that many women who were in the industry.” She notes that when she started her career at Siemens, she was only one of two women at her level, with most others working in accounting.

She quickly immersed herself with AREW, even joining a committee. “At the time, it was a great opportunity to work with women in the industry from whom I actually learned things,” Delgorio says. “Some of us did business together over the years, which was very exciting. Whether they were appraisers, engineers, developers, brokers—we all worked in the same industry and were helping each other out.

“The learning curve within the industry was a tremendous benefit of AREW,” she continues. “You'd get the AREW membership directory, and there was not a person that you wouldn't be able to call that either could help you or would know someone who could help you.”

Delgorio went on to co-chair several AREW committees and its charitable fund. She then became a member of the organization's board and ultimately was voted in as the President for AREW's 30th year, which was also when the Merle Z. Gross Ginsburg Scholarship Fund was founded.

Like Ginsburg, Delgorio also helped to choose the recipients of the AREW scholarships. She says the knowledge base young people bring to the industry today is impressive and, in many cases, the on-the-job experience instills a tremendous amount of confidence they don't even know they possess. “When we're at a table and we're reviewing a dozen prospects for the scholarships, the committee is always amazed at the breadth of what the students put together, much more so then when I went to NYU many years ago.”

As for her own experience, Delgorio is pleased to admit she didn't have as many roadblocks as her predecessor had. Part of this she attributes to her unconventional entry into the business—having come in from the law side, where women had a greater presence. Her environment also plays a role: “I worked for a family company and I can honestly say that my knowledge and experience is very well respected. I'm thought of as an equal. And that says a lot for how far the industry has come.”

At the same time, she stresses, “To get what you want out of your career, you've still got to bring the knowledge to the table.”

MACKENZIE LANDERS was one of the very first recipients of the Merle Z. Gross Ginsburg Scholarship in 2009. She became used to working in the male-dominated business of real estate from a young age.

One summer job during college was as a grunt worker for a mason. “I stocked the block, I built the scaffolding and I picked up the deliveries,” she says. “I was the only female on the jobsite. I wore Carhart pants and steel-toed boots every day—it was great.” In that role, she helped to build a new natural history museum, the Draper Museum of Natural History, in Cody, WY.

“It was pretty incredible to not only see this beautiful building being constructed but also to go inside of it to see what it brought to the community,” Landers explains. “It was exciting to know that I had helped build that. It was a very rewarding experience for me.”

From there, she started doing more work for the business. It was around 2000, and she helped to usher the company into the 20^th Century. “They were still writing checks manually to all their contractors,” she recalls. “I updated their books and got them on computer programs to automate their processes, make it more efficient.” She'd work for four days on the job site and do the accounting on Fridays.

She did the same the next summer. At school, Landers started studying finance “because I knew that no matter what I did, I needed to know how the numbers worked. That would be a good foundation. My stepfather was an engineer-turned-general contractor, so I started helping him out in his building apartment complex in Kansas.”

After graduation, she moved to San Diego and started working as a financial analyst with Sony Electronics. “When you're 22 in San Diego and everyone wants a job, you take what you can get,” she says. “It doesn't necessarily have to be a great job, but it can help you learn. You can learn what you don't want to do and help narrow down what it is you want to do. You figure it out through the process.

Sick of sitting in a cubicle for 15 hours, doing the same thing every month and being viewed as a drone within a larger company, Landers thought about a career change. So she quit the job at Sony, found her way to New York and started attending NYU.

“It was an uphill battle,” she relates. “I wasn't from this area and I knew nothing about real estate in New York. I threw myself into NYU. I joined committees and ran the peer mentoring committee.” Landers tried to learn as much as she could about the city's commercial real estate market and history and came across the AREW scholarship in 2009. “I wasn't familiar with AREW before that. I applied and when I went into the interview, there were probably 10 women around a table ready to interview me. I had an instant heart attack at that moment.

“I remember Merle asking me what I plan on doing with the money if I won, and I just sat there thinking of all the different ways I could answer that question,” she goes on. “The mental saga that went on in my mind during this experience was just extraordinary and I walked out of there and thought, 'This went awful. This was one of the worst experiences of my life. This was unsuccessful.' Then Merle called me one night and I was almost in tears when she told me that I won. The women welcomed me with completely open arms. It was just overwhelming, the excitement they shared in having me involved and wanting to help me out as much as possible.

“Numerous women helped me with my thesis, trying to get information to turn it into something real and tangible, which actually involved a women's community facility for education in the real estate industry,” Landers adds. “Things took off from there. I got involved in the committees and that's where I am today.”

She also graduated—unfortunately during a bad time to enter the labor force. Interested in construction, she ended up working for the NYC Department of Design & Construction, working on major multi-million-dollar projects. She ultimately found her way to HFZ Capital Group, which Landers says has been “an evolving process. I've been there for a year now. I thought was just going to help out one person on the analysis side of the business, and now I'm pretty much running all the sales and marketing for our developments. We're doing over 2.2 million square feet right now in Manhattan.”

Having only been in the industry for five years, Landers admits she doesn't have a huge track record to look back in terms of seeing dramatic changes in the business. However, she says the mentoring she's received over the years has been invaluable, and she works hard to pay it forward. “I've been fortunate enough in my life to have a lot of mentors, and now I find myself in that role. It's such an experience for me.”