Real talk from Maria Bartiromo

From a fascinating (in my opinion, but I am obviously biased because of my job) story in the November 2008 issue of Vanity Fair-- covering the female reporters on CNBC:

Dressed conservatively in a khaki Escada pantsuit, with a green T-shirt and burgundy Manolos, [Maria Bartiromo] seems not to notice the women in the tiny dresses as she stops to give her autograph to an elderly gentleman visiting the exchange. She thanks him and turns to climb the stairs to CNBC’s mezzanine studio when a Fox correspondent rushes up to her.

She is wearing towering heels, tons of makeup, and a scarlet dress so tight you can see her underwear line and unbuttoned to expose her black lace bra. “Hi, Maria!” she shrieks. Maria’s eyes pop open, but then she smiles and kisses her. It’s only later that she says she was “taken aback.” The Fox reporter is a friend, and insisting that her name not be published, she says, “I did tell her, ‘Don’t ever show up here with your skirt up your butt and your shirt down low like that.’ I said, ‘It’s a distraction, it’s ridiculous, and it’s not what you want.’ I don’t know who’s telling her to do this, [but] there are a lot of women doing that.”


As someone who goes to a lot of financial industry events, I can attest to the fact that a lot of women are indeed doing that-- especially in Silicon Valley, it seems.

Maria, by the way, is obviously aware of her looks and uses them to her advantage in her career-- she has made moves to trademark the term "Money Honey," after all-- but she knows where to draw the line between being feminine and attractive and being just plain unprofessional. I love that in this interview, Maria calls a spade a spade-- and puts her remarks on the record with the VF writer.