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It's a long way from a childhood rubbing elbows with Las Vegas' "Rat Pack" to a career in the cerebral and statistical world of asset management, but Patricia Dunn has made the leap.
And it's a long way from the secretarial pool to the chief executive's office, but Dunn has made that journey as well. She now sits atop the largest San Francisco-based financial institution you may never have heard of, overseeing a firm that manages almost $800 billion for clients in 37 countries as CEO of Barclays Global Investors.
Serving mostly institutional clients and rarely giving interviews has kept Dunn away from the spotlight even as her firm has grown to become the world's largest institutional investment manager and she has climbed to the peak of what remains a male-dominated, button-down world.
That cover will be blown, at least slightly, when she accepts the Financial Woman of the Year award next week from the Financial Women's Association of San Francisco.
Career of firsts
Along the way, Dunn's career has included many firsts - such as Barclay's pioneering of index fund investing, which was in its infancy when Dunn arrived as a temporary secretary in 1976. At the time, the idea that...