Maybe it was Wonder Woman who lit a fire under a young Jacki Zehner. Kicking butt and taking names, it was she—(not a he)—wielding her truth-extracting magic lasso, those bullet-deflecting bracelets and rocking the tall red boots on the airwaves in Jacki’s hometown of Kelowna, B.C. Canada.
Or maybe it happened years later, when Jacki met trailblazing social activist Gloria Steinem. “Use your corporate role to create more opportunities for women,” Steinem told the finance whiz, who had just become the youngest female partner at Goldman Sachs.
Whatever set her course toward serving and championing women on the financial frontier, Jacki has spent nearly three decades leveraging her wealth, shrewdness and social capital, investing in female-owned businesses and funds, empowering women around money and inspiring financial power.
“Women simply haven’t been socialized to embrace money as a ‘power to’ tool—to our detriment. A ‘power to’ serve our families, have a positive social impact, help fund wealth creation for others,” she says. “Normalizing conversations and stories around money is a pathway to getting better with money.”
A Park City resident, Jacki says Utah’s high rankings for doing business, livability and quality of life can’t offset a glaring problem. “When it comes to women’s social and economic well-being and equality, we rank at the very bottom,” she says. “We can’t proudly tout favorable rankings while ignoring
the unfavorable ones.”
Wonder Woman
Jacki studied finance at the University of British Columbia before joining Goldman Sachs as a trader in the late ’80s. Driven and fearless, she made partner in 1996 at just 32 years old. When Goldman Sachs went public three years later, Jacki experienced a significant windfall, and suddenly, she wasn’t just managing wealth for others—she was navigating her own.
Jacki (an avid collector) shares actress Linda Carter’s costume pieces from the original DC Comics Wonder Woman TV series. Photo by Adam Finkle
“After 14 years at Goldman, I was itching to leave and, believe it or not, write a Wonder Woman screenplay,” she says, reflecting on her lifelong love of the iconic character, and her newfound love of film.
Beloved by women the world over, Wonder Woman championed love, equality and sisterhood. Yet somehow, even by the early 2000s, the red-booted Amazonian princess didn’t have her own movie, her time on the airwaves had passed, and the newest generation of girls didn’t know her. Jacki was determined to change that.
At a dinner party, she found herself once again face to face with Gloria Steinem. Also a mega-fan, Gloria regularly peppered her speeches with allusions to the superhero and was known to have DC Comics on speed dial in the ’70s whenever the character edged more toward car-hop than superhero. Wonder Woman even graced the very first issue of Gloria’s Ms. magazine.
So, was it a coincidence that Jacki was seated next to one of the foremost experts on Wonder Woman?
“It was a sign,” she says, adding, “The next day I turned in my resignation at Goldman Sachs to chase the screenplay.” Jacki and Gloria have been friends ever since.
It was Warner Brothers that finally produced its own Wonder Woman movie in 2017 (try as she might, she could never secure the rights). But for Jacki, it was just the beginning. Still inspired and free from the hamster wheel, Jacki redirected her energy into helping women—and the world—in a different way: wielding her financial wizardry as her very own superpower.
Women Moving Millions and She Money/ShePlace
“Because women get less than 2% of venture capital,” Jacki explains when asked what motivated her next move.
She became the first president and CEO of Women Moving Millions (WMM), the only women-funding-women community of its caliber, having given over $1 billion towards the betterment of women and women-founded businesses. Additionally, her Foundation has invested in 25 women-owned companies and more than a dozen funds focused on female advancement.
Ever interested in film, she’s promoted and funded female documentary-makers and filmmakers interested in telling women’s stories as a Sundance Institute board member.
Now she’s taking to task Utah women’s upward mobility limitations, working with global thought leader Dr. Susan Madsen (Utah State University) on her state and privately-funded initiative, A Bolder Way Forward.
Once the youngest female partner at Goldman Sachs, Jacki’s SheMoney and ShePlace empower women around money. Photo by Adam Finkle
“Looking at the metrics with Susan and other state leaders,” says Jacki, “what I heard was: we need to get women talking about money.”
Jacki’s wildly popular monthly newsletter on LinkedIn (currently at just under 170k subscribers) became the impetus for a more robust platform. She founded ShePlace, an online and in-person network for women to grow their social capital, and, soon after, SheMoney, a consultancy and content platform to champion financial engagement for women.
So while Jacki could be spending her 60s sailing around the world attending Wonder Woman Comic-cons, she’s leading affordable summits, hosting workshops, creating podcasts and educating women’s organizations about the power of their money and how to use it better.
Jacki seems to have her own magic lasso for truth-telling. She’s encouraging women to share their ‘money stories’ and teaching them how to access capital. While the topic is weighty, somehow she manages to lighten the mood by infusing her other loves into the discussion: Beyoncé, cowboy culture and line dancing (or a combination of all three).
“I want to live in literally the best place in the country for everyone, including women,” Jacki says. “It’s not a zero-sum game. When we help women, we help children…we help everybody.”
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