With Women's History Month 
almost over, I thought I'd take one more opportunity to share some of Wells Fargo's history as it relates to women, who have been among the company's most valuable customers and team members since our early days.
Did you know that today, women make up more than half of Wells Fargo's banking team members? Actually, women have been the majority of the Wells Fargo workforce since World War II, but Wells Fargo's history of hiring women goes back much further.
Wells Fargo hired its first known female employee in 1873 in Palmyra, Nebraska, where Mary Taggart ran Wells Fargo & Co's express office and also worked as the town's railroad and telegraph agent. She was just the first of over 350 women who managed Wells Fargo offices from 1873 to 1918.
Wells Fargo's policy on hiring women was markedly different than one of its major competitors in the express industry, whose president actually stated that he preferred to close his company's offices in some locations if a suitable man could not be found to run the place.
Wells Fargo left the express transportation business in 1918, but at the Company's bank in San Francisco and financial institutions and industry around the nation, women began playing a greater role in the workforce.
In the day when entering a bank to do your banking business meant walking through cigar smoke and around cuspidors on the floor, many banks — including Wells Fargo, Norwest, and Wachovia — opened special banking departments for the convenience and comfort of women customers. Not only that, female tellers were the ones who managed customer relationships.
During World War II, women entered the banking workforce in large numbers. At Wells Fargo, for example, in 1938 two-thirds of bank employees were male. But 1942 numbers had flipped to a workforce 65% female. Women filled agent, teller, clerical, and eventually management jobs.
Wachovia has its own great history of hiring and employing women too, as Wachovia archivists Sue Choate and Trudy Cox tell us on our sister blog, Guided By History. Sue tells the story of Miss Jay Spencer Knapp, Atlanta's first female bank officer, and Trudy writes about Wachovia's hiring of women as far back as 1909.
All in all, both Wells Fargo and Wachovia are proud of the many significant contributions of women in our past and, I'm sure, in our future.
Thanks for this blog -- it's great to see Wells Fargo embracing this technology and do so in a way that pushes knowledge, not it's products. Lots of interesting reading.
I'm in the process of being hired by the two merging companies, so these bits and pieces of information gave me hope while I wait for a decision. I would appreciate any other info about the subject you're willing to share.