MORE than 20 years after the term “glass ceiling” was first coined to describe the invisible obstacles preventing women reaching the top jobs on Wall Street, one of the last bastions of male supremacy may soon be shattered by a Cruz missile.

Zoe Cruz, 52, a co-president at Morgan Stanley, one of America’s best-known investment banks, was identified last week as a likely successor to John Mack, the bank’s 63-year-old chief executive.

Cruz, who has been likened to a missile for her single-minded pursuit of trading profits, would become the first woman to lead a top US bank. She is the richest woman on Wall Street, having earned more than $50m (£24m) in bonuses over the past two years.

The appointment of a female chief executive would end more than a century of male domination of financial markets and, ironically, seems set to occur at a bank that only three years ago was forced to pay out $54m to female employees to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit.

While Cruz is unlikely to take over for at least two years, Mack has been under growing pressure to designate his successor in advance, following the recent meltdown in US mortgage lending and multi-billion-dollar loss-es at big investment banks.

The chief executives of both Merrill Lynch and Citigroup have been forced to step down after writing off up to $20 billion of bad debts. Their sudden departures have triggered a scramble to find replacements with the authority and experience to steer America’s most formidable financial institutions through what some experts predict may be a new recession. “The masters of the universe have fallen on their swords,” one investment banker said last week. “Maybe it’s time for a mistress.”

Born in Greece, Cruz has worked for Morgan Stanley since she graduated from Harvard Business School in 1982. She survived a messy corporate power struggle when several senior Morgan executives rebelled two years ago against the leadership of Philip Purcell, the chief executive at the time.

Cruz supported Purcell against his critics and seemed on her way out when Purcell lost the battle and was replaced by Mack. But her track record managing the bank’s sprawling foreign currency and commodity interests propelled her through an awkward period when she held the title “acting president”, prompting jokes among junior staff that she was only “play-acting” at being president.

She has rarely spoken publicly about the daunting pressures of combining a high-profile banking career with marriage and raising three children. She is half of one of Wall Street’s most renowned power couples – her husband is Ernesto Cruz, a senior executive at Credit Suisse.

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