Muriel Siebert, a Determined Trailblazer for Women on Wall Street, Dies at 84 Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Ms. Siebert was one of the pioneers in the discount brokerage field. Muriel Siebert, who became a legend on Wall Street as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the exchange's member firms, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 84. Dave Pickoff/Associated Press Muriel Siebert in 1977, 10 years after she became the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The cause was complications of cancer, said Jane H. Macon, a friend and board member of Ms. Siebert's firm, the Siebert Financial Corporation. Ms. Siebert, known to all as Mickie, cultivated the same brash attitude that characterized Wall Street's most successful men. She bought her seat on the exchange in 1967, but to her immense anger she remained the only woman admitted to membership for almost a decade. A pioneer in the discount brokerage field, Ms. Siebert transformed Muriel Siebert & Company (now a subsidiary of Siebert Financial) into a discount brokerage in 1975, on the first day that Big Board members were allowed to negotiate commissions. She also was the first woman to be superintendent of banking for New York State, appointed by Gov. Hugh L. Carey in 1977. She served five years during a rocky time when banks were tottering and interest rates were skyrocketing. Ms. Siebert was known, to her delight, as a scrapper. She donated millions of dollars from her brokerage and securities underwriting business to help other women get their start in business and finance. When she was honored for her efforts in 1992, Ms. Siebert used the luncheon celebration to warn that it was still too soon for women to declare victory in the battle for equality on Wall Street. "Firms are doing what they have to do, legally," she said. But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers, and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There's still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting. She continued that fight all her life. In the early 1970s she was one of the first women to battle the sexist practices then prevalent in Manhattan social clubs, spurred by an experience she had had at the Union League Club: arriving there for a board luncheon meeting of the Sales Executive Club, she was not allowed in the elevator. "I had to go through the kitchen and walk up the back stairs," she recalled. She was so angry during the meeting that her male colleagues asked what was wrong. When the lunch was finished, they tried to take her down in the elevator with them. When she was again rebuffed, they joined her in walking down the stairs and through the kitchen. That and similar experiences led her to testify before government bodies about the discriminatory policies of many New York clubs, which were important, informal venues for networking and deal-making. In time, women were permitted to become members. In 1987 Ms. Siebert successfully lobbied to get a ladies" room on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange, near the entrance to the luncheon club she frequented. She accomplished this in her typical fashion. She warned the exchange's chairman that if a ladies" room was not on the floor by the end of the year, she would arrange for a portable toilet to be delivered. The room was installed, and women no longer had to trek down a flight of stairs. She once explained her strategy for dealing with obstacles: "I put my head down and charge." Muriel Faye Siebert was born in Cleveland on Sept. 12, 1928, the second of two daughters of Irwin Siebert, a dentist, and his wife, Margaret. She attended Western Reserve University for two years but left in 1952 before graduating because her father had become ill. She came to New York in 1954, she once said, "with $500, a Studebaker and a dream." She was hired as a $65-a-week trainee in the research department at Bache & Company. "The way it worked, everybody who was already there got to give the new kid one of their junk industries," she told The New York Times in 1992. I got airlines, I got motion pictures - things nobody wanted in those days. She changed jobs three times, she said, when she found that men doing the same work were being paid more than she was. She also discovered when job hunting that when the New York Society of Security Analysts sent out her résumé under the name Muriel Siebert, she received no inquiries, but when the society distributed it under the name M.F. Siebert, the results were quite different. Catherine Rampell contributed reporting. An obituary on Monday about Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, using information from a spokeswoman, misstated Ms. Siebert's age and year of birth. She was 84, not 80, and she was born on Sept. The error also appeared in the headline and in a front-page capsule summary. Ms. Siebert had given her birth year as 1932 during her career.