Erin Callan: ‘I Leaned In Far’

Almost five years after leaving Lehman Brothers, Erin Callan is fashioning a new identity as a commentator.

In an interview scheduled to air Friday evening on “Rock Center With Brian Williams” on NBC, Ms. Callan, Lehman’s former chief financial officer, opines on issues facing women in the workplace. The media appearance follows an essay by Ms. Callan in The New York Times on Sunday, in which she used her own experience to discuss these themes.

“I feel like I got to live an amazing life, and I’m still living an amazing life. But there was a time that cme, naturally, for reflection,” Ms. Callan says in excerpts of the NBC interview released Friday morning. “There was a punctuation point in my life.”

That refers, presumably, to her exit from Lehman, at a time when the investment bank was on the brink of collapse. Ms. Callan worked at Credit Suisse for a brief while after that, before retreating from public view. After putting her house in East Hampton up for sale, she is currently living in Florida.

Ms. Callan expressed regret in the Times essay about how she let her work consume her life. But it was “surprising” t! o her that some readers interpreted that to mean she was “very sad,” Ms. Callan says in the new interview.

In the conversation with NBC’s Ann Curry, Ms. Callan, who has no children of her own, speculates about how her work might have been different if she had been a mother.

“I might have been asked to be C.F.O. I don’t know if I could have actually been the C.F.O.,” she says. “It’s important distinction.”

The conversation nods to the current discussion surrounding “Lean In,” the book by the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. “I leaned in far, very far,” Ms. Callan says.

The former Wall Streeter even has a theory on why fewer women than men rise o the upper echelons of power in the United States.

“Maybe they don’t want that,” she says. Then she adds, “I wanted it. But it’s O.K. not to.”