The Importance of Education
After graduating with an accounting and computer science degree from Valparaiso University, Roberts started her career at Price Waterhouse and then moved on to work for a client, OroAmerica. She enjoyed public accounting but wanted to expand on the number and type of jobs that were open to her, so she decided to pursue an MBA at Chicago Booth.

“For my undergraduate degree, I went to a small school in the Midwest that not many people were familiar with,” she said. “I thought having an MBA from a school that many of the companies I wanted to work for had heard of would be important. At Booth, I was with a more challenging mix of peers—I was swimming with fish much smarter than I was and that was a valuable experience. I don’t think I would have had gotten a job in investment banking if I had not gone to a top business school. The credibility of the school is very important.”

Roberts began working at Lehman Brothers in 1990, eventually serving as co-head of Lehman Brothers’ Global Technology Group until 2004. She then joined Goldman Sachs as a partner and served as co-head of technology within the Global Technology, Media and Telecom Group.

A Focus on Women’s Issues
In 2011, Roberts transitioned to a role as an advisory director where she concentrated on recruiting and mentoring in Goldman’s Investment Banking Division in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on female professionals.

“The challenge to employers is that women don’t come in and ask for what they need,” she said. “It’s kind of like breaking up with a boyfriend. There’s not a lot of conversation. They just walk in and say ‘it’s over.’ Women, in particular, need to understand that there is plenty of gray space to explore between ‘I’m in this career forever’ and ‘I quit.’ Binary thinking doesn’t get to a solution. We need to coach women on how to reach their hands into the machinery to get what they need.”

Roberts, who has been a member of the Council on Chicago Booth since 2005, has long supported the school. Her first gift in 1993 of $100 went toward the Annual Fund. Throughout the years, the size of her gifts grew, and, over time, she changed her focus from investing in scholarships to her most recent pledge of $2 million toward initiatives supporting Booth alumnae in their lives and careers.

“I found that many scholarship dollars were available to the ‘most accomplished,’ yet some women still needed the opportunity to accomplish something,” she said. “During the past several years of working with women at Goldman Sachs, I developed a greater compassion for those who made the choice to focus on family for a period of time. I believe it is economically short-sighted to not actively look to keep these women in the workforce or to create a more robust pathway back into a meaningful career. The decision to raise a family should not be a one-way street. It should be just one of many routes we take along our careers and lifetimes.”

Since retiring from Goldman Sachs in March of 2016, Roberts is looking into several business and investment ideas with the underlying theme of sponsoring and helping women excel.

She also is spending more time fully exploring her philanthropic interests which, in addition to Chicago Booth, focus on education equality for children and children’s mental health. Roberts currently serves as chair of the board for Teach for America, New York, and she is also a board member of the Child Mind Institute and New Leaders. 

“I don’t see philanthropy as doing something nice,” she said. “I think that when you are doing well, it is expected.”