Corporate America is very slowly becoming gender neutral. There are miles to go before equality can be claimed, but women have the top job at more than 20 S&P 500 companies, including Yahoo (YHOO), of course. More than 10% of these same companies had female CFO's at the end of 2012, up 35% since 2011.

Finance is the last hold-out industry. With absurdly few exceptions, Wall Street remains a lilly-white boys club at the highest levels. It's a question that seems like something out of the 70s, but it has to be asked: Can women succeed on Wall Street? If the answer is — obviously — yes, then why aren't they?

Karen Finerman, founder of Metropolitan Capital and author of Finerman's Rules: Secrets I'd Only Tell My Daughters About Business and Life, says of course women can make it to the top. "You hear often about how it's such a disadvantage to be a woman, but there are big advantages to being a woman on Wall Street." The key, she says, is learning to use them.

For women starting out, step one is being unafraid to go where the boys are. In finance that means stepping out of the pre-approved path right from the start of their career. "If you look at the retail industry, that's covered by a lot of women; the mix is not so far off 50:50," Finerman says in the attached video. In the industrial or energy sectors the mix of male to female analysts is 9 or 10 to 1.

Being outnumbered by a factor of 10 is intimidating, but it also means you're going to get noticed. That's a good thing. "If you're a woman and you go into that field and you go to conferences and you meet with the CEOs, they're going to pay attention to you," she says. "That's an advantage, and I think we should use it."

Total nonfarm payrolls increased by 175,000 in May according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number was in-line with estimates. The unemployment rate rose from 7.5% to 7.6%. Below the headlines, participation rate at 63.4%, an average work week of 34.5 hours, and average hourly earnings of $23.89 were all withing basis points of April's report.

"It probably solved nothing in terms of the Fed," says Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, in the attached video. "It certainly calms you down that we're not going to have another Spring swoon this year like we've had the last three years. All in all that's probably a good thing for the stock market."

Early trading on Friday supports the vaguely bullish nature of the data. As discussed yesterday there was a fairly thin window for this data. The unemployment rate ticked higher which took some pressure off the Fed, but the economy is going absolutely no where.

Related: Non-Farm Payrolls Needs to Be Just Right for the Bulls

"In some ways it came in right as expected and pleased no one," Paulsen says. "Those who were hoping for better and those that were hoping for worse; no one got it."