At the start of my career, in 1992, when I was in my early 20s, I worked as a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs. By then, at least in the more genteel parts of Wall Street, such as investment banking at large firms, the worst forms of sexual harassment from the roaring 80s had been toned down. There was still a lot of socializing after hours, but stories of lunchtime assignations between partners and secretaries, and raunchy behavior at work, seemed to be things of the past. People were smarter than that.
The mergers-and-acquisitions department, where I worked, had been chastened. Business was slow in the aftermath of the 80s junk-bond frenzy, which had made M&A bankers Wall Street’s rock stars. Even though Goldman was then making an effort to hire women, and there were many of us in my analyst class, our ranks thinned dramatically as one went up the pyramid. In M&A, as I recall, there were a few women associates, one or two female vice presidents, but no women partners. Women were forbidden to wear pants.
Our introductory program included sensitivity training—although it’s hard to say the lessons sunk in. I remember asking one male associate about diversity. “We have plenty of diversity,” he responded. “We have soccer players, hockey players, and football players.” Not surprisingly, something of a jock ethos prevailed. There were holiday parties where partners were making out with analysts, and vice presidents with secretaries.
I was assigned to work directly for one vice president. My job was to develop presentations for consumer-products companies, a thankless task in a department that only valued deal-making. Two men had been assigned similar work, although one figured out how to get himself out of there, pronto. I could not have been less suited for that work—I was a math major looking forward to quantitative analysis—and I have no visual skills whatsoever. I was too immature not to let my unhappiness show. In return my boss made no secret that he despised me.
Our month-long training program felt like a continuation of college, with plenty of parties and lots of alcohol. But, of course, it wasn’t college. Unwritten rules had very real career repercussions if you broke them, and they were very different for men and for women. Even small missteps, such as making out with a person in your class, could get a woman marked, but would enhance a man’s reputation. When the real work started, almost immediately a senior man held himself to me as a mentor of sorts. I was failing at work, he told me, and I had made myself “too visible.” He alone saw something redeemable in me. But, of course, his “friendship” came with strings attached (despite the fact that he had an out-of-town girlfriend). I wasn’t sure how to say no.
I felt trapped—my parents, who were at home in Hibbing, Minnesota (population 19,000), were lovely, but very clear that any support was over. Perhaps because I was in search of a savior, I had a too public affair with a colleague my own age, which ended when another analyst pulled me aside and told me the man had a girlfriend. (Life lesson: Save yourself.) When another (married) senior vice president tried to get into my hotel room it was a soul-crushing moment, because I felt that I had set myself up.
All of this made it hard for me to have the kind of chipper, can-do attitude so prized in junior roles. I finally transitioned into a more quantitative role, which utilized my skills, and I distinctly remember a moment when I decided I was either going to quit or finish the job with my head held high. From that point on I did nothing but work, and I stuck it out for three years—I had something to prove. In retrospect, I think what bothered me most was the knowledge that, while we were all going to be judged for things besides the quality of our work, for women, extra-professional judgments accrued almost entirely to our disadvantage, whereas for men, at least the white-male sporty types, it was the opposite. It felt brutally unfair.
I quit and moved to a $650-a-month apartment in the far reaches of the East Village, buzz-cut my hair, and took up boxing. I don’t think the men I sparred with had a clue who it was I was punching (nor did I), but my coach told me I had a fantastically powerful right hand. I wore black biker boots (not today’s chic version) and clothes that would define me as anything but feminine. I once randomly wandered into a Brooks Brothers store and the old-school saleslady looked at me, her eyes widening in horror. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
At a recent reunion for my class of analysts, a man suddenly broke off the conversation, looked at me and one of my friends, and said, “I’m so sorry.” He explained that as the years went by he’d realized how hard life was for the female analysts. #MeToo has helped me see my experience through a different prism, but despite that, I will always feel in my gut that it was my fault, and the primary emotion I still feel when I think of those years is shame.
What I also know is that the potent and unique mixture of feeling that you’re failing professionally while at the same time being targeted for your gender is utterly devastating to your confidence and sense of self.
* * *
—
With so many stories of sexual harassment spanning decades, why aren’t the women on Wall Street leading the #MeToo charge? An obvious answer: the money. Wall Streeters often have a great deal of money tied up in their firms in the form of stock, and they usually have to sign non-disclosure agreements, either as a condition of employment or to get money when they depart. “For many senior women there is way too much on the table,” says a retired senior woman. “That’s the base reason why you haven’t heard more.”
But it goes beyond the money. “When you are rewarded for toughness there’s a big disincentive . . . to come forward with a story that would put a dent into your armor,” writes a current Wall Street woman in an e-mail. “That over time becomes identity.”
“It was always just stick your head down and get the work done,” says another woman. “When you are senior, you will be the change you want to see. But we weren’t.” In addition, there’s a belief that the consequences are much worse for a woman who complains than for a man who is the subject of complaints.
Among women I spoke to, the fear was often palpable. Fear of being labeled a complainer. Fear of being ostracized. Fear of being fired. I heard current stories that I cannot print, even anonymously, because the women are terrified that someone, somehow, will figure out they talked. They wish they were braver, several say. But the consequences are too great. The stories that are printed in this piece are scrubbed of telltale details for that reason.
“If someone calls me and says they have gone to H.R., my advice is always that your future with the company is imperiled,” says Dan Kaiser, a New York employment lawyer with Kaiser Saurborn & Mair. “The idea that you are staying there and living happily ever after is now unlikely. You are a complainer.”
“It’s a very small world, and it gets whispered around that there’s a problem with her and she doesn’t work again,” says Maureen Sherry. “She may go entrepreneurial, but her big-league dream is dead.”
A woman who sued her firm believes she was quietly blackballed from subsequent opportunities. “In our business, you either side with the boys or with the ladies—you will be forced to choose at some point,” she says. “When you do, that choice is permanent, with lasting repercussions you can’t possibly appreciate at the time. After years of 14- to 16-hour days and few vacations, I complained.” Her previously stellar annual reviews had abruptly turned negative for no reason she could understand—other than that a man with powerful supporters wanted her book of business. “I complained once,” she says. “And now I’m trapped. You know the language they use. No one says I filed a complaint—they can’t. But they’ll say, ‘Oh, she’s not a team player’ or ‘She’s difficult.’”
Women who do complain often feel ostracized. “In the entertainment industry, it started with women, but then the industry at large showed support,” Sherry says. “I do not think women on Wall Street feel that support. What they have always seen is that the person behaving badly is the powerful one and the man stays employed. The woman takes
a check and where does she go? We don’t know.”
Nor do women always get support from the most obvious place: other women.
“The thing that hurt me the most is that fellow women peers and superiors did not have my back,” says a woman who is currently an unnamed plaintiff in a suit against a large Wall Street firm. “Because the price is too high. You spend all these years trying to fit in and this [complaining] is the ultimate standing out. It’s wonderful watching what’s happening in Hollywood, where women are supporting other women, but that did not and does not happen in finance.”
“Women are very isolated and these are very competitive jobs,” says Kelly Dermody, an employment lawyer at Lieff Cabraser. “They don’t want to make their career cause be fighting sexual harassment. It can be a thankless decision.”
Even for those willing to take the risk of speaking out, Wall Street legal agreements make it difficult for them to be heard. Although practices vary and have changed over the years, some firms, as a condition of employment, insist that all disputes be heard in closed-door arbitrations, not in public lawsuits. Things are getting worse rather than better. Recent court rulings have determined that firms can force employees to sign waivers saying they will not participate in class-action suits (though this outcome is currently being argued). “If there were a Harvey Weinstein and he had harassed 100 women and they had all complained, they might not even know each other exists, and you would never know,” says Adam Klein, an employment lawyer with the New York firm Outten & Golden.
Settlements also often require non-disclosure provisions—and settling is by far the easier route. Ann Olivarius, a longtime high-profile employment lawyer, who works in New York and London, says that when she notifies a firm of a complaint, “the firm’s representatives will have a big binder with your name on it full of all sorts of details, from your personal life to your expense reports. It might all be nonsense, but it’s put down as a threat. Sign and have a good life or fight us and we will destroy you. So 99 percent will take the money and go.”
* * *
—
A recent story, told to me by a woman who was a superstar at a big firm, shows that the cost of speaking out, even internally, can be high. She was a big producer and got promoted for it. “I earned it and it was how it was supposed to be,” she told me. Above all, she was loyal. “I was a fucking assassin, and I would have jumped out the window if they had told me to,” she says.
That was how it was supposed to be until it wasn’t. She’s terrified to talk to me because she too says she’ll get fired if anyone finds out, but I’ve already been told most of the details, and rather than duck and cover, she’s willing to confirm them. When a man who joined her group made racist and sexist remarks, she reported him—because she thought she could and should. After that, “the boys’ club,” as she calls it, closed ranks against her. This man’s boss, who was her boss as well, protected the man. She’d hear from clients and other colleagues that she was being bad-mouthed, and she was called a cunt. “I’m a tough cookie,” she says, and that is clearly true. “But that is not O.K.” She reported the issues to the firm’s human resources department, which responded, she says, as if the problems were of her own making. “They looked at me like I’m the one on trial,” she says.
As she talks, a sneaky little thought creeps into my mind: Would it have been different if she had just been . . . nicer? As soon as I think it, I realize I’m buying into some of the same stereotypes that have been so damaging to women. That a woman who is aggressive is a bitch, whereas a man is a hard-charger. That she somehow brought it on herself. But had this woman been “nicer,” I realize, she never would have achieved what she had, and she would have been run over in a different way.
One of the final straws for her came when she was at an event with a client—and saw the H.R. person there with the man who was protecting the bad actor. She realized that she had nowhere to turn. She doesn’t want to get fired. “I’ve done stuff that isn’t perfect and they’d crush me,” she says. So instead, she says, “I decided I’d be the sheep they wanted me to be.” She works the hours that are required, but she’s an assassin for the firm no longer.
* * *
—
It was almost 30 years ago when a few women started bringing lawsuits alleging harassment and discrimination—the two have always gone hand in hand—in financial services. One of the first came in 1990. Teresa Contardo, who was a broker at Merrill Lynch, alleged sexual harassment—pornographic pictures had been placed at her desk—but her bigger complaint was that the men found ways to exclude her, thereby harming her ability to make money. Contardo won a $250,000 settlement. This would deter “endemic and habitual discrimination against women by undisciplined discretionary decisions in workplaces dominated by men,” wrote the judge in his opinion.
In 1996, Pamela Martens and other plaintiffs sued Smith Barney, alleging both sexual harassment and discrimination. It became known as the “Boom Boom Room” case because there was a room in the firm’s Garden City, New York, office where men would gather after work, and where, according to the complaint, women were “dealt with” when allowed to enter. Smith Barney eventually agreed to pay settlements to about 20,000 women, though the amounts were not disclosed.
About two years later, Allison Schieffelin, a successful bond saleswoman at Morgan Stanley, filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (E.E.O.C.). She says that, as a result, she was called into her boss’s office, abruptly fired, and escorted out the door. She later issued a public statement. “The campaign of retaliation that Morgan Stanley launched against me was designed not only to punish me but also to scare other women who might dare to complain of discrimination,” she wrote. To settle her case, Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $54 million to as many as 340 women. The presiding judge called it a “watershed in safeguarding and promoting the rights of women on Wall Street.”
In 2002, Laura Zubulake, a former saleswoman at UBS, sued, alleging that gender discrimination destroyed her career. At trial, she won her case mainly due to unassailable evidence in e-mails and other electronic communications. “There was an informal code on the street, a brotherhood. . . . No matter the allegations, managers tended to support one another,” she wrote.
Three years later, Renée Fassbender Amochaev and three other women filed a class-action complaint against Smith Barney, claiming rampant discrimination in how female brokers were treated and paid. “I knew I wouldn’t come out with much money, but it was the principle of the thing, and I was angry. It was about not perpetuating the problem for future women in the industry by staying silent,” says Fassbender Amochaev today.
Reportedly, after she and her co-plaintiffs won their case, Jamie Dimon, then Smith Barney’s co-C.E.O. (and now the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase), sent a memo to employees saying that the settlement “focuses on effecting real change and progress rather than simply delivering monetary rewards.”
* * *
—
There has been change, at least on the surface. There is a widespread belief that overt sexual harassment is far less prevalent than it was, certainly at big firms such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. “People blame Wall Street for everything, but we’re outperforming here!” says a woman who recently left a large firm. “We’re better than they [the film and media industries] are!” After all, the lawsuits made financial firms aware of the risks, and one thing Wall Street is supposed to care about is managing risk.
Unlike the entrepreneurial, high-flying private partnerships of old, today’s Wall Street firms are bureaucratic, somewhat stagnant, publicly traded giant institutions, with policies and procedures and diversity training and shareholders and boards of directors to whom executives must answer. The outsize characters of old are now merely life-size. “Go back 15 to 20 years, and you could name the powerful people on Wall Street,” one longtime male executive says. “But who are the [Joseph]
Perellas and [Bruce] Wassersteins of today? It’s much more anonymous.”
Put a different way: who is the Harvey Weinstein of Wall Street today? That person, in both stature in the financial sector and the egregious horror of his deeds, doesn’t exist. So the firings for sexual harassment that have happened—and there have been some—have been quiet. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs fired a trader who attempted to use a female colleague to demonstrate his ability to unhook a bra.
Mores have certainly changed. “In my experience, there was no tolerance,” says a senior woman, talking about a firm where she had been a managing director. “It was not presumed innocent, but presumed guilty. The irony of all ironies is that the industry to clean itself up was Wall Street.”
One woman, who started her career in the 1980s, says that a few years ago she was struck by an incident at her firm’s holiday party, when a senior man got drunk. The next day he was fired. She heard about it and called the C.E.O., hoping to intervene on his behalf. The C.E.O. told her, “I had three incoming calls from women in their 20s who said they could no longer work with him. Didn’t you notice what he was doing?” Her response: No! She hadn’t noticed.
“It’s because I was raised in the 1980s, and it was way worse then,” she says. “[The younger women] thought it was so threatening that they wouldn’t report to him anymore, and I called the C.E.O. to intervene! In that way, it has changed. Young women do not tolerate it.”
“I think there was enough consciousness raised in the 90s and 00s that what offends young women today is so far down the list of what we went through that we wouldn’t even have reacted to it,” says another woman.
But overt harassment still happens, particularly in the smaller shops. One woman who worked on the investment side says that the man who ran her fund would angle his camera at her chest to take pictures, and once told her when he was leaving for a weekend in the Hamptons that he wanted to set up a camera in the office so he could watch her while he was away. “He was obsessed with me,” she recalls. He encouraged rumors in the office that they were having an affair. “I do not put up with bullshit, so I never thought I would be in that predicament,” she says. But she was, and she stayed because of the opportunity the job provided, until she became so physically sick she had to leave. “My body told me before my mind did,” she says.
Vanity Fair's Women on Women Page 47