Seven months after a historic settlement between Goldman Sachs and a group of women who sued the financial giant for pay discrimination, not much seems to have changed on Wall Street. Serious challenges persist for women who work in finance. Women in North America held only 21% of senior leadership jobs in financial services in 2022 and of 15 industries in a recent survey, finance and insurance had the biggest average pay gaps. I wrote about these issues today for Capital & Main.
Tag Archives: goldman sachs
Goldman Sachs Kept the Lid On Sensitive Sex Bias Filings For Years. Until Now.
Over 17 long years — starting long before the #MeToo movement galvanized the nation — one of the most powerful banks in the country has been able to keep the lid on many embarrassing details of a high-profile under discrimination case. A day of reckoning could be on the horizon, though, with a recent agreement between Goldman Sachs and a group of women suing the firm in that case to unseal their allegations of harassment and discrimination. I wrote about the case today for Capital & Main.
To Review Its Mandatory Arbitration Policy, Goldman Sachs Hires Jeffrey Epstein’s Law Firm
Goldman Sachs & Co. is among the 50+ percent of U.S. companies that have forced employees into contracts that require them to use closed-door arbitration — not the public courts — in the event of a dispute. So-called “mandatory arbitration” is one of the greatest scams ever by Corporate America and helps keep racists, sexual harassers and other miscreant bosses out of the headlines and entrenched in their jobs.
So it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when, earlier this week, Goldman said it had hired a law firm to review the impact of mandatory arbitration on its employees and that arbitration was working just fine! Which indeed it is, for Goldman. What was a surprise was news that the law firm that did the review was the same one that sexual predatorJeffrey Epstein used. I wrote about it today in The American Prospect.
The Dangers of Working While Black on Wall Street
Wall Street firms have been rushing to making commitments to racial justice since the death of George Floyd, but how do the same firms behave when a Black employee comes forward to complain about racism? The answer is discouraging. Black people who complain have been ostracized, harassed, threatened and fired after speaking up. And when they have their cases heard in Wall Street’s private arbitration forum, they lose almost all of the time. I wrote about these issues in an article for The Nation, published today.
You can read it here.
Entire Industries Are Being Blacklisted By Insurers Over #MeToo Liability
#MeToo is getting expensive for the insurance companies who issue policies to errant companies. I wrote about it today in this piece for The Intercept.
Under Trump’s SEC, Wall Street Secrecy Expands as Enforcement Shrinks
Jay Clayton, Donald Trump’s choice to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a man Wall Street itself might have picked to run its most important federal regulator. Except for two years clerking for a federal judge after graduating law school, he has worked his entire adult life at Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite law firm based in downtown Manhattan that includes many of the country’s largest publicly traded companies as clients.
Enforcement cases and fines have gone down since Clayton was sworn in last May, and the SEC has given Wall Street and corporate America any number of gifts, including the easing of public company disclosure requirements that some experts consider key for investors looking to understand a company. My colleague Gary Rivlin and I wrote about Clayton’s SEC for The Intercept. You can read our story here.
How Wall Street Keeps Outrageous Gender Bias Quiet 20 Years After the Boom-Boom Room
Everybody loves a half-price sale, and if you’re a recruiter on Wall Street, there’s always a markdown on female employees.
Women in finance last year earned 52 cents for every dollar that men made in a job category the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “securities, commodities and financial services sales agents.” That’s about as bad as it gets for women workers. It was the biggest pay gap among 119 occupations evaluated in a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
But the revealing lawsuits that used to challenge this outrageous pay gap and economically hostile work environment to women are few and far between today — and that’s how Wall Street wants it. The country’s biggest banks have made it harder than ever for women with complaints of unequal pay or treatment to make their cases in a public forum.
It was 20 years ago last month when three women in the Garden City, New York branch of Smith Barney triggered an industry-wide migraine, filing a class-action lawsuit that exposed egregious sexual harassment and unequal pay. It was dubbed the “boom-boom room” suit, the namesake of a party room in the branch’s basement. Click here for the rest of the story.
Decades After ‘Boom-Boom Room’ Suit, Bias Persists for Women
Twenty-three women sued Smith Barney for sexual harassment and pay discrimination in an explosive class-action lawsuit filed 20 years ago this month. It became known as the “boom-boom room” suit, named after a basement party room at Smith Barney’s branch office in Garden City, N.Y. Nearly 2,000 women joined the case, exposing the sordid antics of Wall Street’s testosterone-driven culture.
Smith Barney paid $150 million in arbitration awards and settlements in the case, and it and other Wall Street firms rushed to set up anti-harassment training, employee hotlines and programs to recruit women.
Twenty years later, permanent change is less obvious.
“You may no longer have strippers coming for afternoon entertainment, but that doesn’t mean you are treated as an equal,” said Anne C. Vladeck of the New York employment law firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark. “It’s not quite as blatant as what went on in the boom-boom room, but it’s still there in a way that makes it very hard for women to succeed. Companies on Wall Street are just not changing.”
You can read the full story I wrote for The New York Times here.