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.
Twenty-five years ago this month, three women at a Long Island branch of financial industry giant Smith Barney filed an explosive class-action sexual harassment lawsuit. Their complaint described a branch office where it was acceptable for men to refer to their female colleagues as “b*tches” and “c*nts”, where the boss bellowed to the troops at an office Christmas party that the branch was “the biggest whorehouse in Garden City” and where male brokers would assemble in a basement party room dubbed “the Boom Boom Room” to drink, party and engage in vulgar talk.
That suit wound up including 22,000 women by the time it settled, and women at other brokerage firms started speaking up, too, adding up to a public relations nightmare for the brokerage industry.
A quarter-century later, there is change, but women are still struggling. I wrote about it in an opinion piece today for CNN. You can read it here.
A number of companies that sell liability insurance to cover sexual harassment are demanding higher deductibles or restricting coverage for businesses in high-risk industries such as entertainment, a new survey shows. I wrote about it today for CNBC.com.
A year ago, insurers were getting concerned about the risks they were taking on when they wrote these policies, but their anxiety has risen over the past year. This is the story I wrote about the 2018 survey for theintercept.com.
I worked with the amazing journalists at Type Investigations, The Intercept and Retro Report to tell the story of the women who fought back after being harassed on Wall Street in the 1990s. Watch the segment from tonight’s PBS Retro Report here.
A woman who is sexually harassed at work is six and a half times more likely to change jobs than a woman who is not. So you might think that, a year and a half into the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment would be a front-burner issue for the people paid to diversity Wall Street.
Yet at a two-day conference of diversity experts in the securities industry in New York in late May, not one of the seven panels addressed the challenge of sexual harassment in the workplace. I wrote about it in my latest piece for The Intercept. You can read it here.
Securities attorney Bill Singer today on sexual harassment on Wall Street.
#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.
I looked into the internal investigations that companies do when employees complain about sexual harassment and other workplace inequities. You can read the piece in The New York Times here.