It could be the script for a movie. A brave woman comes forward to talk about the sexual harassment she’s experienced in the office. She feels terrified and alone. But many others have been in similar situations, and soon her voice is joined by a chorus, backing her up and supporting her. Then it spreads. Using the hashtag #MeToo, nearly five million people generate 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook in a 24-hour period. At one of her industry’s premier events, men and women alike wear black to show support for the cause, while Hollywood celebrities come together to form a group called Time’s Up, to fight sexual harassment. The list of powerful, allegedly abusive men who are no longer invincible grows to include a Hollywood mogul, famous journalists, radio personalities, and even a Las Vegas casino owner. Yet no one thinks it’s over.
Many believe the movement is changing the world, but in many places, including one industry that has long been regarded as a path to great wealth, there is mostly silence—in fact, it’s been “eerily silent,” as one woman puts it. She is talking about the world of finance. “#MeToo is not an equal-opportunity movement,” says Nicole Page, a lawyer at New York’s Reavis Page Jump, which handles employment cases, including those involving harassment and discrimination. Or as a recently retired senior Wall Street woman puts it, somewhat ruefully, “We all wear all black every day, and it doesn’t help.”
On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Dennis Chookaszian, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, recently polled his 130 students to see whether they have personally experienced harassment or observed it happening. Seventy percent of the women said they have been harassed, and roughly half the men and two-thirds of the women in the class said they’ve observed it or were aware of it happening. “Wall Street has to be the worst,” a senior Wall Street man tells me. He says that’s because of the nature of the work: the long hours, the travel, the pyramid-like structure, where there are plenty of junior women, but disproportionately fewer and fewer as you get toward the top. One woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s and eventually became a partner at her firm recounts having lunch with a prominent male banker, who asked her, “Did it [sexual harassment] happen to you?” “I guarantee it happened to every woman in this restaurant,” she replied. “It impacts every aspect of your career.”
In private groups, women, especially those who have been on Wall Street for decades, are talking about it. Some believe that a tidal wave is coming. But a close look at the industry’s shameful history, and at the realities of being a woman in finance, belies that optimism.
I was the only woman,” recalls the woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s. “My very first day of work, all the men and I were given office assignments. There was an odd number. So all the men got offices to share. I got a reconfigured utility closet. I was told it was in case I needed to change my nylons. And it just went on from there.”
“It was no-holds-barred,” says Sallie Krawcheck, who started at a junior level at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and rose to run wealth management at Citigroup. “One day [at Salomon Brothers], I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform a sex act on me,” she wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk.” In a recent conversation, she added that “the attitude was ‘Tough it out.’ You had no choice. I was 22 years old and from Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t have any money, and there wasn’t anywhere to turn.”
Maureen Sherry, who became the youngest managing director at Bear Stearns, in the 1990s, and fictionalized her experiences in a 2016 novel called Opening Belle, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that on her first day on Wall Street she opened up a pizza box to find unwrapped condoms instead of pepperoni slices.
“You’d hear shit every day like ‘I want to lick your pussy,’ ” says a woman who worked on a trading floor in the 1980s. Another longtime Wall Streeter recalls being at a work dinner in Houston. On one side of her was a senior leader at her bank; on the other, a prominent politician. They simultaneously put their hands up her skirt. She recalls thinking, This is going to get really interesting when their hands touch. Thankfully, a male colleague across the table noticed her distress signals and called her out for a conference call.
On the flip side, some women who work on Wall Street say that gender has never been an issue for them, and some even say that being a woman in a mostly male world confers certain advantages for those who are strategic about it. “I will always assert that the women who are liked and who succeed in finance . . . actually see their femininity as a strength,” says a close friend of mine who has worked in finance for decades. “I would also go so far as to say that for every moment when a woman feels slighted or downright harassed, there are as many opportunities where she can capitalize on her attractiveness and gain an unfair advantage over men. . . . Perhaps a controversial view, but I truly believe it.”
But physical attributes can also divide women from one another. The woman who started her career in the late 1980s recalls that certain women were made fun of for the way they looked or dressed. One was dubbed “Crickets” because of the noise her stockings made when she walked. “Crickets persistently and consistently extended herself as a mentor to me and I ignored her,” the woman recalls. “I felt I could intellectually muscle my way through anything on my own and . . . she was Crickets.”
Other women view resorting to sex appeal as a necessary evil, but one that inevitably backfires. “Women absolutely feel compelled to use their looks,” says a woman who had a successful career at a big bank. “From your first day, the deck is stacked against you,” she says. “We all talk about it at every stage of our careers. As our male peers did, we attended the best universities, achieved excellent academic records, usually went to top M.B.A. programs, but as a woman, your discount rate [a financial term that measures what something is worth] is double or triple that of any man. . . . That’s why women since the beginning of time have used their looks—to climb out of that very hole. These are your cards, and you play them. You have been told you don’t have other cards of value. That’s the beginning of how all of this happens.” (...)
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.
Many believe the movement is changing the world, but in many places, including one industry that has long been regarded as a path to great wealth, there is mostly silence—in fact, it’s been “eerily silent,” as one woman puts it. She is talking about the world of finance. “#MeToo is not an equal-opportunity movement,” says Nicole Page, a lawyer at New York’s Reavis Page Jump, which handles employment cases, including those involving harassment and discrimination. Or as a recently retired senior Wall Street woman puts it, somewhat ruefully, “We all wear all black every day, and it doesn’t help.”On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Dennis Chookaszian, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, recently polled his 130 students to see whether they have personally experienced harassment or observed it happening. Seventy percent of the women said they have been harassed, and roughly half the men and two-thirds of the women in the class said they’ve observed it or were aware of it happening. “Wall Street has to be the worst,” a senior Wall Street man tells me. He says that’s because of the nature of the work: the long hours, the travel, the pyramid-like structure, where there are plenty of junior women, but disproportionately fewer and fewer as you get toward the top. One woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s and eventually became a partner at her firm recounts having lunch with a prominent male banker, who asked her, “Did it [sexual harassment] happen to you?” “I guarantee it happened to every woman in this restaurant,” she replied. “It impacts every aspect of your career.”
In private groups, women, especially those who have been on Wall Street for decades, are talking about it. Some believe that a tidal wave is coming. But a close look at the industry’s shameful history, and at the realities of being a woman in finance, belies that optimism.
I was the only woman,” recalls the woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s. “My very first day of work, all the men and I were given office assignments. There was an odd number. So all the men got offices to share. I got a reconfigured utility closet. I was told it was in case I needed to change my nylons. And it just went on from there.”
“It was no-holds-barred,” says Sallie Krawcheck, who started at a junior level at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and rose to run wealth management at Citigroup. “One day [at Salomon Brothers], I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform a sex act on me,” she wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk.” In a recent conversation, she added that “the attitude was ‘Tough it out.’ You had no choice. I was 22 years old and from Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t have any money, and there wasn’t anywhere to turn.”
Maureen Sherry, who became the youngest managing director at Bear Stearns, in the 1990s, and fictionalized her experiences in a 2016 novel called Opening Belle, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that on her first day on Wall Street she opened up a pizza box to find unwrapped condoms instead of pepperoni slices.
“You’d hear shit every day like ‘I want to lick your pussy,’ ” says a woman who worked on a trading floor in the 1980s. Another longtime Wall Streeter recalls being at a work dinner in Houston. On one side of her was a senior leader at her bank; on the other, a prominent politician. They simultaneously put their hands up her skirt. She recalls thinking, This is going to get really interesting when their hands touch. Thankfully, a male colleague across the table noticed her distress signals and called her out for a conference call.
On the flip side, some women who work on Wall Street say that gender has never been an issue for them, and some even say that being a woman in a mostly male world confers certain advantages for those who are strategic about it. “I will always assert that the women who are liked and who succeed in finance . . . actually see their femininity as a strength,” says a close friend of mine who has worked in finance for decades. “I would also go so far as to say that for every moment when a woman feels slighted or downright harassed, there are as many opportunities where she can capitalize on her attractiveness and gain an unfair advantage over men. . . . Perhaps a controversial view, but I truly believe it.”
But physical attributes can also divide women from one another. The woman who started her career in the late 1980s recalls that certain women were made fun of for the way they looked or dressed. One was dubbed “Crickets” because of the noise her stockings made when she walked. “Crickets persistently and consistently extended herself as a mentor to me and I ignored her,” the woman recalls. “I felt I could intellectually muscle my way through anything on my own and . . . she was Crickets.”
Other women view resorting to sex appeal as a necessary evil, but one that inevitably backfires. “Women absolutely feel compelled to use their looks,” says a woman who had a successful career at a big bank. “From your first day, the deck is stacked against you,” she says. “We all talk about it at every stage of our careers. As our male peers did, we attended the best universities, achieved excellent academic records, usually went to top M.B.A. programs, but as a woman, your discount rate [a financial term that measures what something is worth] is double or triple that of any man. . . . That’s why women since the beginning of time have used their looks—to climb out of that very hole. These are your cards, and you play them. You have been told you don’t have other cards of value. That’s the beginning of how all of this happens.” (...)
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.
by Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Frank Fournier/Contact Press Images; Digital alteration by Vanity Fair
