Nancy Davis, a rising star at Goldman Sachs Group Inc, left in January 2008 after an eight-year run betting the firm’s money on derivatives to become a portfolio manager at Highbridge Capital Management LLC. She lost that job 10 months later when the hedge fund cut back in the recession.
For women in the financial-services industry like Davis, who’s still unemployed, the last few years haven’t been kind. More than five times as many women as men lost their jobs in the three years after July 2007, and pay for full-time managers compared with their male counterparts worsened between 2000 and 2007, according to US government data.
Women managers in finance, a group that includes bank tellers as well as executives, earned 63.9 cents for every dollar of income men earned in 2000, based on median salaries, according to Government Accountability Office statistics analyzed by Bloomberg. In 2007, the last year for which data are available, the figure was 58.8 cents. The 41-cent gap was the biggest in any of 13 industries surveyed by the GAO, and only two others had a widening disparity.
“When you have an industry dominated by men like finance, and compensation going through the roof, it’s not surprising that it increases the gender disparity between men and women,” said Joan C Williams, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law in San Francisco who has written on gender and the workplace. “The sky’s the limit for men who hit a home run, but women can’t get to first base.”
Goldman Sachs lawsuit
It has been more than a decade since a case brought by Smith Barney brokerage employees served to dismantle Wall Street’s mandatory arbitration rules, Merrill Lynch & Co. was confronted with sex-discrimination claims from 900 women and Allison Schieffelin, a former bond saleswoman, filed a gender- bias suit against Morgan Stanley — a case later settled for $54 million. Yet not a lot has improved for women in banking.
Last month New York-based Goldman Sachs was sued by three former female employees who say they faced discrimination in pay and fewer opportunities for promotion than men at the firm. One of the women claimed she had been pinned against a wall and groped by a male colleague after a 1997 outing that included a stop at Scores, a Manhattan topless bar.
Ed Canaday, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York, said the suit is “without merit” and that the company takes “extraordinary efforts to recruit, develop and retain outstanding women professionals.”
‘Culture hasn’t changed’
“Despite their sustained participation and economic influence, women have experienced a shockingly slow rate of progress advancing into business leadership, regardless of industry,” Ilene H Lang, president and chief executive officer of Catalyst, a New York organisation that promotes workplace diversity, told lawmakers at a September 28 hearing in Washington.
It’s harder for women on Wall Street where trading floors can create a hostile environment, said Nina Godiwalla, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley and author of “Suits: A Woman on Wall Street,” which will be published by Atlas & Co in February.
“Based on the women I’ve talked to, the culture hasn’t changed,” Godiwalla said. Women are routinely subjected to crude jokes and excluded from outings, she said. “Even if it doesn’t happen to you, you see it around all the time, and it’s just a reminder that you’re not part of the team,” she said.
Maternity ‘buddy’
To be sure, women have gained some ground over the last decade. Executives including Mary Erdoes, CEO of asset management at JPMorgan Chase & Co, Lisa Carnoy, co-head of global capital markets at Bank of America Corp., and Isabelle Ealet, global head of commodities at Goldman Sachs, have risen to positions of prominence at the biggest US banks.
Davis, 33, said Goldman Sachs and Highbridge, which is owned by JPMorgan, bent “over backward to keep women.”
Goldman gave Davis a maternity “buddy,” a senior female manager, to help her transition back to work after both of her pregnancies and placed her in its Leadership Acceleration Initiative, a program to promote the development of high- performers, she said.
“Of course you’re going to run into your share of jerks on Wall Street, but my experiences at Highbridge and Goldman were very positive,” Davis said. “I was fortunate to work with good groups of people, and I never saw unfairness or discrimination,” she added.
