And Jane Fraser recently took over as CEO of Citigroup, a triumph for her and a milestone for women. Goldman Sachs recently appointed Kimberley Harris as a board member, and as of July, the company will have six women on its 13-person board. There have been some gains for women in the financial world, but they have been frustratingly slow. Christopher Creese/Bloomberg/Getty Imagesīlack Wall Street was an inspiration. Having women in top positions is a powerful antidote for bawdy bro cultures.Ī pedestrian stands in front of the Black Wall Street Mural in the Greenwood District of Tulsa Oklahoma, U.S., on Friday, June 19, 2020. Professors at Winnipeg’s University of Manitoba, Quebec’s Université Laval and Texas State University said that the addition of a single female director was “ associated with an 18.2% decrease in the sexual harassment rate” reported in job reviews. In an analysis of financial services firms in 2019, Deloitte said that, for every woman added to a C-suite, “the number of women in senior leadership… rose threefold.” A bigger female leadership presence could also impact rates of sexual harassment, according to academic research released last year. The presence of women at the top can have a big impact on closing this gap. Women in the uncontrolled group for the finance and insurance industry were making 76 cents on the dollar for every man. And a recent PayScale survey found that among 15 industries it studied, finance and insurance had the largest “uncontrolled” pay gap, a statistic that measures median pay of all men versus all women, rather than look at pay by individual job categories, education and experience. In 2019, 60% of the female financial advisors surveyed by Investment News said they’d been sexually harassed on the job. Critical to fixing the problem is getting more women in the top jobs in finance, and establishing a system where sexual harassers are exposed and punished, not protected.įor decades, Wall Street firms have forced aggrieved employees to use closed-door arbitration instead of the public courts, keeping appalling behavior and evidence of pay and promotion discrimination mostly out of public view. The suit was settled, with Smith Barney paying out $150 million, according to the women’s lawyers.Ī quarter of a century after what became known as “the Boom Boom Room” lawsuit, Wall Street still has a long way to go in giving women the respect they deserve. The women also claimed that they were paid less than their male colleagues and weren’t promoted as frequently. 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. Potentially millions of dollars are at stake.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. The suit says clubs exercised substantial control over the topless workers, which makes them employees. “We hold the weight of the evidence weighs in favor of finding Lewis was an employee of the club and is entitled to workers’ compensation benefits,” the Supreme Court ruling said.Īside from the Boom Boom Room case, a federal class action lawsuit that now is pending says exotic dancers for the Platinum Plus clubs in the Columbia and Greenville areas should be paid back wages for their time performing at the nightclubs. But the club would not allow her to take off more clothing than her top and it barred her from leaving work early without risk of a fine, the court said. The club also supplied a place to perform VIP dances, a stage with a pole, tables and a sound system, the ruling said. Among other things, the club dictated when she should dance after arriving for work, chose the music for her performances, required her to perform “VIP” dances for certain customers and specified that she perform topless, the Supreme Court said.
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