In the ‘Money’ chapter of ‘ Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs came to rule the world ’ by William D. Cohan ( >www.penguin.com ), there are many instances of how the women employees faced mistreatment in the firm. Sometimes the abuse was physical, sexual, and humiliating, and sometimes the abuse was subtler and psychological, but no less devastating, the author writes.
For instance, the account of Anne Brown Farrell, a graduate of Trinity College and the Wharton School of Business who joined Goldman in 1973 as the first woman in its fixed-income group, speaks of a trading floor with ‘masses of people, no privacy, food all over the place, and at the time… everyone smoked!’
Worse is the story of Kristine Utley, who was the only woman sales associate in the money market department at the Boston office in July 1985. For the next twenty months or so, her life turned hell, what with the men in the office viewing her ‘as a foreign body to be expelled at the earliest possible moment.’ The book mentions a disturbing episode, of how she was invited to a meeting in the conference room where the projector went on and a hardcore porn film was showing just to humiliate her.
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One learns that during legal proceedings later, Utley testified that ‘office humour was a source of sexual harassment’ and that memos at Goldman introducing new women employees ‘were illustrated with nude
Cohan draws from a class-action suit filed in New York in September 2010, to describe the travails of H. Cristina Chen-Oster (who told the story of how, in the fall of 1997, her department went to Scores, a topless dance club in Manhattan, to celebrate the promotion of a colleague), and of Shanna Orlich who was denied the opportunity to work as a trader (and was instead told to be ‘a team player’ and stay an analyst, performing clerical tasks for other traders, such as making photocopies, taking calls from wives, and setting up BlackBerry accounts).
Instructive narrative.
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