Maureen Sherry claims that the few women at Bear Stearns were sat together on what was disparagingly called ‘Estrogen Row’ by the men.
When Maureen Sherry resigned from Bear Stearns after 10 years, she was given a going-away party, a sizable check — and a nondisclosure agreement.
“The legal department gave me this document to sign,” she says, and the money was a bribe: Don’t ever talk about the things you’ve seen here, or the way you were harassed, dehumanized, humiliated.
Sherry refused to sign and declined the check. “Me taking money,” she says, “wouldn’t help anyone coming up after me.”
Her forthcoming novel, “Opening Belle” (Simon & Schuster), a thinly fictionalized account of her 11 years on Wall Street, is the result.
[. . .]
For all of the horror stories she tells — the sexual degradation of female traders, the marginalization of women who were married or had kids — Sherry insists she didn’t have it so bad. A colleague may have guzzled her breast milk, and another may have left unwrapped condoms strewn in her pizza box, but, she says, “a lot of it was pranks. I never got groped.”
And herein lies the conflict so many women on Wall Street still struggle with: The very firms that have made them wealthy and successful have also abused them terribly — and like so many victims, many of these women feel it’s somehow their fault, their problem to fix.
Sherry points to Sallie Krawcheck, who was publicly fired from Bank of America during the mortgage crisis. Now “she runs Ellevate — it’s a membership thing for women. A lot of it’s about strategies, and how to work better with men.”
But why, she’s asked, should the onus be on women to work around men who treat them poorly?
[. . .]
A former colleague of Sherry’s, who asked not to be named, says it’s even worse than that. “Men getting b- - -jobs in front of staff — that happened all the time,” she says. “Lots of things that were extremely shocking, pretty disgusting.”
[. . .]
“Women filing complaints feel like it reflects poorly on them — that they are weak, non-team players,” Sherry says. “They don’t want to be labeled as a troublemaker. It’s a team environment, and they’ll ostracize themselves if they do so.”
Most everyone who goes to work on Wall Street is made to sign a U4 — a document stating that any grievances will be settled in-house. It’s meant to fend off sexual-harassment suits and fosters a secretive, hermetically sealed environment: Bad behavior stays behind closed doors.
[. . .]
In March 2010, three women filed a gender-bias suit against Bank of America, and in September, three women filed a sexual-discrimination suit against Goldman Sachs.
A refiling of that suit in 2015 claimed not just pay gaps and discrimination but that “Goldman condones the sexualization of women and an uncorrected culture of sexual assault and harassment.” One of the plaintiffs claims that she “was sexually assaulted by a married male colleague” after a business dinner, and that when she reported it to higher-ups, she was demoted.
In 2004 and 2007, Morgan Stanley settled two gender-discrimination suits for more than $100 million. The plaintiffs: thousands of women.
[. . .]
Then there are the male traders — less productive, less hardworking — who make double what the women do. Often, the excuse is that men can do what women cannot: comfortably entertain male clients on golf courses, at strip clubs and brothels.
[. . .]
For a moment — a super-brief, blink-and-you-miss-it-moment — there was a great discussion point after the 2008 financial collapse: Could the crisis have been averted, or at least mitigated, if there were more women in positions of power on Wall Street?
In 2014, in a column called “Eight Things I Wish for Wall Street,” author Michael Lewis wrote that women should be in charge.
“Men are more prone to financial risk-taking and overconfidence,” he wrote. “Trading is a bit like pornography: Women may like it, but they don’t like it nearly as much as men, and they certainly don’t like it in ways that create difficulties for society. Put them in charge of all financial decision-making and the decisions will be more boring, but more sociable.”
Sherry agrees. She also thinks there’s only one thing that could make Wall Street renounce its deplorable, chauvinistic attitude toward women: money. A 2014 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that more women complete college and grad school than men, and make up a larger percentage of the work force.
That same year, Forbes magazine reported that women in their 20s without children out-earned their male peers. And a 2013 Pew Research Center report said women are now far more likely to be their family’s primary breadwinner.
That’s a lot of women with a lot of money to invest, and chances are high they’d rather not negotiate at a strip club.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/31/trader-exposes-the-disgusting-sexism-plaguing-wall-street/
Trader exposes sexist horrors of the Wall Street ‘frat house’
By Maureen Callahan
New York Post
January 31, 2016 | 5:01am
By Maureen Callahan
New York Post
January 31, 2016 | 5:01am
http://nyp.st/20f9gSw
Watch Video: The horniest CEOs on the street
* * *
[From article]
A female former trader has lifted the lid on Wall St sexism and revealed how male colleagues mooed at her when she was lactating - and once drank her breast milk.
Maureen Sherry claims that the few women at Bear Stearns were sat together on what was disparagingly called ‘Estrogen Row’ by the men.
They were mocked as ‘fertile lassies’ and one man even knocked back a shot of breast milk she had stored in the office fridge.
Miss Sherry, 51, claimed that the sexism was so bad that in interviews women were asked if they were married and if they planned to marry.
Some were supposedly made to promise never to have children.
Miss Sherry made the revelations in her forthcoming novel Opening Belle, a thinly fictionalized account of her 11 years as a managing director at now defunct investment bank Bear Stearns in the 90s and 00s.
The book is due to be made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon that will come out later this year.
Miss Sherry, a mother-of-four who attended Cornell University and the Wharton School of Business, writes that on her first day on Wall St she opened up a pizza box to find condoms instead of pepperoni slices put there as a prank.
Men openly debated hiring women based on their looks and one young woman noticed that her interviewer - a man - had drawn her breasts at the top her CV.
In the trading room there was an area called ‘The Dais of the D****’ where the high earning men sat.
They would order women to come over with a microphone before subjecting them to Game of Thrones style humiliations, the book says.
Miss Sherry writes that at one point when she was walking to the company nurse’s office with a breast pump, some men made mooing noises at her.
Mooing happened on other occasions too when she was lactating.
Miss Sherry writes: ‘I ignored the time someone taped torn panties on my screen when I came back from my honeymoon.
‘I don’t want to hear slut jokes all day long. I don’t want to work in a frat house.’
Miss Sherry writes that she lost count of the times a woman shared an idea at a meeting - only for a man to take credit for it.
One male colleague told her that they should hire only ‘women who have brothers’ because they are used to the banter.
[. . .]
Miss Sherry quit, took an MFA from Columbia University in nonfiction writing and is now a writer and mother in New York.
Her husband Steven Klinsky, 59, works at a private equity firm in Manhattan.
Wall St has long been accused of sexism but has done little to address it despite a string of multi-million pound lawsuits brought by former female executive.
Miss Sherry's book seems similar to the account published last year by former Citigroup trader John LeFevre, who was born in the UK and worked in London and Hong Kong.
In ‘Straight to Hell’ he told how he and his colleagues threw thousands of dollars over a shopping mall balcony in Manila in the Philippines during a party.
The group laughing as they watched poor people scoop the cash up until the police told them to stop.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3425498/Former-New-York-trader-says-male-workers-MOOED-lactating-drank-breast-milk-d-stored-office-fridge.html
Former New York trader says male co-workers MOOED at her when she was lactating and drank the breast milk she'd stored in the office fridge
A female former trader has lifted the lid on Wall St's shocking sexism
Maureen Sherry claims that women at Bear Steams were mocked
She revealed how male colleagues mooed at her when she was lactating
Ms Sherry also said that her male colleagues once drank her breast milk
By DANIEL BATES FOR MAILONLINE IN NEW YORK
PUBLISHED: 14:10 EST, 31 January 2016 | UPDATED: 14:49 EST, 31 January 2016
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