My
first job out of college in the late 1980s was at Salomon Brothers, a
trading house of cigar-smoking, expletive-spewing strivers. One day, 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. Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on
my desk.
I
was not alone in being treated this way: During that era another
brokerage house, Smith Barney, paid out $150 million in a bias and
harassment case — known as the “boom-boom room” suit,
named after a basement party room in one of its branches. Wall Street
was a hypermasculine culture, where the all-nighter was a badge of honor
and the ever-bigger deal was proof of one’s status, and women were not
safe, either emotionally or physically.
In
the 1990s, I changed firms and was now a midlevel professional. The
harassment shifted: Instead I had to rebuff a client, a chief executive,
who asked me to join him — “Just you, no need to bring the rest of the
team” — in his hotel room at 11 p.m. to go over some numbers. One
company rescinded a job offer upon learning I had a baby at home.
I
changed firms again and moved another rung up the corporate ladder, and
it felt a little less fraught to deal with the inevitable. I was able
to say no to the senior government official who said, “How about we go
up to my hotel room?” before obscenely wagging his tongue at me in front
of my colleagues. I could knock the portfolio manager’s hands off my
leg without too much fear of retribution.
No comments:
Post a Comment