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Women Sue Goldman, Claiming Bias in Pay and Jobs

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The three plaintiffs in the Goldman lawsuit are H. Cristina Chen-Oster, who worked in the firm’s equities division from 1997 to 2005 and was promoted to vice president; Lisa Parisi, who worked in the asset management group from 2001 to 2008 and was promoted to managing director; and Shana Orlich, who worked in the firm’s fixed-income unit from 2007 to 2008 as an associate.

The most detailed allegations come from Ms. Chen-Oster, who worked mostly in sales on Goldman’s convertible-bond desk. Ms. Chen-Oster claims in an affidavit that shortly after she joined Goldman in 1997, a celebration for a recently promoted male colleague took place at Scores, a New York strip club, and all the employees were encouraged to join.

The lawsuit alleges that at the end of the night, a married male colleague escorted her to her boyfriend’s apartment building and in the hallway lobby pinned her against the wall, kissing and groping her.

That episode, which the male colleague reported to his supervisor the next morning, led to Ms. Chen-Oster’s experiencing “increased hostility and marginalization at the firm.”

The complaint details Ms. Chen-Oster’s compensation throughout her tenure. In her second year at the firm, Goldman paid her $475,000, a number she claims was significantly less than that of her male peers. By 2000, a year in which the stock market peaked, Goldman paid her $800,000, a figure she alleges was at least 50 percent less than that paid to male counterparts. Ms. Chen-Oster resigned from Goldman and now works at Deutsche Bank, according to her profile on LinkedIn, a social networking Web site.

link Women Sue Goldman, Claiming Bias in Pay and Jobs - NYTimes.com

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I have utterly no direct knowledge of this case, though of course my profession means I hear lots of rumours about various firms.

A big problem with this case, is that I don't believe she is telling the truth.

To tell the truth, you must first know it, and it's really very hard to get accurate information about what your colleagues earn at a firm like Goldmans. It may not shock people here to learn that not only are people reluctant to share such information, they often exaggerate it ,or even claim it is smaller than it really is.
(OK, it's probably not such a shock to hear people lie about the bonuse)

Indeed if I were to hear figure in a bar in my non-professional capacity, the one number I would assume it was not was the number I just heard.

She says she was ostracised from the group, assume that is true, then work out why people who ostracised her gave her high quality valuable info that they were supposed not to share.

The sexual assault was not in any way acceptable, but I fail to see why this is the fault of GS.

It's a fact that married men make passes at women who are attached to other men. From conversations, I know this is an experience of most women, typically multiple times. This is not something special to the finance biz. Alcohol is often a factor, again I don't think that surprises people either.

The fact that this is included, undermines whatever confidence that I have in this case.

I don't go to strip joints, at my last firm this was so notorious, that the CEO put a bounty on my head that he'd pay for the evening of any group that managed it. They failed. However for various reasons my team were responsible for organising 'marketing' events like this since I had hired Europe's foremost expert on lapdancing clubs. I just don't like them, it's not a moral principle, I don't eat eggs either, foul things that I'd ban if I could.

Even if it is true that she earned less than her colleagues, this to me does not prove anything, it's merely supporting data. There is wide variance in bonuses within teams for good reasons.
...and bad
I know one guy whose bonus was cut because his excuse for coming to the Christmas party was deemed inadequate. No sex or other ism there, just an attitude of his boss.

There is gross sexism in finance, seen it myself, and have all sorts of anecdotal data, but this sort of case seems to me just undermines the case for hiring women in the first place. This is because I expect this women to get real money out of this, and so does she.

Of course I don't know all the facts, frankly now that lawyers are involved no one ever will, she may have been treated badly because of her sex and/or refusal to sleep with this married man. or not, but this smells to me.
 
that Chen-Oster chick is indeed with DB. she is an MD now..
by the way, to say that she doesn't look hot at all would be a huge understatement....
 
The weird thing is that it happened in 97, she said something in 99, and now it's a lawsuit in 2010?
 
I didn't spot the age of the issues, which only goes to increase the possibility that she's doing it just for the money.
 
This is interesting, firstly because she is a former partner of GS, and Andy has recently put up a link about unmaking partners.
I will dissect this article, which with considerable irony was published by Bloomberg.

As a former Goldman partner, I am upset by their accounts.
Note she does not say 'surprised'...
Catholics are upset by accounts of the crimes by their priests, but they aren't surprised.

I was the youngest woman and first female trader to hold that position.


Well done missy. All by itself this proves without any doubt that GS, like all other banks was sexist to its core. Are we supposed to believe that until 1988, no woman of that capability had worked for GS ?

I believe I was promoted because of both my profitability and my commitment to teamwork.
It also helped that I was a woman.

I have never seen this lady, I'd bet money that she's attractive.

Although I had to deal with my share of bad-boy behavior,
Haven't we all dear ?
No issue was left unresolved.
I flatly don't believe that statement, maybe time has clouded her memory. Fact is that human issues are frequently left unresolved, that's their nature.


In 1999 I was asked to leave my production role to take a position in the executive office, serving on the firm’s partnership committee,
By this point the scale of potential legal liabilities for GS (like many other banks) was daunting. I was present at a board meeting of another firm, soon after becoming a director where the riot act was read by our lawyer. One solution is having a woman on the committee.
One interesting side effect of this stuff is that female litigators ear real money because the clients prefer to have them lead sex discrimination cases.

My goal was to do my part to ensure that Goldman was a place of opportunity for all employees, not just the majority, which was and continues to be white men.
Being a white man, and the father of white sons, I can see why that might be a good thing, but not everyone agrees with me.

As a young woman I got a seat at the table to give voice to all women at the firm, and I did my best to represent them.
A problem is that there is no such thing as 'women', in the sense of a group that have entirely consistent goals and values. Things some would demand, like for instance longer maternity leave really piss off others.



Goldman was a standard-setter, as least in the view of many outsiders.
When I was taught formal logic many moons ago, a key term was 'in all interpretations' in that logical inferences remain valid regardless of the variables. In the same was that X * 2 = X+X regardless of what X counts. I mention this because I cannot imagine any interpretation of that statement which can be considered true.




The firm was constantly being contacted by other Fortune 500 companies to share best practices.
I believe this, which is a different statement. Lots of firms were being sued, real shit was going down, executives responsible for dealing with the mess asked for help from people facing similar problems.


Significant resources went into trying to ensure that management knew who were the best producers.
I believe that, fail to see what it's go to do with equality though.


We tried very hard to ensure the system was free of gaming and bias.
And they tried very hard to game it, and bias is endemic, and the people gaming it are very smart and very focused and will scheme night and day to game it. This lady went to meetings and sent memos. She was outgunned big time.


Goldman didn’t operate on a commission system,
It's ambiguous whether this leads to fairer compensation.
The moment you get opinions, contributions to 'team performance' etc, humans being humans will apply prejudices and make errors of judgement.

Goldman’s efforts to hire, retain and promote women were the most comprehensive on Wall Street.
That could be true. Iraq was for many years the best place for a woman in the Arab middle East.
But GS has smart people and lots of money, if it wanted more women in more positions of power it would have got them. If it had wanted a hundred one legged Estonians with PhDs in Physics it could get them as well. The boundary was set by the priority GS gave it.



The list of policies and initiatives was extensive.
I wrote P&D's equal opportunity policy, and even I have never read it, would take me a little while even to find it. I do not believe someone who makes partner at GS is naive enough to believe that the EO policy at GS is a serious part of decision making by managers. So she's saying that for effect. As for the initiatives, my earlier point about GS not being resource constrained applies.

When a decade of such initiatives failed to produce the intended results, Goldman started a task force to focus on the issue,
It took them ten years to realise that no one read the memos ?
I know really smart people who've been turned down by GS, because better ones applied for that job. Ten years is an eternity in financial markets, my interpretation is that one day yet another lawsuit came along and a BSD discovered that the effort was a joke, where people were sent to work as punishment or revenge.

engaging people throughout the firm as well as outside consultants. A larger font was used in the memos, managers were required to stay awake in some briefing where they had to pretend to take this seriously. Occasionally they were asked questions to make sure that they weren't in a zen trance waiting for it to end.


the firm’s leaders stated diversity was critical to long-term business success.
Although I'm now a headhunter, I'm also professionally trained writer, you might be surprised reading this, but people pay me for my words. Part of my training was 'negation'. You work out the value of a statement by reversing it's sense. So when I read that, I saw it as platitude, because it seems to me unlikely that the board of GS saying publicly that "diversity is bad and will bankrupt GS".


The lawsuit cites the following Goldman statistics as evidence of gender discrimination: Women are 29 percent of vice presidents, 17 percent of managing directors, 14 percent of what Goldman calls partners, and four out of 30 people on the management committee. This is poor evidence.
Although of course it proves that GS has been sexist over a considerable period of time and across the whole firm, there's an obvious hole.
GS has HR management, first rate graphic designers, and a vast horde of admin staff which of course have a higher % of females, and less than dramatic pay.
Subtract them, and you do not see an environment where women do well.


In fact, these numbers are among the best of any major Wall Street firm,

Maybe, but they are so far from good that I refer to my comments about Iraq.

Doing Harm While lawsuits have helped to right many wrongs, sometimes litigation may do more harm than good.
I agree with that, but have a natural scepticism about such statements from someone whose firm has been on the receiving end.


I have seen plenty of talented people, not just women, get screwed over. Agree, I've been screwed, and am a white male.


Cases like this may just motivate managers to hire, mentor or promote more men instead of the equally or more talented women because men are easier to fire if they are poor performers.

Yes, that's true.
I have on occasion hit men in the mouth with as much force as I could muster. This is because our relationship had deteriorated to the point where in my considered opinion this was the optimal way of resolving our differences. In most cases, even when they had initiated the divergence in our perception of the correct way forward, I felt that I could have handled it better. GS gets sued because it has not handled the situation well, and because there exists no other mechanism.





We seem to be caught in a place where managers in many large organizations are often told to hire to achieve diversity, then are ill-equipped to manage it.

That's not true.
In my many many years of experience of dealing with screwups, I have learned that sexism, racism, ageism are not 'evil' they are simply poor decision making processes. If you can't judge the performance of your staff, you are a shit manager. If someone gives your staff serious grief because they are female or black or are wearing an unfashionable tie, and you don't defend them then you are a shit manager. If you can't stop your staff picking on each other then... etc





They may not face negative consequences when their trading desks look and act like a football team.



Very poor choice of analogy.
When I was a kid, the top sportsmen were all white men. Now sports teams are the most diverse business units in our society. You tell a manager that he can't hire a star because he's black, and he won't be angry, the idea that his boss would say that is so silly that he would assume you are joking, and you will pay him more money than he can count.


But again I will say that GS is not the worst, and may even be above average, and having worked in several industries will state as fact that most are more sex/race/age-ist than banking.
 
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