Wall Street women still knocking on men’s rooms

Back in an era that some Wall Street guys consider the good old days, men got the promotions, women got left out of important meetings and anyone dumb enough to complain met with a blitz of retaliation.

Ultimately, legal actions including the embarrassing 1996 “Boom-Boom Room” lawsuit against Smith Barney & Co. got Wall Street’s attention. Some firms apologized, sort of, using that “We didn’t do anything wrong but we sure are sorry if you think we did” ploy that financial firms pull off like no others.

Fast forward 14 years. These days, women filing lawsuits against big financial firms say men are getting the promotions, women are getting left out of important meetings and anyone dumb enough to complain is met with a blitz of retaliation. Sound familiar?

Wall Street may be on the cutting edge when it comes to financial advancements. Lehman Brothers’ famous Repo 105 accounting wizardry comes to mind: China and India sure didn’t beat us at inventing that.

Wall Street is an institutional dinosaur, though, when it comes to accepting that if you want to treat women equally, you can’t shut them out of perks, equal pay or key business meetings.

The latest round of complaints against financial firms read a lot like the Boom-Boom Room protests, absent the dirty-old- man-style sex talk and the Penthouse centerfolds taped to the trading-room walls. What they have in common is outlining practices that make it easy for men, not women, to get ahead.

No Invites

Bank of America Corp. was hit with a lawsuit on March 30 (Read that full story.) by one current and two former employees who describe offices where women are left off the invite list for meetings, plum accounts are doled out to men and a formal complaint can be followed by a flurry of new compliance demands that don’t apply to the guys. The bank denies the allegations and is “regularly recognized” as a top company for women, spokeswoman Shirley Norton said in an e-mail.

Dorly Hazan-Amir, an associate in Citigroup Inc.’s Asset Finance Group — where three women and 22 men worked on deals — filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on March 16 describing bosses who excluded her from client meetings and scoffed about the “hiring-women thing.”

Hazan-Amir made the mistake of complaining to the manager of her group about a male co-worker, Dale Vander Woude, who referred to her, in front of colleagues, as someone who “likes to blow,” as she describes it in the complaint. She says she got this concerned response from the global manager: “That’s Dale.” Sometimes those boys just can’t help being boys.

Vander Woude and Citigroup spokesman Alex Samuelson declined to comment.

Throwback Attitude

The “That’s Dale” attitude is a throwback to the response that the litigating women of the 1980s and 1990s got when they tried to tell management how bad the discrimination was.

Back then, it worked like this:

The women at the Garden City, New York, “Boom-Boom Room” office of what was then Shearson Lehman Brothers (later Smith Barney) bombarded a human-resources manager with complaints during a meeting in 1988 about a branch manager who ran “male- brokers-only” golf outings and dubbed a shapely female broker as the office “Playboy Bunny.” The HR lady’s suggestion? “Try to get along with Nick,” she advised them, referring to the offending manager.

Boom-Boom-era women in finance had a particularly bad time if they became pregnant. The HR director at the Chicago firm Rodman & Renshaw told me in an interview in 2001 that she had to coach pregnant women to walk in a way that didn’t call attention to their pregnancies.

‘Moo, Moo’

“Moo, moo, here comes the cow,” was the greeting one woman in the office got if she couldn’t figure out a way to get back to her desk without passing her male colleagues.

In her complaint last month, Hazan-Amir said the jokesters at Citi discussed setting up a pool to guess how much weight she had gained when she was pregnant. Could there be a new financial derivative product here?

I should note that Bloomberg LP, owner of Bloomberg News, faces a lawsuit by the EEOC on behalf of women who say their careers were derailed after they became pregnant. Bloomberg denies the allegations.

Pregnancy seems to keep lots of financial people busy rearranging the office deck chairs.

Office to Cubicle

Charlotte Hanna, who filed a discrimination suit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. on March 24, said she worked successfully for seven years at the firm, only to return from a maternity leave in 2005 to a downgraded job and a new cubicle workspace to replace what used to be her office. Goldman fired her in March 2009, a week before her return from maternity leave with her second child.

Goldman spokeswoman Gia Morón told me in an e-mail that Hanna’s case is without merit and that she was treated “very fairly” at Goldman.

Well, that’s a relief. I wonder, though, about some of the other women who attempt to make their way up the Goldman ladder.

In the firm’s last round of annual promotions announced in November, only 19 percent of the 272 newly named managing directors were women. Morón asked me what the breakdown of males and females on the list had to do with my article about discrimination on Wall Street — which starts to give you an idea of how bad the problem really is.

(Susan Antilla, a Bloomberg News columnist, is the author of the 2002 book, “Tales from the Boom-Boom Room.” The opinions expressed are her own.)