Work/Life Balance at Goldman Sachs

Hold on to your hats. Batten down the hatches. If you thought that big banks like Goldman Sachs were infested with sexist behavior, you are about to be enlightened. It’s not just about the harassment, the willingness to trade assignments for booty, the off-color jokes and the leering looks. 

If those were not bad enough, the Financial Times reports on the complaints that Goldman women made in a recent lawsuit. You probably know by now that the bank settled the suit for slightly over $200 million. 

If you feel suitably prepared, if your loins feel suitably girded, here are some of the complaints that Goldman women have been making.

Some concern motherhood. A woman who has a child is not treated in precisely the same way the company treats a man whose wife has a child. One feels obliged to go back to the book of Genesis to find an explanation, but clearly perfidious patriarchal males taxed women with childbearing in order to keep them out of the corporate executive track. There, you have an acceptable explanation. I trust that you feel suitably enlightened.

Of course, this is shocking. Being a mother probably means that a woman has less time to put into her job. This might cause her to lose promotions to men who are grinding it out for eighteen hours a day.

Gold­man is still grap­pling with some of the chal­lenges out­lined in the 2010 clas­s­ac­tion law­suit. These include feel­ings that start­ing a fam­ily can stunt women’s careers in a way it does not for men, and that there are too few women in lead­er­ship roles.

“I would have been bet­ter com­pensated if I wasn’t a mom,” one woman who recently left the bank told the Fin­an­cial Times. “For guys, most of the people I inter­ac­ted with, their wives didn’t work.”

That last one must hurt. Men who move up the corporate ladder often have wives who do not work. They have careerless wives. The horror of it all. 

Now, one might suggest that a man who wants to advance smartly would do well to have a wife who is at home. The vernacular term used to be housewife and homemaker. This traditional division of labor is basically universal, though it offends feminists who believe that men and women should be doing exactly the same thing. 

If you thought that that was bad, take a gander at this. It appears, horror of horror, that many of the men who work at Goldman’s are interested in sports. This does not feel like an anomaly, but still, it was obviously designed to sideline women, to keep them out of conversations about credit default swaps.

If many of these discussions about Tom Brady and Justin Verlander take place after work, at a time when mothers are more likely to believe that they should be home caring for their children, you can see that talking about sports is rank discrimination against those who do not care about sports. Of course, one might imagine that the company should institute rules about how much talk about sports is allowed in the workplace. If this sounds profoundly stupid, that’s because it is.

While the women inter­viewed said that there were few signs of the overt sex­ism pre­val­ent on Wall Street dec­ades ago, they felt the bank’s cul­ture remained less access­ible to women without an interest in sports, and that speak­ing out on cer­tain issues could still dam­age their careers.

For those who are not suffering from a case of terminal naivete, the truth is, in a corporate culture, speaking out on certain issues, presumably not about the U. S. Open, makes you sound like a complainer. If this litany of excuses, the one that just cost the company over two hundred million, does not feel like a session at the whining post, I do not know what does.

And then there is the #MeToo fallout. As you might have heard, during the #MeToo craze, more than a few men figured out that mentoring young women comported too much of a risk.

Some of them had wives who forbade them from doing same. So, conversational interactions between young women and older male managers were shut down. Blame it on sexism, if you like. But you should also blame it on #MeToo.

“To me there was never expli­cit bias,” said another woman who recently left the bank. “It was harder to inter­act with some of the senior men in the same cas­ual way that other male col­leagues at my level could.”

One cur­rent junior female employee said that although “on a very the­or­et­ical level we are encour­aged to speak up . . . in prac­tice if you say something con­tro­ver­sial it’s not well received”.

Again, Goldman Sachs should set up special times where all employees are allowed to whine and complain to their hearts’ content. That the young women do not understand the nature of corporate culture is dispiriting, at the least. That they resent men for being men and were wishing that men could be more like women-- such an attitude is not going to get anyone promoted. 

“It’s not as though any indi­vidual is say­ing, ‘Hey, let’s keep women back’ — that’s not how it works,” said Mar­tin Dav­id­son, pro­fessor of busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion and global chief diversity officer at the Uni­versity of Vir­ginia Darden School of Busi­ness.

“It’s just in the water . . . mas­culin­ity is the bread and but­ter of the invest­ment bank­ing industry.”

But Gold­man faces a par­tic­u­larly acute chal­lenge given its cul­ture of round-the-clock work, which women feel often impacts them more than men.

“I really think Gold­man is try­ing but there’s an industry prob­lem and there’s a life­style prob­lem,” said one female junior banker who recently quit Gold­man. “It’s actu­ally more about oppor­tun­it­ies and sup­port as a woman at Gold­man in terms of career pro­gres­sion,” said one woman who works at the bank. 

And then, of course, there are biological imperatives. If a woman takes a few months off for maternity, should she be considered to be putting time on the job. The thought feels ludicrous, because it is. Obviously, if a woman is out of the office for an extended period of times, she is not going to be assigned projects. If she has to choose between caring for a sick child and filing a report, her priority will have to be her child. You might not have noticed, but the child has only one mother. Other people can write up the report.

The law­suit alleged that women returned from mater­nity leave with dimin­ished career pro­spects and that Gold­man man­agers, the major­ity of whom are male, had unchecked dis­cre­tion over how they assigned projects to their teams.

Sadly, but normally, women who complain are considered to be complainers. If they go to human resources to complain that they were not given plum assignments during their maternity leave, they are considered out of touch with reality. 

And besides, whatever happened to work/life balance?

One woman who worked at Gold­man dur­ing the period covered by the law­suit described a cul­ture in which going to human resources to air issues made you “a pariah for life”.