Trader exposes sexist horrors of Wall Street "frat house"
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.
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Among the anecdotes in Sherry’s book: Men openly debate hiring women based on their looks. One young woman sees her breasts drawn on top of her résumé. “The Dais of the D- -ks” is where the top male earners and producers sit; from there, they bark at the women through a microphone to come stand before them and suffer through “Game of Thrones”-style humiliations.
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Sherry herself says female traders often fall prey to an insidious reverse psychology: Are you tough enough to take it? How can you move billions of dollars around if you can’t take a little workplace hazing?
“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.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/31/trader-exposes-the-disgusting-sexism-plaguing-wall-street/
Don't expect this to change. Wall Street literally owns both political parties.
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