Courtesy of Pam Martens
Senator Elizabeth Warren
As women in careers as disparate as Hollywood movie stars, television news anchors and members of Congress have fueled the #MeToo movement and spoken out against America’s workplace culture that tolerates sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, the silence from women on Wall Street has been deafening.
Some reporters who have written about the silence have speculated that Wall Street has cleaned up its act, owing to the big class action lawsuits that were brought in the 1990s against some of the largest and oldest Wall Street brokerage firms. (See my Editor’s Note below.) Wall Street women’s detailed court complaints in the 90s described lewd acts during the workday (such as the hiring of strippers) or at company-sanctioned holiday parties (like having a camera shoved under a skirt to take a picture). There was also the endless degradation of women on Wall Street through sexual objectification in front of peers. One female broker was described by her male colleagues as “slits and tits” while the legal defense strategy on Wall Street was internally known as the “nuts or sluts” defense, that is, portray the complaining woman as a nut or a slut.
Tragically, the silence now coming from Wall Street women is not the result of Wall Street taking these lawsuits seriously. Instead, Wall Street has simply beefed up its legal enforcement of non-disparagement agreements and prohibits employees from speaking with the press. But more ominously, Wall Street makes mandatory arbitration agreements a condition of employment. Mandatory arbitration, run by the deeply conflicted self-regulator of Wall Street, FINRA, is more akin to a kangaroo court than the nation’s courts. Feminist Gloria Steinem called the system “McJustice.” Arbitrators are allowed to dispense with legal precedent, case law and place severe restrictions on discovery. The press and the public are not allowed to attend the arbitration hearings. Appeals to a court of law are next to impossible unless there is a mountain of evidence showing fraud in the proceeding.
Today, Bloomberg News is reporting that Senator Elizabeth Warren received a response to her inquiry to FINRA regarding the prevalence of sexual harassment on Wall Street today. The self-regulator reported that it had reviewed 1.1 million termination notices over an eight-year period between 2010 and 2018. It found just four brokerage terminations that reference sexual harassment or suggest it might have been the cause of termination.
We tried something a little different here at Wall Street On Parade. FINRA makes the rulings of its mandatory arbitration tribunals public. Although the skimpy decisions compare to a Federal judge’s reasoned opinions in much the way that a Matchbox toy car relates to a John Deere tractor, we used the search word “sexual” (short for “sexual harassment”) and combed through cases dating back to 1989. There were a preposterously few cases showing the term “sexual harassment” for a span of more than a quarter century on Wall Street, suggesting that the arbitration chair may have been deterred from using this term by one of Wall Street’s many unwritten rules.
…
