Courtesy of Pam Martens
In a blog post on January 19, Citigroup’s head of Human Resources, Sara Wechter, wrote that “Citi’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is longstanding.” She next bragged that “Last year, Citi was the first financial institution to publicly release the results of a pay equity review.” Three paragraphs later, we get the cold, hard facts: “median pay for women globally is 71% of the median for men” at Citigroup.
Citigroup didn’t come up with the idea of releasing that data out of some newfound quest for transparency. The data came as a result of a pressure campaign by Arjuna Capital, an investment firm focused on sustainable investing. The campaign is introducing shareholder proposals at the big Wall Street banks, asking that the banks disclose, and then close, their gender pay gaps. After Citigroup released its data, Arjuna withdrew its shareholder proposal at Citigroup. At 1 p.m. today, Arjuna will host a live national news conference with Equal Rights Advocates and Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap Initiative to announce the leading US banks and tech companies targeted with the median pay gap shareholder proposal. A streaming audio recording of the news event will be available after 4 p.m. today at this link.
Let us distill for you Citigroup’s claim of a “longstanding” commitment to diversity. Citigroup’s origins date back 207 years but when the bank imploded in 2008, it had only two women, or 13 percent, on its 15-member Board of Directors.
Citigroup was also the parent of the retail brokerage firm Smith Barney in the late 1990s as women in branches from coast to coast came forward to reveal credible allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault. The charges became the basis for the largest class action lawsuit by women in Wall Street history. The corporation’s focus at the time was on manipulating the media while doing little to correct the egregious situation for women at the firm. A decade after the lawsuit, many of the worst abusing men were still employed at the firm. The New York Post reported that even the much vaunted, newly established sexual harassment hotline wasn’t working. A reporter failed repeatedly to get anyone to pick up the phone over a period of four days. (See Editor’s note below.)
The seminal book on the lawsuit, Tales from the Boom Boom Room: Women versus Wall Street by Susan Antilla (named after a frat house like bar set up in one Smith Barney branch) revealed horrific statistics on Citigroup’s so-called commitment to diversity. Antilla writes:
“Louise Fitzgerald, a respected psychologist in the fields of sex discrimination and sexual harassment, contacted 1,853 women who had worked at Smith Barney four years earlier and received information from 1,210 – 65 percent of those she surveyed. One-third had the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. One-quarter of them had been stroked or fondled in a sexual way while on the job…One-third of the women surveyed claimed they had been sexually coerced during the period Fitzgerald studied. Workplace studies done prior to this one typically showed no more than 5 percent complaining of sexual coercion, defined as the extortion of sex either through the promises of job-related rewards or threats of punishment, Fitzgerald says. She saw the same kinds of problems at company offices all over the country, she adds. Fitzgerald found it remarkable that an industry culture could breed such similar conditions in disparate locations.”
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