There’s not a lot else to do in Phoenix, and the filthy four, who worked for Morgan Stanley, went on their own time after attending a conference.
Apparently there were “clients” there as well. But it all sounds like pretty innocent stuff. Well, as innocent as you get in strip clubs. Wall Street rumour has it that the evening wasn’t some arranged business do and at least one of the clients was a woman.
The firing of the staffers — all men — is apparently intended to send a message that exclusionary, male-only activities won’t be tolerated at the firm. But what it really says is that Wall Street is now so scared of sex scandals that staff have to conform to the bank’s hypocritical new standards even outside work.
Morgan Stanley, along with most Wall Street banks, does have some really serious sex issues to deal with. In 2004, the bank had to shell out $54m (€45m) to settle a gender-discrimination case.
At least $12m of the money went to Allison Schieffelin, a successful bond saleswoman for Morgan Stanley earning more than $1.3m a year, who complained that she had been denied a promotion to managing director because of her sex.
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The bank denied wrongdoing, but agreed to take additional steps to promote diversity and conduct anti-discrimination training.
Just two weeks into 2006 and Morgan Stanley is not the only bank to have been hit by a sex scandal. Last week, six female employees of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein filed a $1.4 billion sexual discrimination lawsuit, claiming unfair and abusive treatment.
The suit claims that male colleagues would boast of strip club visits, bring prostitutes to the office and repeatedly subject female workers to coarse remarks.
Women were hired as “eye candy” and one was referred to as the “Pamela Anderson of trading”, the suit said. One woman said she was pressured to leave a dinner held to celebrate the closing of a big deal so her male colleagues could go to a strip club.
Nothing new there. These cases stretch back to the early 1990s and the Garden City, New York office of Smith Barney. In what became known as the “boom-boom room” case, the bank was sued by women who said their male colleagues had set up a party room in the basement where they hung a toilet seat from the ceiling and mixed bloody marys in a big plastic bin.
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But the topless four are a different case entirely. Morgan Stanley is sacking people for taking part in perfectly legal activities in their own time. They are not being fired for offending colleagues, excluding women or bringing the bank into disrepute. Nobody seems to be claiming lap dancers on their expenses.
One can only presume this ban is not retroactive, or Morgan Stanley will have no bankers left.
These silly strip-club sackings are the tail-end of the great Wall Street clean-up following the excesses of the millennial stock market bubble. And like a lot of the cleaning, it scrubs the surface while leaving the problem intact.
Women on Wall Street get a raw deal. But it’s money, not sex, that leads to discrimination in the workplace. The amount of money bankers make is directly proportional to the respect they receive. More women, and more pay for those women, would soon even the scores.
If Morgan Stanley really wanted to do something about sex discrimination, they could publish the average salaries of their female and male bankers and the percentage of each at different levels in the company. Then they could set some real benchmarks for improvement. If they do, I’ll treat the chief executive, John Mack, to a lapdance.