A SECOND generation of senior women lawyers and other professionals are sacrificing their careers to fight back against sex discrimination in the City.
Until recently few women made it to the top, or even near the top. Over the past ten years, though, a small number of women have reached senior positions only to find a glass ceiling or even blatant sexism.
Not many women who encounter discrimination at the start of their careers can afford to step out of line. It is the brave few in their forties who are willing to stand up for their rights.
Last year several successful senior women settled claims out of court. But some City firms and banks are now finding bad publicity and consequent damage to their reputations hard to avoid. The investment bank Merrill Lynch is already embroiled in a sex discrimination case brought by Stephanie Villalba, which is expected to last six weeks, and faces a potentially more damaging sexual harassment case brought by one of its former women lawyers. The bank is defending both cases.
Mrs Villalba, 42, a senior executive who earned £1 million last year, is claiming £7.5 million in damages for sexual discrimination, victimisation, unfair dismissal and unequal pay. If she succeeds it will be the biggest payout in a case of its kind. Merrill Lynch denies sex discrimination and says that Villalba was dismissed because of her poor performance, and was replaced by a woman.
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Ann Iveson, a former senior employee at BNP Paribas who has sued and settled, describes those women who refuse to accept discrimination as the “suffragettes of the 21st century”. They face emotional and financial ruin — often hiring expensive lawyers to fight their employers, who seem to have deep pockets and practices that date from the Victorian era.
The Equal Opportunities Commission has been a great help, not only with financial support but also with its equal- pay guidance, which employers ignore at their peril; if they do a tribunal will find it easier to rule that a claimant has been discriminated against.
The financial stakes are now much higher. The ceiling on compensation in discrimination cases disappeared in 1993. This meant that women (and men) who suffered unlawful discrimination could expect to receive an “adequate remedy” for the financial loss they had suffered. At last it was worth suing.
In addition, damages for injury to feelings — as high as £25,000 — can be awarded. In cases where the discriminator has behaved in a high-handed, malicious, insulting or oppressive way, aggravated damages may also be awarded.
The defences put forward by some of the big City employers are predictable. They range from “ulterior motive” — the woman really wanted her boss’s job and he was an easy target — to assertions that the woman was incompetent, a liar, a fantasist or a lazy, greedy gold-digger using the law for her own ends. In several cases the male harasser has made out that the female complainant had been dismissed because she had actually been harassing him.
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Women who want to make high salaries and bonuses work hard for them, or would like the chance to do so. The idea that a woman would sacrifice her career, reputation, salary, financial independence and possibly her health in the uncertain hope of being awarded compensation, months or sometimes years later, beggars belief.
A popular myth is that women distort, exaggerate or fabricate complaints, events or conversations to bolster the evidence in a weak or hopeless case. Suspicion is often cast on the veracity of contemporaneous notes. As one employer put it: “Anyone can make up notes after the event.” When his case came to trial it turned out that he had done exactly that.
The damage to an employer’s reputation and credibility in these cases goes far farther than a bad press at the time of the tribunal hearings. Recently BNP Paribas found that objections had been filed by a US consumer group against its bid to purchase Community First National Bank because of concern over the Iveson and Mezzotero cases, which the group said were “part of a pattern ” (of discrimination) and raised “gender discrimination issues”.
City employers now need to review policies, retrain managers, ensure that pay systems are transparent, conduct impartial grievance hearings . . . and stop discriminating.
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The author is a consultant with Howard & Howard solicitors