Working girls

Yet, she says, she was subjected to vulgar remarks from her boss, who simply laughed when she objected. In one instance, she says, she left a box of sweets at the end of her desk at Hallowe’en. A boss allegedly said loudly in front of her colleagues that she should move it or men would have their “hands in her box”. Oo-er, missus. If true, what offends is the sheer lack of wit.

But this case is not about crass humour and bulging bimbos — indeed four of the plaintiffs are working mothers. It is really about bulging bonuses and job reductions. The six women fighting it are senior executives with a combined 100 years’ experience on Wall Street and in the City. They have been trained to expect hefty pay cheques and, feeling scorned, they now anticipate damages in excess of any City bonus.

Their lawyers disclosed last week to The Sunday Times that, after fighting in the American courts, they will take the case to a British employment tribunal. They also say that “over 15” British women have asked to join the class action and bring a similar case in
the UK.

Indeed, many of the acts of misconduct are alleged to have occurred here. The lawyers revealed that four of the defendants named in the suit are British.

A spokesperson for the bank, part of the German Allianz financial empire, refused to respond to any specific allegations but said: “We believe these claims to be without merit and intend to vigorously defend this matter. These allegations go against everything we stand for and the values we instil in our 6,000 employees worldwide. It is distressing to us that a small number of employees feel they had to take this type of action.”

Whatever its alleged faults, DKW is not unique. A London employment tribunal heard three years ago that a successful female employee of another merchant bank was called the “tethered goat” — meaning that her role was to attract male clients.

A boss said that a female analyst at Schroders in London “had cancer, been a pain, now pregnant”. A Deutsche Bank exec was called “a bit of skirt”, which cost the Bavarian bankers £1m.
That was back in 2000: since then the price of such careless whispers has rocketed. Last April an Asian equities expert, Laura Zubulake, trousered (skirted?) $29m from UBS, Europe’s biggest bank.

But, before we feel too sorry for DKW, it is worth noting that it’s unlikely to win a Cosmo “cuddly company of the year award”: the action claims that only four of its 258 managing directors are women, low even by lamentable City and Wall Street standards — a claim, by the way, that the bank’s spokesperson refused even to confirm or deny.

We don’t know how the women challenging the bank will stand up to tough examination in court, but after reading their submissions and talking through their allegations with them a picture emerges of, well, institutionalised sexism.

AND so to Smith, seated, appropriately enough, in the Savoy’s American Bar on Friday in a dark suit and emerald green shirt. The only Baywatch touches are a few chunky diamond rings (small compensations, perhaps, for working with sexist pigs).

The equity trader — or “stock jockey” as she jokingly styles herself — has toiled for the bank this past decade but claims she has lost out to junior, less productive male rivals in pay and promotion.

Serious and reserved, she is married to another American, a self-employed former City boy. They have a son of two. Fending off questions about her private life, she laughs at suggestions of hobbies: “Hobbies: with work and a two-year-old?” After working long City hours and looking after kids, there is very little time for these women to do anything else. Smith was really looking forward to going out to dinner with her husband on Friday night because she had barely seen him lately.

It is hard to imagine what could have possessed her boss to refer to her — allegedly — as the “Pamela Anderson of trading” during a work lunch to welcome a new person to the firm.

But was being compared to Anderson really so traumatic? Sure, Anderson’s vital statistics are not her IQ scores let alone her trading returns, but a man would probably be quietly flattered to be likened to a dim but dishy screen god.

“A trader tried to make that point [when news of the case broke] by climbing on his desk and declaring ‘I am the David Hasselhoff of trading’.”

What a horrific thought. But is it a big deal?

“If he [her supervisor] said I was the Margaret Thatcher of trading that would be a bonus,” she says with a hint of head girl authority. “But the Anderson remark did not make me feel particularly complimented.”

Fair enough: but these are bright, ballsy women on bumper salaries. Surely when Smith, an economics graduate from New Jersey, joined the Wall Street trading floor she realised she would not be working with a bunch of male lettuce-munchers keen to get in touch with their feminine side?

“Well, I know it is very American,” she says dryly, “but I had this idea that if you work hard you are rewarded. I was not thinking 10 years down the line when I would hit a glass ceiling.”

Smith quotes laudatory annual reviews and client comments and suggests the attitude of bosses changed on her first week at the London office in 2002, when she reported a male colleague for allegedly “threatening” a female. She says the attitude of London staff was “thank God we are not in New York where the rules are so politically correct”.

So what goes on in New York? In a conference call with some of the Dresdner Six on Wall Street, I heard their complaints.

Kathleen Treglia, a vice-president of fixed income in New York, said salesmen on her desk openly commented that they hired females in junior positions because they wanted “eye candy”, and they were unabashed in recounting visits to strip clubs.

Maria Rubashkina, a New York vice-president of corporate communications, claims a male junior from London not long out of actually working in a nightclub was promoted above her. A senior executive allegedly justified the decision by saying he would feel “more comfortable” working with someone “male and British”.

Working in corporate affairs, Rubashkina claims to have observed all departments of the firm where she has “seen examples of incredibly capable women who are not allowed to advance”.

Joanne Hart, a director of investor relations, whose experience is apparently now channelled into ringing the car pool for juniors, said she felt humiliated. “I have always been a team player. I have done my all-nighters. I don’t mind organising the plane for the CEO. But this is day-to-day menial work, and it is very demeaning.”

Each of the women’s cases is different, yet each is very much the same. Some, such as Traci Holt, felt “marginalised a little more each time I came back from maternity leave”.

Another plaintiff, Jyoti Ruta, was brought to America as a child “with nothing” but, pushed by her parents, went on to the Ivy League Columbia School of Engineering. Now she works in DKW’s capital markets division in New York. She alleges she was put under pressure by a supervisor and colleague to leave a dinner celebrating the closure of a large deal, so the male clients and bank employees could visit a strip club.

She says she was “mommy-tracked” after returning from maternity leave. Pregnant once more and unwell, she was speaking by phone from her sickbed. But despite her frailty she is the most passionate of the women.

Ruta claims there is a long history of discrimination behind the present case. When Kleinwort’s bank — now part of DKW — admitted its first female employee in the 1950s, this token woman was apparently ordered to work behind a screen where she would not have to be seen, Ruta alleges.

“All of us have suffered a lot of degradation these last few years,” she said. “We have become meek and pathetic. But eventually our human spirit did come out shining and say ‘do the right thing’. We thought for once we will not be meek; we have to make a stand.”

THE implications of their “stand” are potentially profound. If the six accusers win, their victory could change the way we all work, far beyond the trading floors of gold-laden merchant banks.

For the suit also complains that DKW looked the other way when senior executives had relationships with junior members of staff. It seems to me that no sooner have we dispelled the old prudery than we are assailed by the new puritanism. If the action against DKW succeeds, surely even the most chauvinist boss will in the future do anything it takes to make his office about as sexless as a nunnery. Any office romance — even when both parties are unmarried — could soon become a sackable offence. And as for calling a female colleague “babe” — well, do you ever want to work again?

Maybe the revelation that staff date will do for Dresdner in a New York court but to many British ears the complaint may sound rather sad — after all, millions meet future spouses at work. And if you toil 19 hours a day for a merchant bank but don’t score on the trading floor, where will you?

The head of Boeing has just been ousted for dating his secretary, but do we really want to work in firms free of flirts? Aren’t the Dresdner Six weakening their case by attacking the bank for not banning this more marginal bad behaviour?

I put the question to Smith, but the women’s lawyer, the Oxford-educated American Douglas Wigdor, a partner in Thompson Wigdor & Gilly — who has flown in from New York for this interview — interjects: “It was done to show the culture of the company.”
But what are companies supposed to do: put cameras in their employees’ bedrooms?

“Consenting relationships at a company are not a good idea, particularly between a boss and a junior,” Wigdor hits back. “Most relationships don’t end in marriage: people break up, then rather than concentrate on work they think about how they can avoid each other, and then the bottom line is affected.”

And nothing, it seems, must get in the way of the bottom line, least of all a colleague’s shapely posterior. Smith chips in: “I have a problem with a culture that is hostile to women. We have to be careful not to create a divide in the team.”

A reasonable point. Even the most liberal sensibility is strained by men bringing prostitutes into the office. If the story is true it seems unlikely the pair were having equity discussions. But can it really be true?

“I believe it,” says Wigdor. And they had sex? “That we don’t know.”

Traci Holt, whom I speak to later in New York, reflects: “If men can do that with a prostitute in the office they can also get away with doing down women in the office.”

“And why should I be put in the position of deciding whether to go to a lap dancing bar?” asks Smith testily. “Some of us are married with children; we don’t want to go to these places.”

This is a sign of their infinite good taste, but in return for fabulous salaries staff are expected to take part in frequent grim semi-social activities: presumably some men feel rather bullied into attending lap dancing bars as opposed to bullied not to attend.
Again Wigdor steps in. The media, he says, have “seized” on the sex allegations: the main point of the action is pay, and why lesser men earn more than his female clients.

But if he does not want to justify his clients’ complaints about sexual misconduct, why slap them in the lawsuit? The other women, like Smith, contend that the exclusion of women from contact-building events is not unthinking laddish-ness but deliberate policy.

Joanne Hart, a veteran of 26 years on Wall Street, says: “I know the term ‘laddish’ because most of the people I work with are Brits. This goes way beyond that.”

The women allege that a senior executive organised a wine tasting event inviting everyone in the group bar two of the women fighting the action. One alleges she was routinely forced to organise car hire for male squirts.

Okay, but why $1.4 billion? Wigdor, fresh from a similar triumph over Wal-Mart, steps in: “The $1.4 billion is for the 500 women employed in an executive capacity by Dresdner globally. If you do your maths and work out how much they would have earned if they had been promoted or given the correct bonuses over a four year period — these are not,” he smiles, “minimum wage people.”

His legal colleague from New York, Kate Webber, adds: “These are people who could expect six or seven-figure bonuses.” She points out: “The law also allows damages for emotional distress and punitive damages designed to punish the company for wrongdoing.”

While the distress can hardly compare with, say, surviving a terrorist bomb it must be difficult to work for a company where, it is alleged, a senior executive will take staff to lunch and only address remarks to male underlings. It must have grown even more distressing, after filing the suit, still to turn up at work. How did Smith feel?

“Nauseous,” she laughs. “It is one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. I do not want to end my career.”

A danger, surely, of a big class action is that any woman worker who wants to be paid off could piggyback on the case, dredging up random remarks to establish discrimination.

“I have gone through the cases very carefully,” counters Wigdor. “I have declined to represent some women.”

The odds must be on an out-of-court settlement but this lawyer insists: “These six women before a jury would make a very powerful image.”

The Six claim they have received numerous private messages of support from past and current Dresdner drones, including senior managers. Some high-ups, they suggest, want a fair promotion policy but are stymied by the pervading mood of machismo.

Isn’t one irony of this that it could actually discourage banks from employing women? That, they point out, is hardly their fault. One of Smith’s complaints is that the day before she gave birth she was called into the office to run her eye over a woman applying to join the firm. Would this potential recruit, management supposedly wanted to know, be the sort who might sue the company?

Wigdor points out that, anyway, demography is on their side: half the folk taking business studies are women, and that is rising. One way or another, merchant banks are going to have to employ more women. And one way or another the old boys’ club has had its last dance.

But how long, one wonders, will it take before we hear the first faint mumbles about the formation of a new girls’ club?
After the conference call to New York the women all chirrup “bye Jasper”. Blimey, I remark, I feel like Boswell in Charlie’s Angels, then, remembering myself, I splutter: “Sorry, bad joke. I withdraw that remark.”

“Don’t worry,” one laughs back. “We won’t sue you.”