Some of the behavior depicted in cases rivals the indignities of the boom-boom room, the Smith Barney party room that the lead plaintiff, Pamela K. In an email statement, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman said it promptly investigates allegations of gender discrimination and takes disciplinary action where appropriate. Mays’s attacker, for example, worked at Smith Barney, and then Morgan Stanley, for another 24 years after the episode at her office, despite her having reported it to his supervisor. Still, big producers can get special treatment. Neither would the “open and celebrated” brand of harassment of that era, she said. Thomann and the others, said that would not happen today. Friedman, one of the lawyers who represented Ms. “They gave my books to a male sales assistant so that he could study,” Ms. Roberta Thomann, a former sales assistant and one of the three women in the Smith Barney Garden City office who initiated the lawsuit, said in an interview that her bosses stopped her from studying for the exam to become a broker. In the boom-boom room era, some women complained that they couldn’t become brokers at all. Hegewisch said, however, that senior male brokers at some firms were “forming teams of young white guys to work with old white guys, which means the accounts stay on the team and don’t get distributed” when older brokers retire. Morgan Stanley’s spokesman said the company today uses a formulaic, gender-blind process for distributing accounts. The 1996 suit against Smith Barney, as well as one in 1997 against Merrill Lynch, drew attention to the widespread practice of branch managers’ excluding of women when it was time to assign the accounts of departing brokers. Last year, nearly 50 percent of financial adviser trainees hired were female or members of minority groups, he added. Branch managers at Morgan Stanley, which operated a brokerage joint venture with Smith Barney until acquiring it in 2013, can earn up to an additional $150,000 a year by recruiting and developing diverse advisers, a spokesman said. Companies on Wall Street are just not changing.”Ĭomplaints persist about pay and promotion disparities and a lack of women in senior management roles, and frustrations are growing about the limited ability of individuals to seek damages in court.īrokerage firms today say they deal swiftly with harassers and have developed programs to mentor and showcase high-achieving women. “It’s not quite as blatant as what went on in the boom-boom room, but it’s still there in a way that makes it very hard for women to succeed. Vladeck of the New York employment law firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark. “You may no longer have strippers coming for afternoon entertainment, but that doesn’t mean you are treated as an equal,” said Anne C.
Twenty years later, permanent change is less obvious. Smith Barney paid $150 million in arbitration awards and settlements in the case, and it and other Wall Street firms rushed to set up anti-harassment training, employee hotlines and programs to recruit women. Nearly 2,000 women joined the case, exposing the sordid antics of Wall Street’s testosterone-driven culture. It became known as the “ boom-boom room” suit, named after a basement party room at Smith Barney’s branch office in Garden City, N.Y. Mays, who worked as a wire operator, entering trade orders into the system for brokers, was one of 23 women who sued Smith Barney for sexual harassment and pay discrimination in an explosive class-action lawsuit filed 20 years ago this month.