A shameful chapter in the recent history of Wall St
news.independent.co.uk
By David Usborne in New York
17 November 2002
The mud that has been cascading down on Wall Street has taken on a
more lurid hue following the publication in the US of a shocking book
that details years of abuse and intimidation of female brokers by their
groping and sex-obsessed male colleagues.
Although the book - Tales of the Boom Boom Room - expands mostly
on a legal case filed by former employees of Smith Barney that was
settled four years ago, it includes details never before revealed. Many of
the pages, describing everything from foul language to lap-dancing in
the workplace, are not family reading.
The book's author, Susan Antilla, a reporter with Bloomberg News,
worked on the case when it was heading for the courts. In her
no-holds-barred tome, she also explores the misery of women who
worked during the boom of the 1990s at other small brokerages and at
Merrill Lynch, which was similarly sued.
At the centre of the action is a branch of Smith Barney, now a unit of
Citigroup, in Garden City, a Long Island suburb of New York City. The
main protagonist is its former manager, Nicholas Cuneo, depicted as a
boor who encouraged a locker-room atmosphere while gleefully
denigrating women in the office.
One of them, Pam Martens, finally snapped and gathered evidence to
sue the firm for discrimination. Ms Martens emerges as a kind of Erin
Brockovich, whose triumph over a California energy company that
poisoned a city's water supply inspired the film starring Julia Roberts.
The book's title refers to a basement room opened by Mr Cuneo at the
Garden City office as a place for his male staff to "unwind". A lavatory
bowl was hung from the ceiling, and a "Happy Hour", with cocktails and
beer, was sometimes declared at 10am. Lap-dancers were invited, and
male brokers showed off guns and exposed themselves.
While there are scattered claims of attempted rape and of women
leaving their jobs in despair or considering suicide, most of what
emerges is a pattern of verbal abuse and daily humiliation. Women
were regularly paid less than their male counterparts, and excluded
from lunches.They entered the Boom Boom Room at their peril. A
stripper once performed in the main trading room.
Under Mr Cuneo's regime, female workers were called "tits and slits".
One woman came to work to find herself praised on a message board
for her alleged skill at giving sexual favours. Another overheard a
colleague say: "As soon as a woman squeezes out a kid, you stamp 'a
million dollars' on the kid's forehead and 'stretched goods' on the
woman's."
The book is published at a time when Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are
under federal investigation for conflict of interest violations, mostly
focused on researchers boosting companies of dubious worth to build
business. For the public to be reminded of their history of sexual
discrimination is far from welcome. A spokeswoman for Smith Barney,
which settled with the women plaintiffs and dedicated $15m (£9.5m) to
revamp its equal opportunity policies, said it was all in the past. The
firm, she asserted, was "proud of the significant strides made over the
past several years to become an employer of choice, committed to
giving every employee the opportunity to achieve his or her full potential".
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