Surprise! Big Banks are Sexist Bro Fests

As I’ve mentioned before, Merrill’s modus operandi is treating brokers as though they’re running their own business. Individuals control their own books and profit from their own dealings (with the Firm taking a cut, natch), and moderately successful individuals sometimes partner up with other like-minded brokers to form a “practice” within a specific office. Ideally, a partner practice grows until it becomes a “group.” Some big groups employ 3-4 brokers and a support staff of several. Brokers have complete control over whom they opt to hire as partners. It is much, much, much, much (X100) easier to succeed as a broker when you don’t have to completely build your own book from scratch, when you can work your way up another practice and build off an already-existing reputation rather than creating your own. Think of it as starting your own business versus being hired by an already-successful company.

Of course, the mostly male successful brokers at my office almost unfailingly picked male partners. It’s an innocuously ugly side of basic human psychology; picking a partner is picking a golfing buddy. It’s picking the person who will sometimes take your clients to Cubs games. It’s the face your clients will look at during dinners out at Rosebud. It’s trusting the future of your practice with a person who is “ON BRAND” enough with your business-doing style that clients won’t find interactions with them jarring. Of course it’s going to be a younger, fresher-looking version of the old guys running the show. It almost invariably is.

A few of the guys in my “class” of aspirant Gordon Geckos were bro’d onto “teams” of more senior brokers. There was no formal process to this; higher-ups mostly left them alone. And the whole thing was a mystery to both me and the other female broker who was hired around the same time I was, whom I’ll call M.

M and I used to go to lunch in the basement of the Chase building up the street and lament what was happening, what we were doing wrong. Why is that one guy being brought onto that team? Doesn’t that team know he’s an idiot? Yeah, but he’s got nice ties. Rueful laughter.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a lot of the grunt work— trading, account maintenance, etc — was done by the female support staffs that diligently worked to run the practice as Client Associates (or Registered Client Associates, although by the time I left the firm, all Client Associates were required to pass the same FINRA tests as the brokers). CA’s make much less than the brokers — they make a decent middle-income wage for Chicago, but they definitely weren’t pulling down Owning A Boat money like their successful bosses. They weren’t earning Saving For College money for their kids. Eventually, my friend M gave up trying to join a group as a partner and was brought on as a CA/subordinate. Not much later, the same thing happened to me. By the time I left Merrill in September of 2011, I had descended the corporate ladder so far that I was doing little more than answering phones, troubleshooting trade snags for unassigned accounts, and spending my days surreptitiously reading the news online and emailing my friend Brian about it.

Sad stuff.

My particular experience wasn’t used for lawsuit fodder, but to me, following the lawsuit through the court system has only served to validate suspicions that I’ve had for a long time — sexism at Merrill is endemic, it manifests itself in multiple ways that are harmful to female employees, and will be frustratingly difficult to eradicate. That place employed a group of men who, yeah, had worked their asses off early in their careers, but who also had gotten a particular set of breaks that weren’t afforded similarly to their equally-hard-working female counterparts. The entire time I was there, I never heard of or saw a broker being questioned about their choice of partner or brought to task about failing to appoint a woman. I saw plenty of female CA’s complaining about their boss’s childish technological ineptitude, heard plenty of grumbling about how while the brokers were off entertaining clients, they were stuck in the office on the phone with tech support. And when Bank of America began hiring bankers to prowl around every Merrill office and try to sell the brokers on pushing more loans on existing clients, a lot of complaints about how the highly paid (mostly male) BofA workers had no idea how Merrill worked. A few times I was asked by one very successful broker to help him “download his e-mail” and “work the stock machine” (computer? I think?)

At the same time, I felt bad complaining about working at Merrill because I wasn’t really mistreated that badly, I didn’t think. My bosses were kind to me. My coworkers were a little patronizing, but I rationalized it by telling myself they “meant well.” I had stability, a decent paycheck, insurance. My coworkers laughed at my commie jokes. I had loads of free time. I had so much free time and I was so disengaged that one day in 2008 I began commenting on this very website, and, based on that commenting, I was asked to write a couple of test posts, which turned into a weekend editor position, which turned into a full-time position, which turned into an editor position. So I came out just fine.

But the problem with Merrill’s culture isn’t and wasn’t intention; it’s results. It doesn’t matter if a male stockbroker “means well” if no one is taking him to task about his own internalized sexism. That’s what the Firm’s job was to do, as overseers of the THUNDERING HERD of stockbrokers and stewards of the company’s longstanding reputation as a reliable place for retail clients to invest their money. The Firm’s job was to make sure that the best employees — not the ones who reminded brokers most of younger versions of themselves — were advancing first. And from a purely bloodless capitalist perspective, failing to address issues of how sexism and racism shuts out qualified employees does the Firm’s bottom line a disservice. It’s bad for stockholders! It’s bad for fucking everyone.

One of the terms of the settlement of the Merrill/BofA lawsuit is that Merrill doesn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. But when the company’s paid out almost a billion dollars in employee discrimination suit money in the last decade (including $160 million just ten days ago in a racial discrimination suit) an admission at this point would seem almost gratuitous.

[NYT]