Sexism and the City

I WORKED as an investment banker in the City for seven years, from the rollicking, rumbustious Eighties, when anything often did go, into the supposedly more controlled Nineties. From firsthand experience of life in three of the City's top banks, I know that Julie Bower, Louise Barton and their sexual discrimination cases are the tip of a large iceberg.

I'm delighted that they decided to fight.

In my day, women didn't speak out, let alone take their employer to court.

The perception was that, as a female, you were jolly lucky to have a job in the golden streets of the City. Head down, shut up, and don't complain. Men had been invited to the party, and many of them behaved with a sublime sense of entitlement; women were gatecrashers.

When I started work with a major US bank I was the first women executive employed in the corporate finance department in London. There were plenty of other women in the department, but they were secretaries, known quantities, there to assist the old boys, not to compete with them. But I had walked onto their turf, and some of them didn't like it at all.

One refused to speak to me for six months. He thought female executives were "unnatural". He avoided me whenever possible, but one day, riding up in the lift together, he seemed to find himself forced to speak: "Why, when I look at you, do I think of Stendhal?" was his opening, unanswerable line. The younger men accepted me more easily, but one of them still found himself unable to keep his hands off me. I had to work with him on a number of deals.

Ludicrously, while discussing the finer points of a succession of hundred-milliondollar deals, I would regularly get my bottom pinched. It felt like a scene from Carry On Up the City, and was so farcical it made me laugh.

It didn't occur to me to complain. I told him to back off, in no uncertain terms. It really didn't bother me.

The next case of harassment I met did. It was my second job. I had been headhunted from my American employer to join a British merchant bank, in the days when there were still several. Six months in, I found myself working on a huge deal with an American entrepreneur who had, years earlier, been driven out of Wall Street with the parting words: "You will never work on the Street again." There was a team of about 25 bankers, lawyers and accountants working on this deal. I was the only woman.

We would be closeted regularly in some glossy meeting room, at all hours of day and night, and the client would ask to clear the room for a few private words with his financial adviser.

As I stood to leave, he would stop me: "Not you, Linda, you stay." I was his financial adviser, but by no means the most senior. Bemused, I watched the team shuffle out, the door close, then the client grabbed hold of me and literally chased me around the board table.

Shocked, I escaped, and called the whole team back in. The client tried this trick a few times. Everyone on the team must have guessed what he was up to, but nobody said anything.

MY attempts to evade his clutches were embarrassing and humiliating. He kept up his harassment, brushing past me, muttering suggestions under his breath, grabbing at me whenever he thought no one was looking.

There was menace in his eyes.

This was no Carry On scenario. Had I met him on a dark street, I would have been frightened. But I knew the ethos of the

City well enough. Do your job. Take the rough with the smooth. Finally, even I got fed up.

I managed to catch the senior banker on the deal between his meetings and his polo matches and told him what was going on. He listened to me with a faint sneer curling his patrician features, then turned to me with words which, had I been armed with a tape recorder, would have ended his career and gained me a cool half- mill: "My dear, did nobody ever tell you, the customer is always right?"

I was so shocked by his response, as well as disgusted, that I didn't even challenge him. I got up, walked out, and got on the phone to a head-hunter.

Two weeks later I quit, and joined another, swashbuckling US bank. I worked in corporate finance for a year, and then decided I'd like to try my hand on the trading floor, traditionally the most brutish and sexist area of the City. It lived down to all my expectations, and then some. During my year as a trader I was tied up with Sellotape, on several occasions, while mid-trade.

I refused to react, and just carried on. This was an attempt not just to harass me, but to interfere with my ability to do my job.

When I had safely completed the trade, I cut the line and, enraged, shouted at the culprit. Decking him remains an enduring fantasy.

Some traders were initially friendly, but then, when they invited me out on dates and I refused, they became hostile, and made the necessary working relationship very difficult. Not only was I competing with them on what they saw as their turf, but I was rejecting them as men.

This culture of sexism is not merely confined to the psychological and physical, but also the financial. I saw this most clearly when, during one of the periodic turndowns that hit the City, my employer at the time took to firing women first, because "they don't have to pay the mortgage," a senior manager conceded to me in a staggering display of sexism and paternalism rolled into one.

This perception, that women are merely playing at the game, that they are neither the sole, nor the major, breadwinner, is rampant.

It's interesting to note that most of the cases brought are for sexual discrimination, not harassment.

Most of the harassment cases are settled quietly before getting near a court room. The banks simply do not want the lurid, sordid stories to tarnish their reputations. As women quite rightly take for granted their place in the City, they are increasingly prepared to demand that they be treated fairly.

With the number of cases brought and the size of the awards rising dramatically, perhaps the City will try harder to clean itself up, but it will still be an inhospitable place for women.

While I could still be bothered to play the game, I worked longer hours and harder than the men in an attempt to prove I was "committed", to attack the perception that I was merely marking time.

Ultimately, the attempt was futile. I got out before I hit the glass ceiling.

This overused phrase is as annoying as it is revealing. It makes it sound as if sexism is an impersonal, architectural barrier, a feature of the territory rather than a proliferation of human acts that create a philosophy.

Now, with two young children, I couldn't think of a place I would less like to work in than the City.

For me, the mechanics of motherhood and the City simply do not mesh. Even if I hadn't had children, the unremitting pace of the City, its bloodsucking qualities and its sexism would have made me run screaming from it. After a while, there are simply better things to do with your life. But, in defence of the place, despite the sexism, as a woman, if you are young, free and single, there are few better proving grounds.

Where else can you make so much money legally, unless you look like Elle Macpherson? This is the core of sexism in the City; where there's money, there's muck.

Linda Davies now writes thrillers.

The paperback version of her fourth book, Something Wild, is published by Headline in November.

Copyright 2002
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