From the Boom Boom Room to Matt Lauer: The Untold Cost of Harassment

My first job out of college in the late 1980s was at Salomon Brothers, a trading house of cigar-smoking, expletive-spewing strivers. One day, I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform a sex act on me. Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk.

I was not alone in being treated this way: During that era another brokerage house, Smith Barney, paid out $150 million in a bias and harassment case — known as the “boom-boom room” suit, named after a basement party room in one of its branches. Wall Street was a hypermasculine culture, where the all-nighter was a badge of honor and the ever-bigger deal was proof of one’s status, and women were not safe, either emotionally or physically.

In the 1990s, I changed firms and was now a midlevel professional. The harassment shifted: Instead I was asked by a client, a chief executive, to join him — “Just you, no need to bring the rest of the team” — in his hotel room at 11 p.m. to go over some numbers. One company rescinded a job offer upon learning I had a baby at home.

I changed firms again and moved another rung up the corporate ladder, and I was able to say no to the senior government official who said, “How about we go up to my hotel room?” before obscenely wagging his tongue at me in front of my colleagues. I could knock the portfolio manager’s hands off my leg without too much fear of retribution.

These are stories I have not often revisited. Maybe I’ve shared them over drinks with female friends or with younger women in the industry, to let them know what it used to be like. But in the dizzying past few weeks, as this crucial moment of reckoning on sexual harassment continues, it’s clear that the harassment I was subjected to is not in the past. Worse, I know that being a white woman afforded me a privilege in dealing with these issues that unfortunately not everyone has.

What we are only beginning to recognize is that demeaning and devaluing women is an insidious, expensive problem. It’s not just the eye-popping settlements in some cases, like the $32 million paid by Bill O’Reilly to settle a harassment claim. Nor is it just the high salaries network stars have been making while allegedly assaulting subordinates, like the $20 million, or more, for Matt Lauer. It only starts there.....

Read the rest of this Opinion Piece in The New York Times Sunday Review here.

Sallie Krawcheck is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ellevest, an investing and planning platform for women. She is Chair of Ellevate Network and of the Pax Ellevate Global Women's Index Fund. She is author of Own It: The Power of Women at Work.