I think I was in the middle of a murder trial I was always in the middle of a murder trial
I was doing murder and discrimination at the same time
and um...
a woman came to me
who had a case against merrill lynch
and she described that when she was initially a young broker
merrill lynch would was all male
and you would uh... there would be parties when uh…a broker it was his
birthday and the parties would have cakes in the shape of penises or there would be
a stripper who would come out of the cake
she was a tough lady
and she would say
alright i'm going to take this she shouldn't have to take it but i'm gonna take it as
long as it didn't matter
to my ultimate the money i was making if it didn't matter in terms of money i
will take it
and she took it
and then she began to realize that in fact
to some degree the same attitudes that
privileged that
put their finger on the scale in terms of her money
uh... she you know private uh... there would be a parties
at the...
you know the bruins or the celtics she wouldn't be invited male brokers could
invite their
their
uh... you know their clients
there would be
you know offerings that were offered to the men but not to the women when
brokers left
their book it was called accounts would be distributed and she
would not get as much as any and all of a sudden she realized it really was affecting
the bottom line and so she sued
it was not an easy case because it was a case about lost opportunities
you can't translate that so easy easily into dollars
so we told a narrative
it was a narrative that i was familiar with we told the judge
a story about starting with
penis cakes and strippers and ending up with
this uh... difference in her pay and that she felt compelled to leave when
she realized that uh... that this these differences had been going on and she
left and the judge didn't award us damages but awarded a quarter of a
million in a
punitive damages and as i write in the book i mean i uh
that that continues to happen particularly in professions in which
uh... which are sort of like cowboy professions
where there is not a unified structure where essentially you make what you kill
and that's brokerage even doctors are like that and we see sexual harassment in those
situations as well yes we do and it's
it's wonderful that you expose in your book the link between harassment and
discrimination i mean the ultimate goal is discrimination they just use the
harassment to discriminate it's something that has not been addressed by by
society at all well it it when you think about it
it's only
maybe a generation and a half ago
when women were formally excluded
from professions and jobs formally excluded so now the the
enterprises is to try to figure out the ways in which those obstacles remain
you don't
change something by suddenly taking the signs down off the door it takes
education it takes
affirmative changes
and sexual harassment
was a classic example of that the signs were down on the door
but if you're gonna keep on
demeaning me
I'm not gonna feel welcome here
I'm not gonna feel comfortable here and i'm not gonna stay
and sexual when the courts began to realize that sexual harassment
was a form of discrimination against women and provided an impediment for women's
progress that's when the law began to
began to change
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