Tales From the Boom-Boom Room

As the bull market of the late 1990s soared toward its denouement, America's second-largest brokerage house, Salomon Smith Barney, was hit with a lawsuit that it initially described as having no merit. Three women employees from Garden City, New York, were alleging a pattern of extreme sexual harassment and sex discrimination at their branch office. But they were not to stand alone. A few months later, a similar lawsuit was filed against Merrill Lynch, the nation's biggest brokerage. Soon the plaintiffs in these class actions numbered in the thousands, their bizarre stories streaming in from Manhattan to California. Suits at other firms followed.
They claimed that male brokers had exposed themselves, groped female colleagues, hooted at strippers they brought into the office, and bombarded female coworkers with sexual insults and four-letter nicknames. There was talk of coerced sex, of women held back from advancement, of women seeing their best clients shunted to less productive men.
This book uncovers what these men and women would not or could not reveal about the upsetting daily rituals at some of the largest financial firms in the world. It depicts women and men, CEOs and world-class attorneys, struggling in a web of securities regulations and industry grievance practices spun by Wall Street firms to protect themselves against paralyzing lawsuits from investors and, yes, even from their employees. It was a legal labyrinth within which many women thought their cause and their stories would disappear forever, and from which the firms feared their priceless reputations would never emerge intact.