May 9, 2018 • 23 mins
In the first episode of The Pay Check, we go deep on pay discrimination. Host Rebecca Greenfield tells us about an equal pay fight in her own family. We take you inside a gender discrimination case against Goldman Sachs that’s been unfolding for over a decade. And we look at how companies magically make their pay gaps disappear—without actually paying women more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hi. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter at Bloomberg. This
is the first episode of the Paycheck. For the next
six weeks, we're going to investigate a big, expensive, global mystery.
(00:25):
Why in women still make less money, a lot less
money than men. There's pretty broad agreement on the stats.
According to the U S Census and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics in the US, for every one dollar a
man makes, a woman gets about eighty cents. For women
of color, it's even worse. Black women are in just
(00:48):
sixty cents on the dollar. Hispanic women only fifty four cents.
That's based on median hourly earnings for full time workers.
But the numbers they only get you so are because
the gender pay gap, that's what it's called. By the way,
isn't just about the data. It's about how it plays
out in real life. So here's one way it works
(01:11):
in real life, actually my life sort of, because it's
about my mom. Linda Bradsky, that's my mom, was working
as a pediatric ear nose and throat surgeon up in Buffalo,
New York. She worked at the Children's Hospital, where she
was the busiest surgeon in her practice. She was also
a tenured full professor at Sunni Buffalo, a rank only
(01:34):
a dozen other women had in her field. Then one
day she was doing some work in her department office
and she found a document with the salaries of her
colleagues on it. When I saw what salaries would be
given out, I was appalled when I discovered that a
junior colleague, a man with lower rank, less seniority and
pure responsibilities, was paid twice the stipend from the university
(01:59):
as was And to make it worse, in some cases,
my hospital colleagues were paid more than five times my
hospital stipend for the administrative work I performed. Even though
I had the most busy service in the hospital. Her
male colleagues brought in less business, and yet they made
five times as much money. So she asked for a raise,
(02:21):
but she didn't get it. For four years, she tried
to solve things internally, but finally in two thousand one,
she filed a lawsuit, and for the next seven years
she spent most of her time outside of work fighting
her legal battle. She called it her third job. Even
with a huge practice, a lot of economic security, academic standing,
(02:43):
and a lot of power, and my grants my research program.
It was very, very tough battle. My mom passed away
in so there are a lot of questions. I can't
ask her about her legal battle. I can't ask her
about a lot of things like trump, me too, or
my bad back. Those clips you heard are from a
seminar she gave in after she sued. She still worked
(03:06):
full time as a surgeon, and I remember the nights
and weekends she spent preparing for depositions, or reviewing discovery documents,
or interviewing expert witnesses. I was in high school for
a lot of the time, and when I got bored,
I'd joined her at the kitchen table and we'd sit
together and sift through three ring binders full of salary information.
Her lawyer Sam, he was on speed dial. I was
(03:30):
halfway through college when she finally settled with the university.
She got seven hundred forty thousand dollars, but she later
said the money wasn't enough to make up for the
time she spent or what it did to her career.
She got passed over for jobs and stopped getting invitations
to speak on panels. I remember this one time she
(03:50):
had to go to anger management because she spoke too
loudly during a medical emergency. I was sent to see
a psychiatrist for anger management, and after two sessions, the
psychiatrist wrote back to the medical staff that Dr Brawsky
has no anger management problem. She acted appropriately to the
stressors she faced. When the medical staff president called her
(04:12):
and she was angry. The psychiatrist says, I think you
have an anger management problem, but actually she was angry
and frustrated and upset the lawsuit. It took up a
lot of time and energy, but the worst part of
it was that she didn't think it changed anything for
other women in medicine or any other field. YO. The
(04:39):
year my mom found out she made five times less
than her male colleagues was also the year Want to
Be by the Spice Girls hit number one. That was
the cultural moment. I grew up in a league of
their own. Powerpuff Girls, legally blonde like It's girl power
was everywhere. My mom and everyone else told me I
(04:59):
could be whatever I wanted, and I believe them. My
mom was a surgeon, she wore shoulder pads in a
funny way. The lesson I took from her lawsuit reinforced
all that girl power stuff. See women could be strong
and fight for what's right. It took me a lot
longer to realize the other part of it, that my
(05:20):
mom could be all of these amazing things and yet
still face discrimination. When you look at the world, you
know what the population like. Where is our place like?
Where is our value? People? Real work helps to keep
(05:43):
women not on a pedestal but in a cage, and nationwide,
the median salary for men is greater than women in
ninety nine point six of major occupations, gil power equalization
between the sex sees. What dudes are you won't? We
want to end gender inequality, and to do this we
(06:04):
need everyone involved. Bloomberg crush the numbers and found that
Wall Street is the worst when it comes to gender
pay gaps. And here are the all male nominees. This
is the paycheck. The gender pay gap isn't just a
problem for women. If you're married to a woman, she's
(06:27):
making less money for your family single mom, then you
have less money to spend on childcare, which makes it
harder to work and earn more money. What does that
look like when you multiply it by all the women
in the world, By one estimate, twenty eight trillion dollars
would be added to the global economy if women earned
as much as men. I've been reporting on this for
(06:48):
a long time, and people like to tell me women
earn less than men for entirely justifiable reasons. They say
women tend to work in lower paying jobs and fields.
They say women take off more time to raise kids
than men do. Women, they say, are also less likely
to negotiate their salaries or ask for raises. But there
(07:09):
are plenty of people who don't see it that way.
They say women aren't given the same opportunities as men.
They say they're discriminated against or sexually harassed out of
their jobs and careers. A lot of people are only
just starting to understand how common that is. One of
the big problems with the gender pay gap is that
it's all of these things and they interact with each
(07:31):
other all the time. Women do make choices, they're also
sometimes discriminated against for the choices they make. There's no
simple explanation and there's no easy solution. This is all
(07:54):
about money. So let's go where the money is, Wall Street,
specifically to Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful banks.
If you have the same responsibilities and you are just
as effective, then you should be equally compensated and rewarded
(08:14):
for that work. That's Christina chen Austar. She went to
work at Goldman Sacks and over the next eight years
she made a lot of money, but the men working
at Goldman they made a lot more. Goldman says that
it's not about gender, it's just about individuals getting paid
for performance. Christina has been fighting for thirteen years now,
(08:37):
trying to prove there's more to it. She talked about
her case for the first time with my colleagues Dune,
Lawrence and mac Abelson. A warning, the story you're about
to hear contains a description of an alleged sexual assault.
Christina was born in Taiwan, but grew up outside of Chicago.
(09:00):
She's the oldest of five girls and just incredibly smart.
She graduated from m I T when she was twenty.
She had already been working for six years in banking
when Goldman hired her to sell convertible bonds that's a
bond that can be turned into a stock. Back then,
she didn't spend much time thinking about gender discrimination. She
was just really excited about joining Goldman Sachs. Like all
(09:21):
the big banks, the ones that make billions and billions
of dollars a year. Goldman gets high ratings and some
good press for things like generous maternity leave and mentoring programs.
But on Wall Street women still have to deal with
some shockingly bad behavior and a code of silence when
things go wrong. Christina found that out pretty early on
in Goldman. This still is not easy for her to
(09:44):
talk about. Well. Um, the sexual assault happened not long
after I joined Goldman, Sachs. I joined in March of
n and then it happened in October, which was just
seven months later. This is Christina's account from legal filings
and inner views of what happened Goldman, as you'll hear,
disputes most of it. She and her team had gone
(10:05):
out to dinner to celebrate someone's promotion. Then everyone went
to a strip club. She got bored and left, but
a colleague insisted on walking her to her boyfriend's apartment
a few blocks away. Upstairs. Outside the apartment, he pinned
her against the wall and groped and kissed her. She
had to fight him off. The Next day she saw
him in the office. He pulled her aside and he apologized.
(10:28):
He asked her to promise not to say anything, and
for a year and a half she didn't. When she
finally told her manager about the assault, it turned out
he already knew her boss was friends with this guy.
He told them what happened, but not who it had
happened with. He said, oh, that was you, and so
I was flabbergasted, and the response really disappointed me since
(10:53):
it was very clear that something was wrong. He said,
now it's my duty to raise this with HR and
and I would suggest that you not make a big
deal out of it, since you don't want a lawsuit.
And so I essentially did what he asked and then
reported that back to him. Christina hoped that would be
the end of it. It wasn't. After that, she says
(11:14):
she was cut out of big areas of business. Her
managers didn't support her attempts to find new opportunities. Her
performance reviews, which fed into how much she got paid,
were assigned to colleagues she didn't even work with much.
When you're busy and you're working hard, you just focus
on doing a good job and doing your work, and
you don't really think about it too much on a
(11:35):
day to day basis. And you can ignore a lot
of things, but you know at some point you step away,
you lift up your head, and you realize that things
are not right. That point for Christina came in two
thousand four, when she returned from maternity leave. Her team
had been reorganized and they had moved her desk. Now
(11:56):
she was sitting with a group of administrative assistants, all women.
It was a very visual and visceral representation that my
manager did not care about my career or care about
my prospects for contributing to the team. In eight years
at Goldman, Christina remained a vice president and her pay
(12:17):
ended up rising about the guy she says assaulted her,
he made managing director, then partner. Over those same years,
his pay went up something like four In two thousand five,
she quit and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, the federal agency tasked with investigating complaints of discrimination.
(12:39):
If you want to see your employer in court, in
most cases, this is the first step. Goldman told the
e e o C that Christina was paid more than
fairly and the firm hadn't wanted her to leave at all.
The part where she had to sit with the secretaries temperary.
Goldman Saks called her alleged assault a brief and disputed
interaction that she was now, in the words of Goldman
(13:00):
sax trying to exploit. Gina Palumbo, whoever sees employment law
at the firm, gave us Goldman Saxes perspective. What she
says is this. The key issues here are that Mission
Astars significantly delayed reporting the incident to employ your relations,
and when she did talk to employee relations, she declined
to provide any detail about the incident or to in
(13:20):
any way cooperate in the investigation. In two thousand ten,
the e o C gave her the green light. She
filed suit along with two other former Goldman employees, alleging
that Goldman paid women less than men for the same
work and that the bank systematically denied women the opportunities
(13:42):
they deserved. They wanted Goldman to pay for its mistakes
and to change its policies. They also wanted to sue
as a class, representing more than two thousand Goldmen women.
Once you say you're soon to represent a group, it
raises the stakes a lot. It stops being about this
or that individual experience. They'd have to prove Goldman is
systematically biased against the women who worked there. It also
(14:05):
raises the financial stakes for the women and for the bank.
For the last eight years, they've been going back and
forth and back and forth. There were fights about internal documents.
Christina's team won those and attempts to divide the coalition
of plaintiffs. Sometimes they were just unlucky. In two thousand eleven,
(14:25):
the Supreme Court issued a ruling that made it harder
to get class status. The case has also moved from
judge to judge. In two thousand and fourteen, Christina's lawyers
were finally ready to put a number on paid discrimination
at Goldman Sachs. Female vice presidents were paid twenty one
percent less than similar men, according to their analysis. Goldman
(14:46):
calls that analysis deeply flawed and maintains they pay everyone fairly. Meanwhile,
more women have joined the suit. Here's one of them,
Alice and Gamba, a former Goldman Sachs trader. I had
my head on. I did everything right. I jumped through
every hoop, I played the game right. I did everything
that should have got me the title that I wanted,
(15:08):
and I didn't get it. What do I have to lose. Now,
if I could help them out, you know, maybe there's
maybe there's a chance that something changes in this industry.
Christina was twenty five when she started at Goldman. She
was thirty four when she filed that ees. He complained
this March ty nine, she turned forty seven. The next
(15:28):
day was Good Friday, and the markets were closed. She
took her daughter to visit a prospective middle school. The
very same day, the judge ruled that Christina and Allison
can represent a class of as many as two thousand
three d women and christina GE's Kelly Dermany, M hey,
that's some amazing news. The court just certified. Christina didn't
(15:51):
hear her lawyer's voicemail until the next day. She was
sitting in a Broadway theater waiting for a Saturday matinee
of Mean Girls. A huge congratulations, just really really really
really happy for you. And this is not a happy ending.
It's more like a happy ending to a beginning. No
matter what happens, a settlement, a trial, you get the
(16:13):
sense it's going to be big. This, after all, is
Goldman Sex. I firmly believe that eventually the truth always
comes out. Eventually, it's just a question of time, but
I certainly hope that things will be better and that
we will come to a resolution before my daughter looks
for a job. Goldman shows no signs of throwing in
(16:40):
the towel. Gina Palombo told Bloomberg, we're defending the firm
and good faith against what we believe our meritless accusations.
She also says the plaintiffs analysis of Paya Goldman ignores
the fact that different roles in different teams have different
market values. Here's how Christina's lawyer, Kelly Dermody explains it.
(17:03):
That's what they would like to pretend that this case
is about millions of individual decisions as opposed to a
system that has, you know, players that operate within the
guidelines of the system. A lot of big US companies
make some version of this claim. They do their own
(17:25):
pay gap analysis and they find little or no disparity
between what they pay men and women. Well, Spargo, b
and Y, Melon City Group, Master Cards, and JP Morgan
have all released that information. After accounting for the different factors.
Those companies have all said their pay gap is really
very small. On a like for like basis, women make
(17:46):
about one percent less than men. Do you heard that right?
One percent? So how does that work? We know women
in the US make less than men, and yet all
these companies, these major employers, they say they barely have
a pay gap at all. My colleague Jordan Holman and
I tried to get to the bottom of it. So
(18:07):
here's the thing. Companies don't have to tell you anything
about their pay gaps. The law just says it's illegal
to discriminate in the US. Any company that's releasing a
number is releasing the number for presumably public relations purposes,
to inform whoever's watching that g don't come after us
and say we're discriminating. Look, here's an analysis that shows
(18:29):
that there's no pay gap once you account for people
doing comparable work. That's Henry Farber. He's a professor at
Princeton and he's an expert at measuring the gender pay gap.
I called Dr Farber and asked him about these small
pay gaps and how they could be so much smaller
than the national average, and he told me it just
(18:50):
really depends on what you measure. Well, as I understand it,
people can use these terms however they like, but the
average pay gap is simply taken as a whole. For example,
within a company, what's the average pay that men received
and the average pay that women received, and the proportional
difference between those two is what might be called the
(19:12):
average pay gap. What the average tells you a lot
of the time is that most of a company's highest
paid people are men, but it doesn't tell you if
men and women doing the same job are getting paid
the same. So if you want to figure out if
there's a gap between men and women doing the same work,
then that's when you use the adjusted pay gap. And
(19:32):
that calculates all of the things that go into compensation,
and there's lots of them, like education, experience, how long
you've worked out a place. There's no specific formula for
calculating what some might call an adjusted pay gap, so
to be clear, there's no set equation for the adjusted
pay gap. Companies can use whatever variables they want, but
(19:56):
to be fair, there are reasons companies might want to
know both number bers they're just a pay gap helps
them compare apples to apples. Plus, if you aren't paying
men and women the same for the same work, then
you have a problem. Companies say they consider variables like
(20:16):
someone's experience, job title and geography. For example, someone living
in New York probably makes more than someone in Kansas
City because the cost of living is higher. But then
sometimes companies use the phrase pay philosophy. What does that mean?
We don't really know, and they don't elaborate. Recently, when
(20:39):
Dr Barber was looking at one company's data, he came
up with four different adjust to pay gap figures that
reigns between two point eight percent and eight point six percent.
When the company did its own analysis, they said the
gap was even smaller zero point two percent. You can
(20:59):
imagine in that the company might be able to cook
up an adjustment analysis. Cook up is the wrong word,
it's too pejorative, but come up with an adjusted pay
analysis that shows there's not much of a gap at all,
whereas some other analysts might look at this and say, no, no,
you're over adjusting for some things, and in fact there
is a substantial pay gap. But that's the problem with
(21:21):
the adjusted pay gap. We don't know what variables they're
including and how much weight they're giving them. Maybe everyone's
getting paid fairly for the job they're in, but this
figure might not tell us that companies are just asking
us to trust them and that's a little awkward. I
haven't seen too many companies, frankly, either talk about their
(21:41):
pay gaps or admit that they have a substantial pay
gap between men and women. The average pay gap tells
us who's taking home the biggest salaries at these companies,
and if men keep earning a lot more than the
women they work with like they do and most major
US companies, the average pay gap is going to stay
pretty big. To change this equation, you need a more
(22:05):
balanced workforce at every single level, so like more women
at the top of the pay scale or more men
at the bottom, exactly. And then the question is is
everyone getting a fair shot of reaching the highest paid jobs.
(22:28):
There's a word that's entered the popular lexicon recently that
I think perfectly describes what's happening. Gas lighting. Decades of
statistics tell us we're making less money. Our experiences tell
us we're being paid less. They moved Christina's desk, My
mom saw the salaries of her coworkers. But our employers say,
(22:50):
there's nothing to see here, just a whole lot of
reasonable explanations. Next week on the paycheck, we're going to
dig into those explanations. How would did we get here?
Why do women make less money than men in the
first place? The short answer sex. Thanks for listening to
(23:12):
The Paycheck. If you like our show, please head on
over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review,
and subscribe. This episode was reported by Dune, Lawrence, Max Abelson,
and Jordan Holman. It was edited by Janet Paskin, produced
by Elizabeth, and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. We had
additional help from Magnus Hendrickson, Francesca Levy, and Gillian Goodman.
(23:37):
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
at bloomberg dot com slash Paycheck. Bloomberg's head a podcast
is Francesca Levy
M Hi. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter at Bloomberg. This
is the first episode of the Paycheck. For the next
six weeks, we're going to investigate a big, expensive, global mystery.
(00:25):
Why in women still make less money, a lot less
money than men. There's pretty broad agreement on the stats.
According to the U S Census and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics in the US, for every one dollar a
man makes, a woman gets about eighty cents. For women
of color, it's even worse. Black women are in just
(00:48):
sixty cents on the dollar. Hispanic women only fifty four cents.
That's based on median hourly earnings for full time workers.
But the numbers they only get you so are because
the gender pay gap, that's what it's called. By the way,
isn't just about the data. It's about how it plays
out in real life. So here's one way it works
(01:11):
in real life, actually my life sort of, because it's
about my mom. Linda Bradsky, that's my mom, was working
as a pediatric ear nose and throat surgeon up in Buffalo,
New York. She worked at the Children's Hospital, where she
was the busiest surgeon in her practice. She was also
a tenured full professor at Sunni Buffalo, a rank only
(01:34):
a dozen other women had in her field. Then one
day she was doing some work in her department office
and she found a document with the salaries of her
colleagues on it. When I saw what salaries would be
given out, I was appalled when I discovered that a
junior colleague, a man with lower rank, less seniority and
pure responsibilities, was paid twice the stipend from the university
(01:59):
as was And to make it worse, in some cases,
my hospital colleagues were paid more than five times my
hospital stipend for the administrative work I performed. Even though
I had the most busy service in the hospital. Her
male colleagues brought in less business, and yet they made
five times as much money. So she asked for a raise,
(02:21):
but she didn't get it. For four years, she tried
to solve things internally, but finally in two thousand one,
she filed a lawsuit, and for the next seven years
she spent most of her time outside of work fighting
her legal battle. She called it her third job. Even
with a huge practice, a lot of economic security, academic standing,
(02:43):
and a lot of power, and my grants my research program.
It was very, very tough battle. My mom passed away
in so there are a lot of questions. I can't
ask her about her legal battle. I can't ask her
about a lot of things like trump, me too, or
my bad back. Those clips you heard are from a
seminar she gave in after she sued. She still worked
(03:06):
full time as a surgeon, and I remember the nights
and weekends she spent preparing for depositions, or reviewing discovery documents,
or interviewing expert witnesses. I was in high school for
a lot of the time, and when I got bored,
I'd joined her at the kitchen table and we'd sit
together and sift through three ring binders full of salary information.
Her lawyer Sam, he was on speed dial. I was
(03:30):
halfway through college when she finally settled with the university.
She got seven hundred forty thousand dollars, but she later
said the money wasn't enough to make up for the
time she spent or what it did to her career.
She got passed over for jobs and stopped getting invitations
to speak on panels. I remember this one time she
(03:50):
had to go to anger management because she spoke too
loudly during a medical emergency. I was sent to see
a psychiatrist for anger management, and after two sessions, the
psychiatrist wrote back to the medical staff that Dr Brawsky
has no anger management problem. She acted appropriately to the
stressors she faced. When the medical staff president called her
(04:12):
and she was angry. The psychiatrist says, I think you
have an anger management problem, but actually she was angry
and frustrated and upset the lawsuit. It took up a
lot of time and energy, but the worst part of
it was that she didn't think it changed anything for
other women in medicine or any other field. YO. The
(04:39):
year my mom found out she made five times less
than her male colleagues was also the year Want to
Be by the Spice Girls hit number one. That was
the cultural moment. I grew up in a league of
their own. Powerpuff Girls, legally blonde like It's girl power
was everywhere. My mom and everyone else told me I
(04:59):
could be whatever I wanted, and I believe them. My
mom was a surgeon, she wore shoulder pads in a
funny way. The lesson I took from her lawsuit reinforced
all that girl power stuff. See women could be strong
and fight for what's right. It took me a lot
longer to realize the other part of it, that my
(05:20):
mom could be all of these amazing things and yet
still face discrimination. When you look at the world, you
know what the population like. Where is our place like?
Where is our value? People? Real work helps to keep
(05:43):
women not on a pedestal but in a cage, and nationwide,
the median salary for men is greater than women in
ninety nine point six of major occupations, gil power equalization
between the sex sees. What dudes are you won't? We
want to end gender inequality, and to do this we
(06:04):
need everyone involved. Bloomberg crush the numbers and found that
Wall Street is the worst when it comes to gender
pay gaps. And here are the all male nominees. This
is the paycheck. The gender pay gap isn't just a
problem for women. If you're married to a woman, she's
(06:27):
making less money for your family single mom, then you
have less money to spend on childcare, which makes it
harder to work and earn more money. What does that
look like when you multiply it by all the women
in the world, By one estimate, twenty eight trillion dollars
would be added to the global economy if women earned
as much as men. I've been reporting on this for
(06:48):
a long time, and people like to tell me women
earn less than men for entirely justifiable reasons. They say
women tend to work in lower paying jobs and fields.
They say women take off more time to raise kids
than men do. Women, they say, are also less likely
to negotiate their salaries or ask for raises. But there
(07:09):
are plenty of people who don't see it that way.
They say women aren't given the same opportunities as men.
They say they're discriminated against or sexually harassed out of
their jobs and careers. A lot of people are only
just starting to understand how common that is. One of
the big problems with the gender pay gap is that
it's all of these things and they interact with each
(07:31):
other all the time. Women do make choices, they're also
sometimes discriminated against for the choices they make. There's no
simple explanation and there's no easy solution. This is all
(07:54):
about money. So let's go where the money is, Wall Street,
specifically to Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful banks.
If you have the same responsibilities and you are just
as effective, then you should be equally compensated and rewarded
(08:14):
for that work. That's Christina chen Austar. She went to
work at Goldman Sacks and over the next eight years
she made a lot of money, but the men working
at Goldman they made a lot more. Goldman says that
it's not about gender, it's just about individuals getting paid
for performance. Christina has been fighting for thirteen years now,
(08:37):
trying to prove there's more to it. She talked about
her case for the first time with my colleagues Dune,
Lawrence and mac Abelson. A warning, the story you're about
to hear contains a description of an alleged sexual assault.
Christina was born in Taiwan, but grew up outside of Chicago.
(09:00):
She's the oldest of five girls and just incredibly smart.
She graduated from m I T when she was twenty.
She had already been working for six years in banking
when Goldman hired her to sell convertible bonds that's a
bond that can be turned into a stock. Back then,
she didn't spend much time thinking about gender discrimination. She
was just really excited about joining Goldman Sachs. Like all
(09:21):
the big banks, the ones that make billions and billions
of dollars a year. Goldman gets high ratings and some
good press for things like generous maternity leave and mentoring programs.
But on Wall Street women still have to deal with
some shockingly bad behavior and a code of silence when
things go wrong. Christina found that out pretty early on
in Goldman. This still is not easy for her to
(09:44):
talk about. Well. Um, the sexual assault happened not long
after I joined Goldman, Sachs. I joined in March of
n and then it happened in October, which was just
seven months later. This is Christina's account from legal filings
and inner views of what happened Goldman, as you'll hear,
disputes most of it. She and her team had gone
(10:05):
out to dinner to celebrate someone's promotion. Then everyone went
to a strip club. She got bored and left, but
a colleague insisted on walking her to her boyfriend's apartment
a few blocks away. Upstairs. Outside the apartment, he pinned
her against the wall and groped and kissed her. She
had to fight him off. The Next day she saw
him in the office. He pulled her aside and he apologized.
(10:28):
He asked her to promise not to say anything, and
for a year and a half she didn't. When she
finally told her manager about the assault, it turned out
he already knew her boss was friends with this guy.
He told them what happened, but not who it had
happened with. He said, oh, that was you, and so
I was flabbergasted, and the response really disappointed me since
(10:53):
it was very clear that something was wrong. He said,
now it's my duty to raise this with HR and
and I would suggest that you not make a big
deal out of it, since you don't want a lawsuit.
And so I essentially did what he asked and then
reported that back to him. Christina hoped that would be
the end of it. It wasn't. After that, she says
(11:14):
she was cut out of big areas of business. Her
managers didn't support her attempts to find new opportunities. Her
performance reviews, which fed into how much she got paid,
were assigned to colleagues she didn't even work with much.
When you're busy and you're working hard, you just focus
on doing a good job and doing your work, and
you don't really think about it too much on a
(11:35):
day to day basis. And you can ignore a lot
of things, but you know at some point you step away,
you lift up your head, and you realize that things
are not right. That point for Christina came in two
thousand four, when she returned from maternity leave. Her team
had been reorganized and they had moved her desk. Now
(11:56):
she was sitting with a group of administrative assistants, all women.
It was a very visual and visceral representation that my
manager did not care about my career or care about
my prospects for contributing to the team. In eight years
at Goldman, Christina remained a vice president and her pay
(12:17):
ended up rising about the guy she says assaulted her,
he made managing director, then partner. Over those same years,
his pay went up something like four In two thousand five,
she quit and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, the federal agency tasked with investigating complaints of discrimination.
(12:39):
If you want to see your employer in court, in
most cases, this is the first step. Goldman told the
e e o C that Christina was paid more than
fairly and the firm hadn't wanted her to leave at all.
The part where she had to sit with the secretaries temperary.
Goldman Saks called her alleged assault a brief and disputed
interaction that she was now, in the words of Goldman
(13:00):
sax trying to exploit. Gina Palumbo, whoever sees employment law
at the firm, gave us Goldman Saxes perspective. What she
says is this. The key issues here are that Mission
Astars significantly delayed reporting the incident to employ your relations,
and when she did talk to employee relations, she declined
to provide any detail about the incident or to in
(13:20):
any way cooperate in the investigation. In two thousand ten,
the e o C gave her the green light. She
filed suit along with two other former Goldman employees, alleging
that Goldman paid women less than men for the same
work and that the bank systematically denied women the opportunities
(13:42):
they deserved. They wanted Goldman to pay for its mistakes
and to change its policies. They also wanted to sue
as a class, representing more than two thousand Goldmen women.
Once you say you're soon to represent a group, it
raises the stakes a lot. It stops being about this
or that individual experience. They'd have to prove Goldman is
systematically biased against the women who worked there. It also
(14:05):
raises the financial stakes for the women and for the bank.
For the last eight years, they've been going back and
forth and back and forth. There were fights about internal documents.
Christina's team won those and attempts to divide the coalition
of plaintiffs. Sometimes they were just unlucky. In two thousand eleven,
(14:25):
the Supreme Court issued a ruling that made it harder
to get class status. The case has also moved from
judge to judge. In two thousand and fourteen, Christina's lawyers
were finally ready to put a number on paid discrimination
at Goldman Sachs. Female vice presidents were paid twenty one
percent less than similar men, according to their analysis. Goldman
(14:46):
calls that analysis deeply flawed and maintains they pay everyone fairly. Meanwhile,
more women have joined the suit. Here's one of them,
Alice and Gamba, a former Goldman Sachs trader. I had
my head on. I did everything right. I jumped through
every hoop, I played the game right. I did everything
that should have got me the title that I wanted,
(15:08):
and I didn't get it. What do I have to lose. Now,
if I could help them out, you know, maybe there's
maybe there's a chance that something changes in this industry.
Christina was twenty five when she started at Goldman. She
was thirty four when she filed that ees. He complained
this March ty nine, she turned forty seven. The next
(15:28):
day was Good Friday, and the markets were closed. She
took her daughter to visit a prospective middle school. The
very same day, the judge ruled that Christina and Allison
can represent a class of as many as two thousand
three d women and christina GE's Kelly Dermany, M hey,
that's some amazing news. The court just certified. Christina didn't
(15:51):
hear her lawyer's voicemail until the next day. She was
sitting in a Broadway theater waiting for a Saturday matinee
of Mean Girls. A huge congratulations, just really really really
really happy for you. And this is not a happy ending.
It's more like a happy ending to a beginning. No
matter what happens, a settlement, a trial, you get the
(16:13):
sense it's going to be big. This, after all, is
Goldman Sex. I firmly believe that eventually the truth always
comes out. Eventually, it's just a question of time, but
I certainly hope that things will be better and that
we will come to a resolution before my daughter looks
for a job. Goldman shows no signs of throwing in
(16:40):
the towel. Gina Palombo told Bloomberg, we're defending the firm
and good faith against what we believe our meritless accusations.
She also says the plaintiffs analysis of Paya Goldman ignores
the fact that different roles in different teams have different
market values. Here's how Christina's lawyer, Kelly Dermody explains it.
(17:03):
That's what they would like to pretend that this case
is about millions of individual decisions as opposed to a
system that has, you know, players that operate within the
guidelines of the system. A lot of big US companies
make some version of this claim. They do their own
(17:25):
pay gap analysis and they find little or no disparity
between what they pay men and women. Well, Spargo, b
and Y, Melon City Group, Master Cards, and JP Morgan
have all released that information. After accounting for the different factors.
Those companies have all said their pay gap is really
very small. On a like for like basis, women make
(17:46):
about one percent less than men. Do you heard that right?
One percent? So how does that work? We know women
in the US make less than men, and yet all
these companies, these major employers, they say they barely have
a pay gap at all. My colleague Jordan Holman and
I tried to get to the bottom of it. So
(18:07):
here's the thing. Companies don't have to tell you anything
about their pay gaps. The law just says it's illegal
to discriminate in the US. Any company that's releasing a
number is releasing the number for presumably public relations purposes,
to inform whoever's watching that g don't come after us
and say we're discriminating. Look, here's an analysis that shows
(18:29):
that there's no pay gap once you account for people
doing comparable work. That's Henry Farber. He's a professor at
Princeton and he's an expert at measuring the gender pay gap.
I called Dr Farber and asked him about these small
pay gaps and how they could be so much smaller
than the national average, and he told me it just
(18:50):
really depends on what you measure. Well, as I understand it,
people can use these terms however they like, but the
average pay gap is simply taken as a whole. For example,
within a company, what's the average pay that men received
and the average pay that women received, and the proportional
difference between those two is what might be called the
(19:12):
average pay gap. What the average tells you a lot
of the time is that most of a company's highest
paid people are men, but it doesn't tell you if
men and women doing the same job are getting paid
the same. So if you want to figure out if
there's a gap between men and women doing the same work,
then that's when you use the adjusted pay gap. And
(19:32):
that calculates all of the things that go into compensation,
and there's lots of them, like education, experience, how long
you've worked out a place. There's no specific formula for
calculating what some might call an adjusted pay gap, so
to be clear, there's no set equation for the adjusted
pay gap. Companies can use whatever variables they want, but
(19:56):
to be fair, there are reasons companies might want to
know both number bers they're just a pay gap helps
them compare apples to apples. Plus, if you aren't paying
men and women the same for the same work, then
you have a problem. Companies say they consider variables like
(20:16):
someone's experience, job title and geography. For example, someone living
in New York probably makes more than someone in Kansas
City because the cost of living is higher. But then
sometimes companies use the phrase pay philosophy. What does that mean?
We don't really know, and they don't elaborate. Recently, when
(20:39):
Dr Barber was looking at one company's data, he came
up with four different adjust to pay gap figures that
reigns between two point eight percent and eight point six percent.
When the company did its own analysis, they said the
gap was even smaller zero point two percent. You can
(20:59):
imagine in that the company might be able to cook
up an adjustment analysis. Cook up is the wrong word,
it's too pejorative, but come up with an adjusted pay
analysis that shows there's not much of a gap at all,
whereas some other analysts might look at this and say, no, no,
you're over adjusting for some things, and in fact there
is a substantial pay gap. But that's the problem with
(21:21):
the adjusted pay gap. We don't know what variables they're
including and how much weight they're giving them. Maybe everyone's
getting paid fairly for the job they're in, but this
figure might not tell us that companies are just asking
us to trust them and that's a little awkward. I
haven't seen too many companies, frankly, either talk about their
(21:41):
pay gaps or admit that they have a substantial pay
gap between men and women. The average pay gap tells
us who's taking home the biggest salaries at these companies,
and if men keep earning a lot more than the
women they work with like they do and most major
US companies, the average pay gap is going to stay
pretty big. To change this equation, you need a more
(22:05):
balanced workforce at every single level, so like more women
at the top of the pay scale or more men
at the bottom, exactly. And then the question is is
everyone getting a fair shot of reaching the highest paid jobs.
(22:28):
There's a word that's entered the popular lexicon recently that
I think perfectly describes what's happening. Gas lighting. Decades of
statistics tell us we're making less money. Our experiences tell
us we're being paid less. They moved Christina's desk, My
mom saw the salaries of her coworkers. But our employers say,
(22:50):
there's nothing to see here, just a whole lot of
reasonable explanations. Next week on the paycheck, we're going to
dig into those explanations. How would did we get here?
Why do women make less money than men in the
first place? The short answer sex. Thanks for listening to
(23:12):
The Paycheck. If you like our show, please head on
over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review,
and subscribe. This episode was reported by Dune, Lawrence, Max Abelson,
and Jordan Holman. It was edited by Janet Paskin, produced
by Elizabeth, and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. We had
additional help from Magnus Hendrickson, Francesca Levy, and Gillian Goodman.
(23:37):
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
at bloomberg dot com slash Paycheck. Bloomberg's head a podcast
is Francesca Levy
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