Lady Business: Wall Street, E. Jean Carroll, and the evolving legacy of #MeToo

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 147th issue, published May 14, 2023.
 

Open Endings

There’s an overwhelming desire–among news editors and election pollsters and social-media engineers, but also, let’s face it, among all of us–for simple, definitive headlines. This CEO is a genius hero or a crazed villain. This candidate will win or lose the next presidential election. This pandemic is over.

The reality is almost always more complicated. And the last couple of weeks have particularly demonstrated the nuanced legacy of #MeToo, the ongoing reckoning over sexism and harassment in business, politics, and pretty much everywhere.

The most high-profile recent headline was E. Jean Carroll’s court victory against a former U.S. president who, Carroll alleges, raped her almost thirty years ago. A civil-court jury did not find Donald Trump liable for rape—but it did find him liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carrolly, and ordered him to pay her $5 million in damages.

Carroll’s landmark legal victory–and the trial that preceded it–set off a new round of analysis over the legacy of #MeToo, and the endless attempts to declare it a success or a failure. “It’s been common, in recent years, for the media to make real-time declarations about where we are in the feminist project,” as New York’s Rebecca Traister put it. But few such stories noted that, a week before Carroll’s legal victory, two other similar lawsuits came to a more ambivalent end.

As I reported in October, five years after #MeToo went viral, the financial industry has remained relatively untouched by any sort of visible reckoning over gender bias or sexual harassment. That was supposed to change this spring, as TCW Group and Goldman Sachs prepared to defend themselves in court against two high-profile and long-simmering lawsuits. The trial against TCW was scheduled to start on May 1; the trial against Goldman was set for June 7. (Both Goldman and TCW have denied all wrongdoing.)

But once again, Wall Street has managed to avoid a public airing of employee complaints about sexism and harassment. In early May, I broke the news for Fortune that former TCW employee Sara Tirschwell had quietly settled her five-year-old individual lawsuit against the bond trading giant.

A day later—as I was writing two Fortune newsletter essays about the TCW settlement, and preparing to speak that evening on a journalism panel about #MeToo’s legacy on Wall Street—reports started trickling out that Goldman Sachs was also on the brink of settling the class-action gender-discrimination case against it.

This week it became official: The investment bank will pay $215 million to about 2,880 current and former Goldman employees. Minus legal fees of about $71 million, the settlement works out to about $50,000 per person—a rounding error for a bank that reportedly pays employees six-figure bonuses in good years. 

My initial reaction to the Goldman settlement was to file it under “surprising but not shocking.” It was more remarkable that the lawsuit had gotten so close to a trial, in an industry where most employment disputes are forced into mandatory arbitration, or settled quietly out of court.

Lead plaintiff Cristina Chen-Oster, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, first filed a federal gender-bias complaint against Goldman in 2005–and persisted over the next 18 years, or the entire life so far of her youngest child, as I reported for Fortune last fall. “There’s been an outpouring of support that I did not expect,” she told me then, even while acknowledging that “Wall Street is still slow to make real changes."

I couldn’t help but notice this week that Chen-Oster hasn’t commented on the settlement, even in her lawyers’ press release about it. (She and Tirschwell both declined to comment to me; not surprising, as many legal settlements usually involve carefully negotiated conditions about what the various parties can and can't say.) I was also surprised that, after the case had gotten so close to trial, Goldman was able to end it for what seems like a relatively low price tag. For context, Smith Barney paid a little less—around $150 million—to settle a previous high-profile sexual-harassment class-action, the infamous “Boom Boom Room” lawsuit filed in 1996.

So yes, big Wall Street companies successfully kept two more #MeToo cases out of court this month. But I wouldn’t necessarily declare this a defeat for Chen-Oster, Tirschwell, or the thousands of other women who have made similar claims against Wall Street employers. There are at least signs that these cases could lead to long-term change: For example, as part of the class-action settlement, Goldman Sachs will also engage an independent consultant for three years, to review its performance-evaluation processes and to conduct pay-equity analyses. Meanwhile, since Tirschwell first filed her lawsuit, TCW has appointed a new CEO: Goldman veteran Katie Koch, the first woman to run the bond trading giant, and someone that Tirschwell told me last fall she has “a lot of respect for."

It’s hard to know, especially immediately, how much any of these small changes will move the industry needle. Still, even just two weeks ago, the predominant narrative was that #MeToo had failed, or at least faded. Carroll’s legal victory changed those conclusions, again. And, while Tirschwell and Chen-Oster ultimately did not have similar days in court, their years and decades of persistence also led to at least some change in their professional worlds—and deserve more headlines beyond the financial press.

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com