Well, that was fast. Just a few days ago, I wrote about Fearless Girl facing off against the Wall Street bull.
Now, Wall Street bros don’t typically like Fearless Girls (that’s the whole point of the gimmick). So this guy decided that he would take a strong stand against a bronze statue and just hump it (image via the original Facebook post that reported the incident):
Lets hope that this is the only humping he is going to get to do for a while.
The original Facebook poster and other commentators have noted that this guy and his ilk are why we need feminism. I can think of several hundred other reasons why we need feminism (lets not get carried away and give all the little wolflets of Wall Street too much credit for feminism). But I thought I would use this opportunity to remind myself of the many ways in which Wall Street promotes a blatantly sexist culture:
- In this July 2016 New York Times article titled “How Wall Street Bro Talk Keeps Women Down,” the author, a (male) former bond trader, details overt displays of sexism he observed among his former Wall Street colleagues. For instance, take this: “I often heard men say about female colleagues, “I’d like to get behind that.”” Also, this: “A bond trader friend received a smaller-than-expected bonus after refusing to sleep with her boss, and soon quit.”
- Another article in the New York Times is titled “A Colleague Drank My Breast Milk and Other Wall Street Tales” Need more explanation? Alright, I will indulge you. The author, Maureen Sherry, is a former Managing Director at Bear Stearns whose 12 years in Wall Street gave her more than enough material to write a book on the subject of Wall Street sexism. In this article, she writes of “the “moo” sounds that traders made when [she] headed to the nurse’s office with a breast pump [after returning from her maternity leave]”, “the colleague who on a dare drank a shot of the breast milk [she] had stored in the office fridge,” “the guy known for dropping Band-Aids on women’s desks when the trading floor was cold because he didn’t “want to be distracted”,”about [her] first day on Wall Street, when [she] opened up a pizza box to find condoms instead of pepperoni slices,” and “one guy telling [her] that [they] should hire only “women who have brothers.””
- And then there were Sherry’s less provocative revelations: women having to avoid “stereotypical female behavior,” having to hide their pregnancies, their children’s artwork and in some instance, entirely suppress any desire to have children at all, having to accept men getting entirely undeserving credit for their ideas. These sound almost tame in comparison to the Band-Aids, moos and condoms that women receive from their male colleagues.
- In 2014, Goldman Sachs passed out nailfilers and vanity mirrors at a coding conference for women engineers at Harvard (because, you know, coding can be hard on the nails).
- A few years ago, three former employees of Merrill Lynch sued the company, alleging that during training they were instructed to read a book called “Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics From a Woman at the Top” and emulate its advice. “The women “were also pressured to attend gals-only events on topics like ‘dressing for success’ and ‘preparing healthy meals while working full-time.’” The women also report being told to be more “perky” or “bubbly,” and one even says a manager told her to “stick to her knitting” when she tried to bring in a client.”
- And of course, there are many, many other gender discrimination lawsuits against Wall Street firms, plenty of statistics on pay gaps between male and female Wall Street employees, and staggering levels of gender imbalance at all levels at Wall Street firms.
I could go on. But this was supposed to be a short post so let me stop right here.
She Can Do It! 