Story 96
At another Tier 1 bank (not Citi), when interviewing for associate/analyst jobs, several of the female candidates received invites to one-on-one drinks with a male MD. He sent the invites directly and individually, typically a few weeks after the formal/firm on-site rounds. Because of a few of us (fortunately) compared notes, the pattern was clear.
One in this group of acquaintances, deciding she wanted to gather more information for the sisterhood (she had received an offer from her preferred firm in the intervening weeks and was going to reject this other pipeline), replied to the guy that she would accept the invitation. She shared the invite location details with her flatmates and fiance for safety (and kept a close eye on her drink, i.e. didn’t go to the rest room, etc), and her hunch was correct. The drink was a pretext for a sexual advance, one that the MD stated would impact whether she would be offered a job, or not (“I can be very helpful in your process”). That experience, of course, made it easy to reject that firm. And, many years later, that associate candidate is now/currently a partner at Goldman, in asset management. Many of her clients are female titans, and she’s well-known for going to bat for her clients on valuations, co-investments, etc. Her reputation is sterling, and her results are outstanding. She is bold and fierce–and in a macro sense, she won.
Thank you to many leaders on Wall Street — female and male — who root out low character. It’s an institutional vulnerability, of course (reputational risk; loss of clients; lawsuits, etc). Tier 1 firms must consider high character as table stakes.
Thank you for creating this website for both transparency and visibility.