The News: Like It Or Not, the Boom Boom Room's Still There

Did the rise of corporate diversity and compliance enforcement on Wall Street face down gender discrimination? Hardly.

Recent gender lawsuits against big financial firms indicate little has changed since the 1980s "Boom-Boom Room" days, observes Susan Antilla, Bloomberg News columnist and author of a 2002 book about the "Boom-Boom" culture at Smith Barney and elsewhere that spawned a generation of lawsuits. The only thing missing today, Antilla writes in Investment News, is "the dirty-old-man-style sex talk and the Penthouse centerfolds taped to the trading-room walls."

Women filing lawsuits against big financial firms say men are getting the promotions, women are getting left out of important meetings and anyone dumb enough to complain is met with a blitz of retaliation....

Wall Street is an institutional dinosaur, though, when it comes to accepting that if you want to treat women equally, you can't shut them out of perks, equal pay or key business meetings.

According to evidence introduced in a March 30 lawsuit against Bank of America, women were excluded from meetings, plum accounts went to the men, and compliance tended to come down harder on a woman who protested than on guys she complained about. And in a March 16 complaint to the EEOC, an asset finance associate at Citigroup alleged that when she complained that a male co-worker made seemingly sexual comments about her in front of colleagues, the boss just said, "That's Dale."

Antilla brands that attitude "a throwback to the response that the litigating women of the 1980s and 1990s got when they tried to tell management how bad the discrimination was."

Wall Street Women Still Knocking on Men's Rooms [Investment News]

Scotiabank Chief Says Asia Is Next Stop for Expansion [Bloomberg News]

Compensation Watch '10: KPMG Back to Raises and Bonuses [Going Concern]

Financial Deal-Making May Rise in 2010, PwC Says [NY Times]

Finra, SEC And State Regulators Swarm Morgan Keegan With Fraud Charges [Investment News]

Goldman Sachs Trader Hedayat Said to Leave Firm [BusinessWeek]

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