Morning Coffee: The tale of the male banker with 4 children and the female banker with 3. Hedge fund managers and the apocalypse

Want to know the different that fatherhood and motherhood makes to the careers of men and women? Research already shows that fathers get a pay rise while mothers are penalized. Now, Bloomberg's tale of a vice president (VP) at Goldman Sachs appears to highlight the discrepancies in actuality.

Tania Mirchandani spent 15 years at Goldman Sachs, starting as an analyst in M&A and ending as a vice president (VP) in asset management. Towards the end of that time, she had three children, each around two years apart and (seemingly) took four months of maternity leave for each one. Her husband, Dinesh, also works: he's the CFO of a company that provides band merchandise for musicians.

John Mallory was Mirchandani's boss at Goldman. A partner in the investment management division, he's spent around 20 years with the firm. Mallory has four children and a wife, Tracy, who left her finance career in her 20s and who now describes herself as, 'CEO, COO, logistics coordinator, driver, chef and therapist for Mallory Family Inc.’’ John Mallory likes sport: Mirchandani claims Mallory would organize evening sporting outing and drinks that would exclude female advisors like herself.

While John Mallory was very able to become Goldman's partner in charge of asset and wealth management for the entirety of U.S. and Latin America with four children, Tania Mirchandani is alleging that she was penalized for having three and for taking her full allocation of maternity leave each time. After being let go (on maternity leave) in 2016, she wants $1.5m in compensation.

At issue is a comment Mallory allegedly made when discovering his VP was pregnant for the third time. "That's a lot of mouths to feed," he's alleged to have told Mirchandani, disparagingly. She alleges that after her first maternity leave she discovered that her (male) partner no longer wanted to work with her. After her second, she discovered that a key account she had cultivated had been assigned to a male advisor, and during her third she was laid off. Mirchandani claims Goldman pressures women to keep their maternity leaves as short as possible and expects them to get straight back up to speed as soon as they return: "Come back from four months and, a week later, it is like ‘what are you doing for me."

Goldman denies all this and says its policies are "explicitly designed" to support new parents and that Mirchandani was terminated for, "strategic business planning reasons." The courts will soon decide. In the meantime, Mallory is now a GS partner and Mirchandani has left banking and is now a real estate manager and investor in California.

Separately, Douglas Roshkoff, an "influential intellectual" who studies human autonomy in a digital age has written a piece on Medium about his strange experience with some paranoid survivalist hedge fund managers. Roshkoff says he was taken to a "super-deluxe" private resort where he met, "five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world." There, they paid him half his annual professor's salary to quiz him about how to survive The Event. - Their euphemism for, "environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down."

Roshkoff says there was some concern that the hedge fund managers' private armies wouldn't follow commands after their masters' money became worthless in the apocalyptic future. "I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now," he says. "They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it."

Meanwhile:

How Goldman Sachs' Marquee system evolved beyond warfare with traders to a place where clients, 'can now execute trades, examine portfolios, and design bespoke products via browser, desktop application or API', while, 'technologists now listen to music and sip energy drinks from a refrigerator reserved for Marquee employees, under freshly painted columns of blue and white that are inscribed with the project's name.' (Business Insider)

Female bankers should get higher bonuses this year. So should equity derivatives professionals (up 9.5%). Rates traders will probably get lower bonuses (down 6.4%). (Bloomberg) 

Standard Chartered has offered two years of free housing, paid school fees and German lessons as part of a deal to persuade some of its most senior bankers to quit London for Frankfurt. (Financial News) 

1,800 financial services jobs have already been confirmed as leaving London. Bankers from Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Credit Suisse, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered and UBS have all been told they will have to quit the capital. (Financial News) 

The European Central Bank says twenty-five banks have concluded, or are close to finishing, applications for EU subsidiaries. (Bloomberg) 

Banking is no longer the highest paying career in Switzerland. You can earn more in the pharmaceutical industry or insurance. Even mid-ranking civil servants earn more than bankers. (Finews) 

Ex-Goldman quant and gifted mathematician Ke Xu is being sued by a shadowy hedge fund after allegedly stealing its 'signals'. Former Goldman colleagues helped fund the first stages of his defence. (Bloomberg) 

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