Terminated: Why the Women of Wall Street Are Disappearing

This is the Cover Story on this week’s Forbes magazine.

After the scandals of the 1990s, didn’t investment banks put sexist employment practices behind them? Evidently not.

“Nadine Mentor, 29, had just landed in New York – and found out, she says, that she’d bagged one of the biggest gets of her career at Citigroup:  a role for the bank leading a bond offering, valued at as much as $400 million, for the U.S. Virgin Islands.  The deal was worth potentially more than $500,000 in fees. A day later, on Nov. 21 2008, as she headed to a business meeting, she got an anxious call from her boss. Sensing something was up, Mentor said, “Just tell me, just tell me.”  Her boss gave her the bad news.  Mentor who had been lured to Citi from UBS in 2005, was included in a round of downsizing.

When her boss was laid off last summer, Amy Bartloletti, 38, says she was asked to run a Citi group that securitizes home loans through state authorities. But one of her peers in New York complained, she says, and the bank wound up making him a cohead of the group, asking both to take the Series 53 licensing test, required of mangers in the municipal securities business. Bartoletti took the exam and passed in October. On Nov. 21 she was axed, told later by the bank that she was too expensive. Bartoletti contends that she and her male counterpart made the same base salary, $175,000 and that she is more qualified than he. As of late February her cohead, who now runs the group, still doesn’t have his Series 53 certification. “It’s the old boys’ network,” says Bartoletti. “It’ s very hard to imagine that that what is happening in this day and age.”

Mentor and Bartoletti are among five former managers and rising young stars who were cast out that day. They say that in all, 24 professionals in the public finance department lost their jobs , in roughly equal numbers of men and women.  Yet the women claim they were victimized by more than economic necessity.” More . . .

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