"Terminated: Why the Women of Wall Street Are Disappearing" Forbes Feb. 25

[Captain_Nemo]

On The Cover/Top Stories
Terminated: Why the Women of Wall Street Are Disappearing
Anita Raghavan, 02.25.09, 06:00 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated March 16, 2009

excerpt:

"I think women are just getting creamed" in the downturn, says Linda D. Friedman, the Chicago attorney who brought the case involving the infamous "Boom-Boom Room" against Smith Barney in the mid-1990s, throwing a spotlight on the frat-house-style antics that male brokers used to harass their female colleagues in the basement of Smith Barney's Garden City, N.Y. office. "There are just so few women," says Friedman, "you lose one, you lose 100%."

Indeed, none of the leading Wall Street banks--Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ), the combined Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Credit Suisse (nyse: CS - news - people ) and Morgan Stanley--has a single woman in any of the top three jobs. Asked to provide a current breakdown of the number of female officers (managing directors, directors and vice presidents), only Goldman responded: As of today, its ranks of female vice presidents, which includes its executive directors, stand at 29.4% of the 9,244 total, up from 27.9% of 7,667 three years earlier; over the same period women increased from 15.5% of 1,236 managing directors to 16.6% of 1,796.

Part of the problem has to do with the fact that trading desks reward sharp elbows more than they value brains or managerial skills. Meanwhile, in the hushed corridors of investment banking, women are so thinly represented in the most senior positions that as securities firms shed workers, they are becoming an endangered species."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/072_terminated_women_2.html

[DonCoquixote]

1. A quote that says it all

"Part of the problem has to do with the fact that trading desks reward sharp elbows more than they value brains or managerial skills."

This goes beyond the sexism issue, this is the reason our economy has gone down. Bush himself is a fine example of a sharp elbow.