Good morning. Fortune senior writer Maria Aspan here.
Five years after #MeToo went viral, the financial industry has remained relatively untouched by any sort of visible reckoning over gender bias or sexual harassment. That was supposed to change this spring, as TCW Group and Goldman Sachs prepared to defend themselves in court against two high-profile and long-simmering lawsuits.
But once again, Wall Street has managed to avoid a public airing of employee complaints about sexism and harassment. Former TCW employee Sara Tirschwell has quietly settled her five-year-old lawsuit against the bond trading giant, before a trial that was scheduled to start Monday, I reported for Fortune this week.
Tirschwell had alleged that her supervisor sexually harassed her and that the company fired her in retaliation for reporting it; TCW had denied the allegations. Now TCW and Tirschwell have “resolved their litigation pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement,” spokespeople for both parties told me.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs is also seeking to pay around $200 million, to settle a much larger and older legal challenge, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. A class action lawsuit alleging gender bias at Goldman is scheduled to go to trial next month; lead plaintiff Cristina Chen-Oster, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, first filed a federal complaint against the bank in 2005—18 years ago—and has since been joined by 1,400 past and current Goldman employees. (Goldman has denied the allegations; representatives for both the bank and Chen-Oster declined to comment on reports of the settlement talks.)
Whatever happens with the Goldman Sachs lawsuit, the existence and longevity of both cases is pretty extraordinary for Wall Street, as I wrote for Term Sheet last fall:
Big banks, like many large employers, often require their employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements, which keep all kinds of workplace disputes out of court—and out of the public eye. About 60 million workers are subject to forced arbitration, according to a 2018 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Both Chen-Oster and Tirschwell told me that they were only able to file suit—and talk to me—because they hadn’t been required to sign arbitration clauses when they worked for the companies they’re now suing. And it’s clear that this was the exception, rather than the rule: In an almost 30-year career on Wall Street, “TCW is the only place that I worked where I didn’t have an arbitration clause,” as Tirschwell puts it.
Chen-Oster told me then, “Arbitration doesn’t allow for things to be more broadly broadcasted, or for there to be greater consequences.” Whatever ends up happening with her case, she and Tirschwell have already spent years increasing public awareness of the culture still facing many women on Wall Street. “Change happens slowly, and then all at once,” Tirschwell told me last fall. “Change is still happening very slowly on Wall Street—but maybe this is the moment.”
See you tomorrow,
Maria Aspan
Email: maria.aspan@fortune.com
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Correction: In yesterday's newsletter, we erroneously wrote that Raisley acquired Aplos when in fact it was the other way around. Aplos, owned by ASG, acquired Raisely, a Melbourne, Australia-based nonprofit fundraising platform. We regret the error.
Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
