Ex-Goldman Sachs analyst reveals culture at NYC HQ where female recruits were ranked on ‘f***ability’
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: An ex-Goldman Sachs analyst has spoken up about her experience inside the company's Manhattan headquarters in her new memoir. She detailed one incident where her colleagues ranked women on their "f**kability". 46-year-old Jamie Fiore Higgins spoke about her experiences in her book 'Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs'.
In her book, she wrote about the spreadsheet in which an employee declared, "I want t*t size, a** shape and leg length'. In another incident, Higgins recalled that she once removed an employee from an account because he was having an affair with a client, he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her to the wall, yelling, "If I could, I'd rip your f**king face off". She reported the incident to her boss, who refused to fire him as they could not "afford to lose his golf connections".
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Higgins, who attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated in 1997, wanted to become a social worker. Her mother told her she needed a higher-paying job to pay off student loans. Higgins completed the Goldman Sachs training program back in 1998 and passed her licensing exam to become a financial analyst. She was awarded an $80,000 bonus after her first year.
Her first promotion came in 2006, but with an understanding that she stop having children. She recalled how one employee told her of her promotion, "the only reason you got it is because of your vagina." "Most guys at Goldman assume that women who get promoted either filled a quota or screwed … someone," she said, according to the Daily Mail.
Higgins said one woman at Goldman Sachs had to quit after her work was delegated to the men in the office. Other women confided in her about senior members at the company staring at thier breasts or offering shoulder massages. Higgins said she thought of quitting multiple times herself, unable to deal with the misogyny she experienced. However, she held onto the job as she received good yearly bonuses each January. In fact, she reached a yearly salary of $1 million one year. The salary was important for her to be able to support her family.
Higgins said she would regularly take Xanax to handle the stress she faced at work. She once suffered a miscarriage and requested some time off, to which her boss said, "You were hardly pregnant and it's been three days already. When my wife had a miscarriage, she was fine after a few days."
The first time she received a poor performance review after 17 years with the company, she was advised to remove her children's pictures from her desk. "I need a commercial killer, Jamie, not a class mom," she was told. Her performance review reportedly included phrasing like "motherly".
"It was official: my career and reputation were being sabotaged," she said. "There was an intentionality behind this madness: to keep the strongest relationships with management and the largest clients, and therefore the influence, with these types of men. It maintained the old boys' club and solidified its power.
Meanwhile, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson told The New Yorker, "We strongly disagree with Ms. Higgins' characterization of Goldman Sachs's culture, and we decline to respond to anonymized allegations."