Speaker 1: M Hi. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter at Bloomberg. This
Speaker 1: is the first episode of the Paycheck. For the next
Speaker 1: six weeks, we're going to investigate a big, expensive, global mystery.
Speaker 1: Why in women still make less money, a lot less
Speaker 1: money than men. There's pretty broad agreement on the stats.
Speaker 1: According to the U S Census and the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Labor Statistics in the US, for every one dollar a
Speaker 1: man makes, a woman gets about eighty cents. For women
Speaker 1: of color, it's even worse. Black women are in just
Speaker 1: sixty cents on the dollar. Hispanic women only fifty four cents.
Speaker 1: That's based on median hourly earnings for full time workers.
Speaker 1: But the numbers they only get you so are because
Speaker 1: the gender pay gap, that's what it's called. By the way,
Speaker 1: isn't just about the data. It's about how it plays
Speaker 1: out in real life. So here's one way it works
Speaker 1: in real life, actually my life sort of, because it's
Speaker 1: about my mom. Linda Bradsky, that's my mom, was working
Speaker 1: as a pediatric ear nose and throat surgeon up in Buffalo,
Speaker 1: New York. She worked at the Children's Hospital, where she
Speaker 1: was the busiest surgeon in her practice. She was also
Speaker 1: a tenured full professor at Sunni Buffalo, a rank only
Speaker 1: a dozen other women had in her field. Then one
Speaker 1: day she was doing some work in her department office
Speaker 1: and she found a document with the salaries of her
Speaker 1: colleagues on it. When I saw what salaries would be
Speaker 1: given out, I was appalled when I discovered that a
Speaker 1: junior colleague, a man with lower rank, less seniority and
Speaker 1: pure responsibilities, was paid twice the stipend from the university
Speaker 1: as was And to make it worse, in some cases,
Speaker 1: my hospital colleagues were paid more than five times my
Speaker 1: hospital stipend for the administrative work I performed. Even though
Speaker 1: I had the most busy service in the hospital. Her
Speaker 1: male colleagues brought in less business, and yet they made
Speaker 1: five times as much money. So she asked for a raise,
Speaker 1: but she didn't get it. For four years, she tried
Speaker 1: to solve things internally, but finally in two thousand one,
Speaker 1: she filed a lawsuit, and for the next seven years
Speaker 1: she spent most of her time outside of work fighting
Speaker 1: her legal battle. She called it her third job. Even
Speaker 1: with a huge practice, a lot of economic security, academic standing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of power, and my grants my research program.
Speaker 1: It was very, very tough battle. My mom passed away
Speaker 1: in so there are a lot of questions. I can't
Speaker 1: ask her about her legal battle. I can't ask her
Speaker 1: about a lot of things like trump, me too, or
Speaker 1: my bad back. Those clips you heard are from a
Speaker 1: seminar she gave in after she sued. She still worked
Speaker 1: full time as a surgeon, and I remember the nights
Speaker 1: and weekends she spent preparing for depositions, or reviewing discovery documents,
Speaker 1: or interviewing expert witnesses. I was in high school for
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, and when I got bored,
Speaker 1: I'd joined her at the kitchen table and we'd sit
Speaker 1: together and sift through three ring binders full of salary information.
Speaker 1: Her lawyer Sam, he was on speed dial. I was
Speaker 1: halfway through college when she finally settled with the university.
Speaker 1: She got seven hundred forty thousand dollars, but she later
Speaker 1: said the money wasn't enough to make up for the
Speaker 1: time she spent or what it did to her career.
Speaker 1: She got passed over for jobs and stopped getting invitations
Speaker 1: to speak on panels. I remember this one time she
Speaker 1: had to go to anger management because she spoke too
Speaker 1: loudly during a medical emergency. I was sent to see
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist for anger management, and after two sessions, the
Speaker 1: psychiatrist wrote back to the medical staff that Dr Brawsky
Speaker 1: has no anger management problem. She acted appropriately to the
Speaker 1: stressors she faced. When the medical staff president called her
Speaker 1: and she was angry. The psychiatrist says, I think you
Speaker 1: have an anger management problem, but actually she was angry
Speaker 1: and frustrated and upset the lawsuit. It took up a
Speaker 1: lot of time and energy, but the worst part of
Speaker 1: it was that she didn't think it changed anything for
Speaker 1: other women in medicine or any other field. YO. The
Speaker 1: year my mom found out she made five times less
Speaker 1: than her male colleagues was also the year Want to
Speaker 1: Be by the Spice Girls hit number one. That was
Speaker 1: the cultural moment. I grew up in a league of
Speaker 1: their own. Powerpuff Girls, legally blonde like It's girl power
Speaker 1: was everywhere. My mom and everyone else told me I
Speaker 1: could be whatever I wanted, and I believe them. My
Speaker 1: mom was a surgeon, she wore shoulder pads in a
Speaker 1: funny way. The lesson I took from her lawsuit reinforced
Speaker 1: all that girl power stuff. See women could be strong
Speaker 1: and fight for what's right. It took me a lot
Speaker 1: longer to realize the other part of it, that my
Speaker 1: mom could be all of these amazing things and yet
Speaker 1: still face discrimination. When you look at the world, you
Speaker 1: know what the population like. Where is our place like?
Speaker 1: Where is our value? People? Real work helps to keep
Speaker 1: women not on a pedestal but in a cage, and nationwide,
Speaker 1: the median salary for men is greater than women in
Speaker 1: ninety nine point six of major occupations, gil power equalization
Speaker 1: between the sex sees. What dudes are you won't? We
Speaker 1: want to end gender inequality, and to do this we
Speaker 1: need everyone involved. Bloomberg crush the numbers and found that
Speaker 1: Wall Street is the worst when it comes to gender
Speaker 1: pay gaps. And here are the all male nominees. This
Speaker 1: is the paycheck. The gender pay gap isn't just a
Speaker 1: problem for women. If you're married to a woman, she's
Speaker 1: making less money for your family single mom, then you
Speaker 1: have less money to spend on childcare, which makes it
Speaker 1: harder to work and earn more money. What does that
Speaker 1: look like when you multiply it by all the women
Speaker 1: in the world, By one estimate, twenty eight trillion dollars
Speaker 1: would be added to the global economy if women earned
Speaker 1: as much as men. I've been reporting on this for
Speaker 1: a long time, and people like to tell me women
Speaker 1: earn less than men for entirely justifiable reasons. They say
Speaker 1: women tend to work in lower paying jobs and fields.
Speaker 1: They say women take off more time to raise kids
Speaker 1: than men do. Women, they say, are also less likely
Speaker 1: to negotiate their salaries or ask for raises. But there
Speaker 1: are plenty of people who don't see it that way.
Speaker 1: They say women aren't given the same opportunities as men.
Speaker 1: They say they're discriminated against or sexually harassed out of
Speaker 1: their jobs and careers. A lot of people are only
Speaker 1: just starting to understand how common that is. One of
Speaker 1: the big problems with the gender pay gap is that
Speaker 1: it's all of these things and they interact with each
Speaker 1: other all the time. Women do make choices, they're also
Speaker 1: sometimes discriminated against for the choices they make. There's no
Speaker 1: simple explanation and there's no easy solution. This is all
Speaker 1: about money. So let's go where the money is, Wall Street,
Speaker 1: specifically to Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful banks.
Speaker 1: If you have the same responsibilities and you are just
Speaker 1: as effective, then you should be equally compensated and rewarded
Speaker 1: for that work. That's Christina chen Austar. She went to
Speaker 1: work at Goldman Sacks and over the next eight years
Speaker 1: she made a lot of money, but the men working
Speaker 1: at Goldman they made a lot more. Goldman says that
Speaker 1: it's not about gender, it's just about individuals getting paid
Speaker 1: for performance. Christina has been fighting for thirteen years now,
Speaker 1: trying to prove there's more to it. She talked about
Speaker 1: her case for the first time with my colleagues Dune,
Speaker 1: Lawrence and mac Abelson. A warning, the story you're about
Speaker 1: to hear contains a description of an alleged sexual assault.
Speaker 1: Christina was born in Taiwan, but grew up outside of Chicago.
Speaker 1: She's the oldest of five girls and just incredibly smart.
Speaker 1: She graduated from m I T when she was twenty.
Speaker 1: She had already been working for six years in banking
Speaker 1: when Goldman hired her to sell convertible bonds that's a
Speaker 1: bond that can be turned into a stock. Back then,
Speaker 1: she didn't spend much time thinking about gender discrimination. She
Speaker 1: was just really excited about joining Goldman Sachs. Like all
Speaker 1: the big banks, the ones that make billions and billions
Speaker 1: of dollars a year. Goldman gets high ratings and some
Speaker 1: good press for things like generous maternity leave and mentoring programs.
Speaker 1: But on Wall Street women still have to deal with
Speaker 1: some shockingly bad behavior and a code of silence when
Speaker 1: things go wrong. Christina found that out pretty early on
Speaker 1: in Goldman. This still is not easy for her to
Speaker 1: talk about. Well. Um, the sexual assault happened not long
Speaker 1: after I joined Goldman, Sachs. I joined in March of
Speaker 1: n and then it happened in October, which was just
Speaker 1: seven months later. This is Christina's account from legal filings
Speaker 1: and inner views of what happened Goldman, as you'll hear,
Speaker 1: disputes most of it. She and her team had gone
Speaker 1: out to dinner to celebrate someone's promotion. Then everyone went
Speaker 1: to a strip club. She got bored and left, but
Speaker 1: a colleague insisted on walking her to her boyfriend's apartment
Speaker 1: a few blocks away. Upstairs. Outside the apartment, he pinned
Speaker 1: her against the wall and groped and kissed her. She
Speaker 1: had to fight him off. The Next day she saw
Speaker 1: him in the office. He pulled her aside and he apologized.
Speaker 1: He asked her to promise not to say anything, and
Speaker 1: for a year and a half she didn't. When she
Speaker 1: finally told her manager about the assault, it turned out
Speaker 1: he already knew her boss was friends with this guy.
Speaker 1: He told them what happened, but not who it had
Speaker 1: happened with. He said, oh, that was you, and so
Speaker 1: I was flabbergasted, and the response really disappointed me since
Speaker 1: it was very clear that something was wrong. He said,
Speaker 1: now it's my duty to raise this with HR and
Speaker 1: and I would suggest that you not make a big
Speaker 1: deal out of it, since you don't want a lawsuit.
Speaker 1: And so I essentially did what he asked and then
Speaker 1: reported that back to him. Christina hoped that would be
Speaker 1: the end of it. It wasn't. After that, she says
Speaker 1: she was cut out of big areas of business. Her
Speaker 1: managers didn't support her attempts to find new opportunities. Her
Speaker 1: performance reviews, which fed into how much she got paid,
Speaker 1: were assigned to colleagues she didn't even work with much.
Speaker 1: When you're busy and you're working hard, you just focus
Speaker 1: on doing a good job and doing your work, and
Speaker 1: you don't really think about it too much on a
Speaker 1: day to day basis. And you can ignore a lot
Speaker 1: of things, but you know at some point you step away,
Speaker 1: you lift up your head, and you realize that things
Speaker 1: are not right. That point for Christina came in two
Speaker 1: thousand four, when she returned from maternity leave. Her team
Speaker 1: had been reorganized and they had moved her desk. Now
Speaker 1: she was sitting with a group of administrative assistants, all women.
Speaker 1: It was a very visual and visceral representation that my
Speaker 1: manager did not care about my career or care about
Speaker 1: my prospects for contributing to the team. In eight years
Speaker 1: at Goldman, Christina remained a vice president and her pay
Speaker 1: ended up rising about the guy she says assaulted her,
Speaker 1: he made managing director, then partner. Over those same years,
Speaker 1: his pay went up something like four In two thousand five,
Speaker 1: she quit and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment
Speaker 1: Opportunity Commission, the federal agency tasked with investigating complaints of discrimination.
Speaker 1: If you want to see your employer in court, in
Speaker 1: most cases, this is the first step. Goldman told the
Speaker 1: e e o C that Christina was paid more than
Speaker 1: fairly and the firm hadn't wanted her to leave at all.
Speaker 1: The part where she had to sit with the secretaries temperary.
Speaker 1: Goldman Saks called her alleged assault a brief and disputed
Speaker 1: interaction that she was now, in the words of Goldman
Speaker 1: sax trying to exploit. Gina Palumbo, whoever sees employment law
Speaker 1: at the firm, gave us Goldman Saxes perspective. What she
Speaker 1: says is this. The key issues here are that Mission
Speaker 1: Astars significantly delayed reporting the incident to employ your relations,
Speaker 1: and when she did talk to employee relations, she declined
Speaker 1: to provide any detail about the incident or to in
Speaker 1: any way cooperate in the investigation. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: the e o C gave her the green light. She
Speaker 1: filed suit along with two other former Goldman employees, alleging
Speaker 1: that Goldman paid women less than men for the same
Speaker 1: work and that the bank systematically denied women the opportunities
Speaker 1: they deserved. They wanted Goldman to pay for its mistakes
Speaker 1: and to change its policies. They also wanted to sue
Speaker 1: as a class, representing more than two thousand Goldmen women.
Speaker 1: Once you say you're soon to represent a group, it
Speaker 1: raises the stakes a lot. It stops being about this
Speaker 1: or that individual experience. They'd have to prove Goldman is
Speaker 1: systematically biased against the women who worked there. It also
Speaker 1: raises the financial stakes for the women and for the bank.
Speaker 1: For the last eight years, they've been going back and
Speaker 1: forth and back and forth. There were fights about internal documents.
Speaker 1: Christina's team won those and attempts to divide the coalition
Speaker 1: of plaintiffs. Sometimes they were just unlucky. In two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court issued a ruling that made it harder
Speaker 1: to get class status. The case has also moved from
Speaker 1: judge to judge. In two thousand and fourteen, Christina's lawyers
Speaker 1: were finally ready to put a number on paid discrimination
Speaker 1: at Goldman Sachs. Female vice presidents were paid twenty one
Speaker 1: percent less than similar men, according to their analysis. Goldman
Speaker 1: calls that analysis deeply flawed and maintains they pay everyone fairly. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: more women have joined the suit. Here's one of them,
Speaker 1: Alice and Gamba, a former Goldman Sachs trader. I had
Speaker 1: my head on. I did everything right. I jumped through
Speaker 1: every hoop, I played the game right. I did everything
Speaker 1: that should have got me the title that I wanted,
Speaker 1: and I didn't get it. What do I have to lose. Now,
Speaker 1: if I could help them out, you know, maybe there's
Speaker 1: maybe there's a chance that something changes in this industry.
Speaker 1: Christina was twenty five when she started at Goldman. She
Speaker 1: was thirty four when she filed that ees. He complained
Speaker 1: this March ty nine, she turned forty seven. The next
Speaker 1: day was Good Friday, and the markets were closed. She
Speaker 1: took her daughter to visit a prospective middle school. The
Speaker 1: very same day, the judge ruled that Christina and Allison
Speaker 1: can represent a class of as many as two thousand
Speaker 1: three d women and christina GE's Kelly Dermany, M hey,
Speaker 1: that's some amazing news. The court just certified. Christina didn't
Speaker 1: hear her lawyer's voicemail until the next day. She was
Speaker 1: sitting in a Broadway theater waiting for a Saturday matinee
Speaker 1: of Mean Girls. A huge congratulations, just really really really
Speaker 1: really happy for you. And this is not a happy ending.
Speaker 1: It's more like a happy ending to a beginning. No
Speaker 1: matter what happens, a settlement, a trial, you get the
Speaker 1: sense it's going to be big. This, after all, is
Speaker 1: Goldman Sex. I firmly believe that eventually the truth always
Speaker 1: comes out. Eventually, it's just a question of time, but
Speaker 1: I certainly hope that things will be better and that
Speaker 1: we will come to a resolution before my daughter looks
Speaker 1: for a job. Goldman shows no signs of throwing in
Speaker 1: the towel. Gina Palombo told Bloomberg, we're defending the firm
Speaker 1: and good faith against what we believe our meritless accusations.
Speaker 1: She also says the plaintiffs analysis of Paya Goldman ignores
Speaker 1: the fact that different roles in different teams have different
Speaker 1: market values. Here's how Christina's lawyer, Kelly Dermody explains it.
Speaker 1: That's what they would like to pretend that this case
Speaker 1: is about millions of individual decisions as opposed to a
Speaker 1: system that has, you know, players that operate within the
Speaker 1: guidelines of the system. A lot of big US companies
Speaker 1: make some version of this claim. They do their own
Speaker 1: pay gap analysis and they find little or no disparity
Speaker 1: between what they pay men and women. Well, Spargo, b
Speaker 1: and Y, Melon City Group, Master Cards, and JP Morgan
Speaker 1: have all released that information. After accounting for the different factors.
Speaker 1: Those companies have all said their pay gap is really
Speaker 1: very small. On a like for like basis, women make
Speaker 1: about one percent less than men. Do you heard that right?
Speaker 1: One percent? So how does that work? We know women
Speaker 1: in the US make less than men, and yet all
Speaker 1: these companies, these major employers, they say they barely have
Speaker 1: a pay gap at all. My colleague Jordan Holman and
Speaker 1: I tried to get to the bottom of it. So
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Companies don't have to tell you anything
Speaker 1: about their pay gaps. The law just says it's illegal
Speaker 1: to discriminate in the US. Any company that's releasing a
Speaker 1: number is releasing the number for presumably public relations purposes,
Speaker 1: to inform whoever's watching that g don't come after us
Speaker 1: and say we're discriminating. Look, here's an analysis that shows
Speaker 1: that there's no pay gap once you account for people
Speaker 1: doing comparable work. That's Henry Farber. He's a professor at
Speaker 1: Princeton and he's an expert at measuring the gender pay gap.
Speaker 1: I called Dr Farber and asked him about these small
Speaker 1: pay gaps and how they could be so much smaller
Speaker 1: than the national average, and he told me it just
Speaker 1: really depends on what you measure. Well, as I understand it,
Speaker 1: people can use these terms however they like, but the
Speaker 1: average pay gap is simply taken as a whole. For example,
Speaker 1: within a company, what's the average pay that men received
Speaker 1: and the average pay that women received, and the proportional
Speaker 1: difference between those two is what might be called the
Speaker 1: average pay gap. What the average tells you a lot
Speaker 1: of the time is that most of a company's highest
Speaker 1: paid people are men, but it doesn't tell you if
Speaker 1: men and women doing the same job are getting paid
Speaker 1: the same. So if you want to figure out if
Speaker 1: there's a gap between men and women doing the same work,
Speaker 1: then that's when you use the adjusted pay gap. And
Speaker 1: that calculates all of the things that go into compensation,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of them, like education, experience, how long
Speaker 1: you've worked out a place. There's no specific formula for
Speaker 1: calculating what some might call an adjusted pay gap, so
Speaker 1: to be clear, there's no set equation for the adjusted
Speaker 1: pay gap. Companies can use whatever variables they want, but
Speaker 1: to be fair, there are reasons companies might want to
Speaker 1: know both number bers they're just a pay gap helps
Speaker 1: them compare apples to apples. Plus, if you aren't paying
Speaker 1: men and women the same for the same work, then
Speaker 1: you have a problem. Companies say they consider variables like
Speaker 1: someone's experience, job title and geography. For example, someone living
Speaker 1: in New York probably makes more than someone in Kansas
Speaker 1: City because the cost of living is higher. But then
Speaker 1: sometimes companies use the phrase pay philosophy. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: We don't really know, and they don't elaborate. Recently, when
Speaker 1: Dr Barber was looking at one company's data, he came
Speaker 1: up with four different adjust to pay gap figures that
Speaker 1: reigns between two point eight percent and eight point six percent.
Speaker 1: When the company did its own analysis, they said the
Speaker 1: gap was even smaller zero point two percent. You can
Speaker 1: imagine in that the company might be able to cook
Speaker 1: up an adjustment analysis. Cook up is the wrong word,
Speaker 1: it's too pejorative, but come up with an adjusted pay
Speaker 1: analysis that shows there's not much of a gap at all,
Speaker 1: whereas some other analysts might look at this and say, no, no,
Speaker 1: you're over adjusting for some things, and in fact there
Speaker 1: is a substantial pay gap. But that's the problem with
Speaker 1: the adjusted pay gap. We don't know what variables they're
Speaker 1: including and how much weight they're giving them. Maybe everyone's
Speaker 1: getting paid fairly for the job they're in, but this
Speaker 1: figure might not tell us that companies are just asking
Speaker 1: us to trust them and that's a little awkward. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen too many companies, frankly, either talk about their
Speaker 1: pay gaps or admit that they have a substantial pay
Speaker 1: gap between men and women. The average pay gap tells
Speaker 1: us who's taking home the biggest salaries at these companies,
Speaker 1: and if men keep earning a lot more than the
Speaker 1: women they work with like they do and most major
Speaker 1: US companies, the average pay gap is going to stay
Speaker 1: pretty big. To change this equation, you need a more
Speaker 1: balanced workforce at every single level, so like more women
Speaker 1: at the top of the pay scale or more men
Speaker 1: at the bottom, exactly. And then the question is is
Speaker 1: everyone getting a fair shot of reaching the highest paid jobs.
Speaker 1: There's a word that's entered the popular lexicon recently that
Speaker 1: I think perfectly describes what's happening. Gas lighting. Decades of
Speaker 1: statistics tell us we're making less money. Our experiences tell
Speaker 1: us we're being paid less. They moved Christina's desk, My
Speaker 1: mom saw the salaries of her coworkers. But our employers say,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to see here, just a whole lot of
Speaker 1: reasonable explanations. Next week on the paycheck, we're going to
Speaker 1: dig into those explanations. How would did we get here?
Speaker 1: Why do women make less money than men in the
Speaker 1: first place? The short answer sex. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: The Paycheck. If you like our show, please head on
Speaker 1: over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe. This episode was reported by Dune, Lawrence, Max Abelson,
Speaker 1: and Jordan Holman. It was edited by Janet Paskin, produced
Speaker 1: by Elizabeth, and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. We had
Speaker 1: additional help from Magnus Hendrickson, Francesca Levy, and Gillian Goodman.
Speaker 1: Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
Speaker 1: the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
Speaker 1: at bloomberg dot com slash Paycheck. Bloomberg's head a podcast
Speaker 1: is Francesca Levy