“Can I get champagne?” she asks the waiter. “Does anyone else want one?” She looks at me in my yoga pants and my disheveled kids and doesn’t bat an eye. “Anyone?” She’s not even joking. This is whom I’m seeking advice from, someone offering champagne to minors.
“Look at it this way,” I try again. “I have these MBA women, graduates from Duke and Harvard and Wharton, and they’ve got so much potential and we hire them, we train them, and then some dope does something and there we are watching her leave with a nice check in her hands, never to work on Wall Street again. I never get the upside of that woman. I spend the time to train her, I use up my very limited energy bucket to mentor her, and in a way it’s my money spent to have her leave. Is it worth it to me to even hire someone like that? These women could be so useful to the firm, they could be a voice of reason on the risk committee, and they could help raise the whole culture of the bank, but instead the men treat them like sex objects and they run.”
“Wait, so your question is should you hire these types of lassies? You just answered yourself.”
“So I should never hire women.”
“Never.”
“Liz, gimme a break.”
“They frickin’ whine, they reproduce, they’re litigious. Stick to guys.”
“You only hire guys?”
“I mostly hire guys. Guys and lesbians. I’m not going to lie. I just have less drama with those two groups. Maybe do your next recruiting trip to the LGBT office at one of those fancy universities you visit. Minorities too. They work out well. They’re hungry to move ahead and don’t give a rat’s behind about Johnnie thwacking someone’s ass.”
“Enough. You’re saying gay women and minorities don’t mind being harassed? Who the hell are you these days?”
“I’m saying they aren’t so sensitive. They’re above it, they’re focused, and they’re not analyzing every nuance of every comment, looking for some sort of harassment angle. I’ve always said the stuff you think but are afraid to say. Look at that description I just gave you of successful women. You’re one of them. I’m one of them. You’re even more of one of them ’cause you have the whole kid package too. You’re like one of those women leaning in. Or is it leaning over?”
“You’re hurting my ears.”
“Belle. Reality check. We’re ambitious and we aren’t overly sensitive. Guys like us. They know how to work with us. The guys aren’t going to change. It’s too late for them. The women need to just deal with it. I get to move ahead ’cause I picked an industry where the average company has twenty employees and very few rules. You work in a big bank with lots of structure and rules that nobody pays attention to anyway. You’re talking like you suddenly want to enforce stuff that’s never been enforced. You want to be the headmistress of a bunch of cowboys wearing pinstripes and that’s a loser’s job. Any growth industry is too busy to adhere to lots of rules and manners. It’s a wild landgrab for me and for you and so yes, a little ass pinching goes along with that.”
I sit back on my faux-fur banquette and think about this while Elizabeth rants on. If I didn’t love her, I’d hate her right about now. She still isn’t done talking.
“Look, if you want to run something you have to go small and start it yourself, and speaking of small, I have a job for you.”
Elizabeth proceeds to tell me about a group at her firm who created a high-speed technology that allows traders to see stock market orders coming in a millisecond before they trade. Elizabeth’s group can then jump in and buy that stock before the trade is executed and before the order will make the price rise. They are essentially buying the stock for a smidgen less, a millisecond faster. Once the big order is done at the higher price, her group sells and takes their minimal profit. If you do this hundreds of times a day, it adds up. To me it sounds like front running, to me it sounds illegal. I can’t believe her firm can do this and still have clearance as a broker/dealer. But they don’t. They outsource this stuff as a service to a bank that does. This side business at her social media firm is now raking in cash at such a rate that what I call frontrunning is their largest profit center.
“I’m worried about the market,” I tell her. “There are too many people finding loopholes like that. I have no interest in making someone’s grandmother pay one-sixteenth of a dollar more than she should and pocketing the difference. There’s so much credit and borrowing and people doing things they can’t afford.”