The MP leading a parliamentary inquiry into sexism in the City of London has spoken of the discrimination she faced when working in finance, saying her former employer, JP Morgan bank, refused to pay her full bonus after she returned from maternity leave.
In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Harriett Baldwin described her experience of bias on pay and inappropriate behaviour by senior managers, as the influential Treasury select committee that she chairs prepared to hear from hedge fund bosses in the next stage of its inquiry into gender barriers in financial services.
Baldwin’s inquiry has received widespread attention, not least because it has coincided with the demise of London-based hedge fund Odey Asset Management after allegations of sexual misconduct against its founder, Crispin Odey, which he denies, reportedly spanning decades.
The evidence on gender barriers gathered by the committee includes written submissions from more than 40 individuals and organisations ranging from big high street banks to Can’t Buy My Silence, the campaign group set up by Zelda Perkins, former assistant to the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Baldwin joined the US investment bank JP Morgan in 1986, working in London and Wall Street as a trader and later as a fund manager responsible for millions of pounds of pensions savings. Describing her return to the office after taking less than four months off for the birth of her child, she spoke of a “glass ceiling”.
“I was one of only 11% of managers in my firm who were women in those days. And there had never been a woman return from maternity leave at the bank. Never before.
“So I returned with no role models. I carried on doing my job. I performed very highly and I got to the end of the year, and my boss said [at which point she adopts a Yankee drawl]: ‘OK, Harriett, you’ve had a fantastic year, your portfolios have performed really well, you’ve increased the size of your assets under management, and in a normal year your bonus would have gone up very substantially, but you did take those 14 weeks’ maternity leave, and so I am cutting your bonus back as a result.’”
Baldwin said she was never paid the full reward she believed she was owed for that year but that her usual bonus calculation was restored in following years.
The incident was not an isolated one. Baldwin also spoke of having her skirt being lifted by a senior manager at the bank when she was in her 20s. She said she had been working on a dealing room floor, and at the end of a busy day there was only herself and a male trader still in the room.
“The big American boss came out and said: ‘The only difference between here and Las Vegas is that in Vegas the women wear short skirts.’ Then he came over to me and lifted my skirt right up.
“I put in for a transfer to another part of the firm. Lots of people would leave or walk out after an experience like that, which so undermines your confidence.”
Asked for a comment, a spokesperson for JP Morgan said: “We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or inappropriate or abusive conduct of any kind.”
Baldwin stresses that the inquiry was prompted by far more than her own experiences. She said: “I don’t want to give the impression that the only reason we are doing this inquiry is because I had some bad experiences in the 80s – that is not the case. This was an inquiry other committee members wanted.”
The inquiry will explore what role companies, the government and regulators should play in combating sexual harassment and misogyny. The committee will evaluate the progress on implementing the recommendations of the previous Treasury committee’s 2018 inquiry into the problem, as well as the impact of the Treasury’s women in finance charter from 2016, whose signatories pledged to work towards gender balance.
It has already heard from Helena Morrissey, the former chief executive of Newton Investment Management, who told the inquiry sexual harassment and misogyny are allowed to go unchecked at City companies because women have a “fear factor” over speaking out and do not trust human resource departments.
Lady Morrissey, who gathered evidence from 20 women as chair of the Diversity Project, an initiative in the UK investment and savings industry, told the committee: “Each time where women have escalated what has happened to them, it has made their working lives worse.”
Perkins, whose Can’t Buy My Silence group campaigns against non-disclosure agreements , has told the committee in written evidence how their use protects and perpetuates misconduct, allowing abusers to remain in post.
Baldwin said her committee also wanted to hear from hedge fund bosses, and was in the process of contacting executives to ask them to attend the next hearing. “We are very keen to have the hedge fund industry representatives in front of our committee. They have a reputation for being not the most diverse part of the financial services sector.”
