Has Goldman Sachs got a women problem? Is it still, in the face of all changing fashion, a macho world of golfing bros who cut deals over late-night sambucas in ways that make it very difficult for women, especially those with families, to get ahead?
There is evidence, and a growing anecdotal feeling, that the famously demanding Wall Street investment bank simply cannot change its ways — or hang on to top female bankers for that very reason.
The latest Government data shows Goldman at the top — or bottom depending on your perspective — of the banking pay gap league table. Of the major City banks, it has had the biggest average gap between what men and women are paid in each of the past three years.
In 2023, Goldman Sachs men got 54 per cent more than its women, according to the data, a seemingly yawning and completely unjustifiable differential.
One feeling is that chairman and CEO David Solomon — DJ D Sol at the weekends — is under such pressure from shareholders over other more harder-edged and immediate issues that long-term goals like closing the gender pay gap are the last thing on his mind.
There is no denying that a number of top women have headed for the exit. They include, but are far from limited to, Stephanie Cohen, the bank’s global head of its platform solutions division and former chief strategy officer, who quit last month after 25 years to join IT service provider Cloudflare; and Beth Hammack, ex-co-head of the Global Financing Group and its most senior female trader, who left in February after 30 years with no immediate job to go to.
It is said that it was during an extended period of family leave from Goldman last year that Cohen decided she wanted to rebalance her life and move to a job where she could spend more time with her children.
Both were quintessential Goldman Sachs insiders who might have been expected to join the exalted “C-suite” elite of most senior executives within a few years. Their departure has led to questions about whether Goldman’s culture will ever allow enough of its brightest women to ascend all the way to the boardroom.
According to leadership expert Dr Nahla Khaddage Bou-Diab: “Goldman Sachs’s pay gap, now the widest it’s been in six years, cannot be tolerated. In the modern working world, there is no place for disparity. Despite Solomon’s desire to include and promote women in the top ranks, Goldman Sachs has not been viewing its staff equally. This is a fundamental issue. They need a complete culture transformation.” In a Wall Street and a City where women are increasingly breaking through to the very top, is Goldman in danger of being left as a behind-the-curve outlier?
A glance at the male-dominated senior leadership page of its website seems to bear this out. In the boardroom there are nine male directors and five women, a fairly typical ratio for a top investment bank. It is at the next levels down, executive officers and management committee, where the disparity is perhaps more stark.
Of the executive officers, six are men and just two are women. Perhaps more significantly still, all the really powerful posts, almost all, including chairman and CEO, chief operating officer and president, and chief financial officers, are held by men.
The management committee, the group of top Goldman bosses who actually run things day to day, is made up of 17 men and six women, Of those women, only one, Ericka Leslie, chief operating officer of global banking & markets, actually leads a division at the coalface of money-making that is Goldman’s raison d’être.
Goldman thinks all this is terribly unfair. It says it has more women among its highest earners than many of its rivals — just not enough.
Goldman does concede this: “This gender pay gap report does not account for pay in similar role or tenure, but we know that we need to do more to increase representation of women at the senior-most levels of the firm.”
Which still leaves the bank admitting that progress has been slow — and slower than at rivals who have at least grasped the mood — while denying a female talent exodus.
Goldman points out that women represented 40 per cent of the vice-president and executive director classes of 2023 and 2022, up four percentage points compared with the 2018 class. It also says that 34 per cent of its vice- presidents are now women, up two percentage points on 2018.
The overall percentage of women managing directors at Goldman is 26 per cent, up four percentage points on 2018. So that’s moving in the right direction, just not terribly quickly.
If you walk around Goldman’s impressive new London HQ on Shoe Lane in the City — an office straight out of a movie — it’s not obviously lacking in diversity.
In fact, my guide bet me it was more diverse than the average City office. Maybe — but not at the very top.
Until the bank realises that losing senior women is actively costing it money, expect more talk of “progress” and “aspirational goals” rather than anything radical.
For ambitious women in the City who once dreamed of a job at Goldman Sachs, but would quite like a family life too, other options look more attractive.
