Sexism and the City

At 6pm on a Thursday, the City's traders and dealers are spilling out of the banks and heading towards the pubs. Thursday nights are traditionally big drinking nights for City bankers, and tonight is no exception.

After downing as many pints as they can, many of them plan to go 'whoring' - the bankers' term for visiting lap-dancing clubs, where they like to flash their gold cards and spend their bonuses. To them, female flesh is another commodity, to be bought and sold.

Sadly, many of these men appear to view all women in the same way, whether they work in the lap-dancing clubs or alongside them on the trading floor.

Their smart City suits belie a laddish culture which has recently been exposed in scores of allegations of sexism made by female bankers. Not that any of the successful court actions brought by female employees against their banks seem to have made any difference to what, in the past months, has been described as the 'boorish and bullying' environment of the City.

And I should know, for I have witnessed, first hand, the deplorable and demeaning treatment of women by their male colleagues and bosses.

For the past few weeks, I've been undercover, posing as a secretary in the City, and hanging out in the bars and lap-dancing clubs frequented by traders and brokers after hours. And the shocking content of the conversations I have overheard leaves me in no doubt that sexism is as rife in the square mile as ever.

As one female trader told me: 'Every woman who works in the City can expect to be the butt of offensive jokes and be propositioned on a regular basis. These guys are animals, and it comes with the territory. If you want promotion, you simply learn to keep your mouth shut.'

Outside the Slug And Lettuce pub in Liverpool Street, a group of men are downing shorts and pints of lager while making leery comments at their female colleagues standing in a huddle nearby. I am with the male traders as they try to get the attention of the 'new totty' - a tall, attractive blonde, who got her job after being 'auditioned' by a senior member of the group.

He describes how, in a bizarre ritual more casting couch than finance recruitment, he vets prospective women employees at a 'coffee bar trial'.

He arranges to meet in the staff canteen, then takes a table near the coffee bar. From there he is able to scrutinise the legs, the breasts, and the way the woman moves as she walks towards him. By the time she has arrived at the table for her 'interview', he will already have made up his mind whether she has the job or not.

This 25-year-old, whose most valuable credentials are, apparently, her legs and not her Economics degree or glowing references from her previous employer, is currently on the receiving end of some X-rated vernacular.

The other women urge her to ignore it. She manages to retain her composure as the lewd comments get louder, but whether or not she is up to surviving the degrading treatment she will inevitably experience on the trading floor remains to be seen.

I am curious to see if it really is feasible for a woman to land a job on her physical attributes alone, and express an interest in working on the trading floor myself. I have no experience in the markets, but the silver-haired executive - who, remember, thinks I'm a secretary - tells me straight away that he'll give me a job.

'You'll do all right,' he tells me, looking me up and down. 'It's the fat and ugly girls who have a hard time of it. With legs like yours, you'd be a bonus. It also helps that you've got a bit of a posh voice - you'll get a bit more respect for that. The ones with the Essex accents are thick tarts.'

I tell him that I am only a secreyoutary and no good with figures. He assures me: 'You won't need to know about figures, love. You will be the figure.'

Later, Clive, a senior broker at the same bank, tells me: 'It's very easy to get a job on the floor if you've got the right looks. If two women come for the same job, the blonde chick with the long legs is going to get offered the job first. Qualifications don't come into it.'

He goes on: 'Our bank used to have a policy for only recruiting pretty girls. If a broker has an attractive female friend who wants to work in the City, he'll bring her in, introduce her to his boss, and if he likes the look of her, she'll get the job.'

Former fund manager Miranda Richards is the inspiration for the heroine of Allison Pearson's best-selling novel, I Don't Know How She Does It. Miranda, who spent 15 years in the City, revealed how her figure was used as a sales tool by her bosses.

'There was a big element of "If you look good, you'll get good results with your clients",' she says. 'If a big client was coming in, I was always told to wear a short skirt - the shorter the better.'

The City, it would seem, is the last bastion of sexism in the workplace. Female bankers I have met have compared the trading floor with a building site, or an 18-30 holiday camp. One even compared working there with being a stripper on a stag night.

Political correctness is a dirty term here. The air is blue with expletives, wolf whistles and sexual innuendo targeted at women struggling to prove their worth in an environment where they are in the minority, and not particularly welcome.

One female trader describes how on a trading floor of around 2,500 people, there are only 50 women traders, who not only have to do brisk business to keep up to speed with the fluctuating markets, they must also shout to get their voices heard above the men's, and deal with the added pressure of sexual intimidation and taunting.

In the pits, where the most frenetic sales activity happens, women complain of being jostled, groped and propositioned.

Anya Harris, 35, held a top job with a leading City firm for seven years, but was eventually forced out by the taunts and jibes made against her by 'sexist bullies'. Harris, the only woman of 20 brokers at the bank in which she worked, described how men would 'constantly grope' at her breasts: 'They used to bet on what colour and type of underwear I was wearing, and thought nothing of looking down my blouse or my skirt to see who was right. They called me a Fat Slag.

'Women generally were called "tarts" or "slappers", and a girly night out was a "dogs' dinner".

'One of their favourite games was to grade women according to how many pints of beer they needed before going to bed with her. If a woman was an eight-pinter, it meant they would need eight pints before they slept with her because she was dead ugly. A pretty girl was a one-pinter.'

Madeleine, a 29-year-old broker, has chosen to put up with this behaviour in order to keep focused on her job, although she admits at times it's almost impossible.

She tells how the men all go off for long boozy lunches, sometimes not reappearing at all. Yet if she takes as much as half an hour for lunch, she'll return to a tirade of abuse.

'It'll be very humiliating,' she says. 'The usual line is: "Did you go to get a Brazilian wax?" Then some smart Alec will try to look under your skirt to check. If

walk over to someone's desk in a hurry, and your chest might bounce up and down a bit, the guys will ask for an "action replay, with more of the wobble".

'Just last week, I explained to my boss that I felt tired because I was finding it difficult to sleep. His response was simply: "Well you know what you need." There was no ambiguity as to what he was suggesting.'

For the handful of female traders who work in the City, and whose jobs necessitate close physical contact with men, the abuse is even worse.

Clare is 27 and the only female trader in her bank. When she started, she worked alongside two other female traders. 'But one had a nervous breakdown, and the other was fired because she wasn't prepared to put up with the "muck".

'I can be in the middle of trading, but if a new girl comes over, within seconds I'll get an e-mail from a male broker, saying: "Who's that? She's got a great arse."

'You know straight away what the guys think of the new girls at the desk. They'll judge her completely on her breasts and backside. Work performance doesn't come into it.'

Clare says she dreads going out drinking with her colleagues after work, but would be the butt of even more jokes if she resisted. 'However, I'm careful these days about not sharing taxis with colleagues after a drinking session. The last time I did, I was with my boss - whom I'd never shown any interest in - and he started forcing his tongue down my throat.

'I had to deal with that situation with as much courtesy as possible. The guy was responsible for my yearly appraisals and, ultimately, my career.'

She says she has become immune to the persistent innuendo and propositioning because it is so much a part of everyday life. 'I work with 15 guys, and seven of them have tried it on with me, as well as guys who work in other departments.'

Diane, 27, works in asset management. She finds the harassment by men at senior level particularly menacing.

'You get used to the jumped up barrow boys who will spend all day trying to look up your skirt and make vile propositions,' she says. 'But it's always more alarming when you get the guys at executive level, invariably married with children, flexing their authority to try to bed you.'

Days after starting work at her bank, her boss told her: 'We could really have something going here if I wasn't married.'

'I'd barely exchanged words with him, yet he seemed to think it perfectly natural that he could suggest such a thing without me having a say in it,' she says.

Even more shocking are the after-work anecdotes of the male traders, which demonstrate a general acceptance of the degradation of women. Men laugh about accessing porn websites and downloading them to female colleagues' e-mail addresses.

They think nothing of using a pornographic screen-saver on a computer they may have to share with a woman. And they talk endlessly about how they invite new employees to strip joints and S&M parties by e-mail, and wait to see the girls' shocked expressions.

I'm having a drink with Clive, a 36-year-old senior broker who has worked at a London-based Swiss bank for the past six years. Without flinching, he tells me how 'women in the City are second class'; how they 'deserve everything they get if they insist on working in a man's job'.

'It's like women who join the Army and think they can survive on the front line. They can't. And they certainly can't survive in the trading pits. No man will take a female trader seriously. If I need some information, I'll go to a junior man before going to a senior woman. The only thing women bring to the floor is a bit of titillation.'

HE TELLS me how one junior broker in his bank 'wasn't up to the job' after being literally driven out by the constant abuse of her senior male colleagues. He laughs as he tells me how: 'Every Monday morning, she'd arrive at the office and we'd ask her: "Did you **** this weekend?"

'We used to have bets on whether she was wearing a thong or a pair of knickers, and then one of the guys would be chosen to go and find out.

'She left in the end when she messed up a deal.' He later admits that she left because her boss, who got the rap when she failed to close the deal, called her an '****ing whore' in the dealing room, reducing her to floods of tears.

The story is reminiscent of one senior broker who won an out of court settlement on the grounds of sex discrimination. She recalled how her colleagues brought a Polaroid camera into work.

'One of them scrabbled under my desk to take a picture up my skirt. I tried to stop him, and we fell to the floor, but he got several shots which were displayed like trophies on his desk.

'The manager came out and the guy was reprimanded - not for taking a picture of my knickers, but for making too much noise while others were working.'

The bankers and I move to another bar, where I am approached by the executive who offered me a job. He is mixing Champagne with beer and is already 'lashed'.

He asks me if I want to celebrate my new career by joining him and some of his colleagues at a party. 'We'll be having a bit of group action, if you know what I mean,' he winks.

I turn down his charming offer, not because I'm offended ( having spoken to women who put up with this treatment daily, I know not to take it personally), but because I have agreed to accompany a group of brokers and their clients to Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing club in Tottenham Court Road.

By the time we arrive, the guys - incidentally, all carrying VIP passes - are drunk and boisterous. Some have taken cocaine to ensure they last the night.

The bankers, all regulars here, are instantly recognised by a bouncer, who takes us straight

over to a table at the front of the stage. This table has been reserved, while every other table is occupied by groups of traders, brokers and bond dealers, sitting with two or three half naked dancers.

We sit down, and the guys call over a couple of dancers and immediately thrust £20 notes at them. They order Champagne and loudly applaud the girl, who is now bending over and pushing her rear into one of their faces. One of them disapprovingly points out she has cellulite, and is not worth the money.

There is more jeering. They demonstrate no sensitivity towards me at all. I may as well not exist.

One of the men is bragging about how he will pay for 'extras' with one of the dancers later. It turns out he is a new father - something I learn listening to him bitterly complain about how he doesn't fancy his wife any more. 'Her boobs are sagging,' he sneers loudly.

A topless dancer takes centre stage on the pole. Wearing no more than a G- string and 6in Perspex mules, she seductively gyrates and shimmies for the group.

Growing bored of the dancers they have paid £100 each to sit with them for an hour, they stuff £20 and even £50 notes into the pole dancer's garter. At the end of her sequence, one of the team, cheered on by his colleagues, takes the girl off to a dark back room where he pays extra for her to dance naked for him.

Every day, female bankers must listen to stories of the men's exploits in these clubs, without appearing to be offended. Madeleine tells me: 'It's so sordid. Some of it is stomachchurning stuff. You wouldn't think most of them have wives and girlfriends to go home to.'

Visiting lap-dancing clubs is so widespread that when membership details of one club were broken into by a computer hacker, the list read like a Who's Who of bankers.

It included names of individuals from City institutions such as SBC Warburg, Dillon Read, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, First Boston, Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Normand City Finance.

SENIOR staff at Cantors told, in a recent court case, how it was commonplace for male brokers to go 'whoring', and how 'bankers even conduct meetings with clients while watching the lap-dancing'.

At Spearmint Rhino, I meet Giles, a 28-year-old broker who tells me 'whoring' is an essential part of pushing a deal through.

'The last time I was here,' he tells me, 'I spent £1,000 on one girl that my client took a fancy to. She sat with us from 8pm until 2am, and I paid for her to dance topless whenever his eyes started glazing over.

'It can get tiring after a while, watching a girl dance for five minutes and then looking around for the next one when you should be concentrating on your client.

'So most of the time we prefer to have a couple of girls sit with us and drink as much Champagne as they can without falling over. You pay through the nose for that, but it keeps the continuity.'

Another investment banker tells me how he and one other broker were given £3,000 to entertain a client. After a £250 dinner, where the deal was done, the client went home and the traders spent the remaining money on lap-dancers. 'It was the best night ever. We got a dance off every girl in the house, and put it through as client entertainment.'

A third banker tells me how his Japanese client asked him to pay for sex with a dancer, whom he had arranged to meet at the back of a club when she had finished work. 'I gave the club my credit card and got £800 in cash for the hooker,' he says. 'The client chickened out, so I slept with her.'

Madeleine tells me she is convinced that the reason her male colleagues are given such huge bonuses is because it's assumed they'll need to spend a lot of money in lap-dancing clubs.

'I see male colleagues doing the same work as me, whose bonuses are ten times bigger than mine. They tell their bosses that they need the money for cars, boats, strippers - and they get it. I've been told that I don't need the same luxuries that they do. The City is a great example of how money corrupts moral values.'

What I found most disturbing about the pernicious sexism that pervades the City is how a lot of women, who have known no other working environment, are prepared to put up with it in the hope that, in doing so, they'll get to the top.

Clare, meanwhile, has been so worn down by the men's behaviour that she no longer even questions it. Even more worryingly, she takes some responsibility for the treatment she receives.

'Sometimes, I do think I might have asked for it,' she says. 'I am attractive, and when you're the only woman working with a lot of men, you can't expect them to ignore that. I still look back and blame myself for getting in the taxi with my boss. It was a stupid thing to do.'

What Clare doesn't seem to realise is that in any other industry, it would be totally unacceptable for a woman to find herself fighting off her boss's advances.

But in the City, no one would even blink an eyelid. For there, it seems, women are a commodity to be bought and sold - just like the rest of their squalid dealings.