Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $215 million to settle a longstanding gender discrimination lawsuit brought by former female employees who said they were consistently underpaid and underestimated by their male colleagues.
The two sides agreed to the settlement and will now sit out a trial that was scheduled for next month in New York federal court, the women’s attorneys confirmed. The funds will be dispersed among approximately 2,800 associates and vice presidents who participated in the class action, primarily in the investment banking and securities divisions.
About a third of the proceeds are expected to go towards the plaintiffs’ attorney fees, according to a person familiar with the details.
As part of the settlement, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said Goldman Sachs he had also pledged to hire an independent expert “to conduct an additional analysis on performance appraisal processes” at the bank, as well as conduct “studies on pay equity”.
The original plaintiffs, including former Goldman employees Cristina Chen-Oster and Shanna Orlich, first sued Goldman in 2010 and were awarded the right to drive a class action lawsuit for sex discrimination in 2018.
They accused Goldman of company-wide policies and practices that led to better pay and promotion prospects for its male employees and said the bank’s review process allowed managers, mostly men, to appoint people who have contributed to staff evaluations, leading to a “hit on the shoulder system”.
“My focus in this case has always been to support the strong women of Wall Street,” said Allison Gamba, one of the plaintiffs, after the settlement. “I am proud that the result we have achieved here will promote gender equality.”
Adam Klein, an attorney for Outten & Golden who has represented the women, said the settlement “provides significant relief for our clients.”
Jacqueline Arthur, global head of human capital management at Goldman, said the bank is “proud of its long record of nurturing and nurturing women and remains committed to ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace for all our people.”
The deal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, concludes a longstanding lawsuit surrounding Goldman, which had underlined the struggle on Wall Street to diversify the financial sector’s workforce.
Last year, another former Goldman employee, Jamie Fiore Higgins, published a memoir of his 17 years in the bank in which she claimed to have experienced bullying, discrimination and manipulation.
Goldman’s CEO David Solomon has spoken publicly about trying to diversify the bank’s workforce and released a set of hiring goals in 2019. In the group’s two-year selection process for its status as an elite partner last year, 29 percent of selected employees they were women, a record.
If the New York court overseeing the case approves the settlement, a third-party trustee will award the settlement amounts “based on an objective formula” to class members, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said.
—————————————————-
Source link