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The sex-discrimination lawsuit by Ellen Pao against the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers may be the gender and workplace story of the moment. But let’s get one thing straight: This doesn’t describe anything that’s new.

In a dusty, Wichita, Kan., re-creation of a frontier town recently, while state securities regulators slapped at mosquitoes and swapped stories about cagey financial crooks over cocktails, a spurs-and-boots-clad sheriff drew his weapon and staged a faux gunfight in the town square.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who own shares in publicly traded mutual-fund companies — not to mention fans of corporate accountability — should be feeling a little unsettled by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Janus Capital Management, a mutual-fund adviser, was sued for fraud in 2003 by shareholders who said Janus and its publicly traded parent company, Janus Capital Group Inc., had lied in mutual-fund prospectuses, and that those lies had cost them a lot of money. On June 13, the Supreme Court threw out their case.

Fifteen years after female brokers sued Smith Barney & Co. in a lawsuit famously known as the Boom-Boom Room case, financial firms have set up harassment training, torn racy photographs from the walls and pulled the plug on company-paid outings to strip joints. Despite all that, the industry is far from cured of a male-dominated culture where women can be intimidated and underpaid for work equal to the guys.

Tagged with: harassment

When duped investors set out to make themselves whole after a fleecing by a broker, the American way is to hustle them off to a private court run by Wall Street. It’s a tradition that was set in stone when the Supreme Court in 1987 said that, if an investor signed an agreement to arbitrate, the sorry loser is out of luck if he ever wants a day in court.

Not that I think it’s weird that a brokerage firm chief executive would pin a female clerk on the floor by putting his shoe on her breast (the right one, if you must know), or that some insurance company guy in Fullerton, Calif., would put a sample of his semen in a female colleague’s water bottle. Twice.

In an era when taxpayers are subsidizing Wall Street bonuses and a populist president is embracing financiers, I guess I won't shock you with news that a top securities regulator tried to sell a service to help businesses keep employee and customer disputes out of court.

The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has a past that is fast coming back to haunt her. Mary Schapiro’s story has none of the lurid details of philandering celebrity golfers or hedge fund titans who get sued by ...

Readers have had a lot to say about the goings-on of Wall Street over the past month. People who don’t work on Wall Street have sent a deluge of e-mails lambasting decision-makers in the financial world. People who do work ...

Tagged with: Wall Street

Wall Street, meet Eric W. Haugaard, a civil engineer who designs water and sewer-line systems for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Haugaard says he had tears in his eyes as he watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, hopeful that politics ...

Tagged with: Eric Haugaard Wall Street

Financial crises have a way of jolting investors into seeing that perhaps their brokers weren’t such trustworthy advisers after all. Requests for arbitration hearings are up 85 percent so far this year at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the only ...

Tagged with: Arbitration Barack Obama kangaroo court Wall Street