On Goldman Sachs Group chief executive officer (CEO) David Solomon’s second day on the job in 2018, I listened to him address a conference audience made up of some of the most powerful women in the world. It was clear he was trying to send a strong message by spending one of his crucial early days as chief executive in this way. “What could be better? I spent time with clients and women, two of my top priorities,” he said to the crowd.
Solomon’s competitors for the top job had all been men, but he told the group that as CEO, he wanted to change that—to make sure diverse candidates were in the mix for leadership jobs across the firm.
It has not been going well.
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This month, after more than a year of consideration, the company named 17 executives to its management committee. Just three of them are women, and only one of the three—Kim Posnett, now global co-head of the investment banking business—is in a job that generates revenue for the firm. That means that among the three, only Posnett is positioned to have a shot at reaching the investment company’s highest ranks.
“Implying that there’s a two-class system of senior women is offensive,” a Goldman spokesman said when Bloomberg News pointed it out.
But in reality, this is how Goldman and the rest of corporate America works, and it’s one of the key reasons so few women ever make it to the very top. They get relegated to support roles rather than revenue-generating ones, or to other jobs that are seen as less prestigious.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year, for example, that Goldman’s markets division lost a slew of female partners between 2020 and 2022 when it made having experience across the business a requirement for running one of the division’s groups. Many women partners were in sales rather than trading and therefore didn’t meet the requirements.
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That same Journal article noted that, as of March 2024, about two-thirds of the women who were partners at the end of 2018 had left the company or no longer held that title.
Meanwhile, Goldman has never had a woman CEO, chair, president or chief financial officer (CFO), which now puts it in the minority among top Wall Street firms.
Those who have come close to cracking the Goldman glass ceiling have left, often after encountering one of the usual factors that stymie women as they climb the corporate ladder: having their work undermined by male colleagues, being passed over for promotion despite being highly qualified, or being appointed to an impossible job that set them up for failure.
Take Beth Hammack, a highly respected 30-year Goldman veteran who left the firm last year after losing out on the CFO role. (She is now the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.) Or Stephanie Cohen, one of the few women to ever run a major division at the company, who inherited a deeply flawed business and was blamed for its poor performance. (She is now chief strategy officer at Cloudflare.)
Goldman has never had a woman CEO, chair, president or chief financial officer (CFO), which now puts it in the minority among top Wall Street firms.
In a sign of how seriously the Goldman Sachs board seems to have taken Solomon’s failure to deliver on one of his most public promises, it increased his pay by 26% to $39 million last year and gave him a $80 million retention award to keep him in the job.
Even though Goldman has seen little improvement in diversifying the company’s most senior ranks, Solomon should still get credit for continuing to talk about why it’s a priority for him and the bank. That puts him in contrast with many other CEOs, who have stopped talking about the issue altogether as they’ve pared back or abandoned their own diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Just recently, at Davos, he pushed back against calls by activist investors who want the company to reverse course on its DEI commitments.
Perhaps that’s what is most alarming. Goldman still purports to care about diversity, even when it would be easier to back away under the cover of the anti-woke pressures roiling America Inc right now. And yet, the company has still made little progress. It follows then that we should expect to see even fewer advancements at companies that have walked back commitments to support the careers of female employees.
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But with fewer companies in America setting representation goals or reporting the results of such efforts, we are losing the mechanisms that have alerted us to this kind of backsliding.
The risk now is the advances of the past few years will slip away—and we won’t even realize it. ©Bloomberg
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