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Citigroup was the first major Wall Street bank with a female CEO. But interviews with 22 people who worked in or closely with the bank’s equities division suggest a pattern of harassment and discrimination.

Bloomberg’s Paige Smith and Max Abelson join The Big Take podcast to share what their reporting uncovered, and what it says about the rest of Wall Street’s overdue #MeToo reckoning.Read more: Harassment and Drugs Plagued a Citigroup Division for Years

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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Sarah Holder: Wall Street has never had a reputation for impeccable behavior. Headlines and pop culture often show a cutthroat industry with toxicity bubbling right beneath the surface. 

But Citigroup appeared to be different. 

In 2021, the bank promoted Jane Fraser to CEO, making her the first female CEO of any major Wall Street bank. And the company touted a concerted effort to prioritize diversity and inclusion.

But in November of last year, a managing director at the bank named Ardith Lindsey filed a lawsuit accusing Citigroup of harassment and discrimination.

Paige Smith: The managing director painted this sort of picture of just an extremely dysfunctional workplace, sort of rife with discrimination and sexual harassment and drug use that she says persisted over a number of years.

Holder: My Bloomberg colleague Paige Smith covered the lawsuit in November… and then kept digging. 

She worked with finance reporter Max Abelson, who’s covered Wall Street for years, and together, they uncovered a much bigger story about problems in Citigroup’s equities division… and the finance industry’s long path to reckoning with how it treats women.

Max Abelson: This story is a reminder that questions about gender and behavior, like are not abstract at all. And the question of corporations and what they owe their employees. It's a very real thing with real consequences.

Holder: Today on the show, we go inside Citigroup and explore what behavior within this one unit reveals about just how far Wall Street still has to go… 

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I’m Sarah Holder.

In November of 2023, Citigroup executive Ardith Lindsey filed a lawsuit against the bank, accusing it of tolerating a culture of harassment and discrimination in its equities unit. Citigroup has said it will defend itself against her claims. But for Bloomberg reporter Paige Smith, the legal filing opened a rare window into part of Citigroup’s culture. She wanted to pry it all the way open. 

Holder:  So, Paige, where did the reporting process take you next? What other questions did you want to ask? 

Smith: I think the, the thing that we really wanted to uncover with this piece was understanding that the lawsuit was one person's experience within the equities Division, but we really wanted to learn more about how widespread the alleged behavior was, how many people had experienced it, over what period of time, what kinds of experiences maybe extended beyond those described in the lawsuit.

So, our reporting sort of brought us to these interviews with these many, many people who worked in or closely with the equities division over a long period of time. 

Holder:  Can you describe any more of the specific allegations that were unearthed in these conversations?

Smith: One instance that is one depiction of some of the dysfunction that we uncovered in our reporting was a client party at a sort of buzzy downtown club restaurant called Catch in May 2018 where there were rappers performing, there were Citigroup employees there, there were clients there, and there were also two people linked to the equities division there. A young two-year rotator and her roommate. 

And at the time, the night sort of progressed and one of the unit's bosses actually came up and started sort of grinding his crotch against the young two year rotator's roommate. 

Sarah Holder:  That’s according to two people present who said they saw the incident.

Smith: Made people uncomfortable and it was an instance that sort of stuck out to us as, just showing that this behavior was, not just tolerated, but witnessed by a number of people within the division. And it was not just a standalone incident, but kind of a, a pattern of harassment.

Abelson: And what I find impressive about Paige's reporting is that it doesn't just stop there. She also has that rotator going on to be told to like wear higher heels to work and to wear shorter skirts. And I think that there was a, a, a male trader who kept asking about her love life. Paige's work depicts not just these individual instances, but a pattern of, a unit where all was not well.

Holder:  What is the culture of an equities division generally?

Abelson: Well, you know, Wall Street, like any high stakes corporate environment is never perfect. When there's a lot of money to be made or, or to be lost, I think it's completely normal to expect a certain level of intensity and competitiveness.

But, um, we're not talking about pedestrian banal competitiveness. We're talking about people who were using cocaine and not just after hours, but at work. One person had to tell another to wipe the white residue beneath their nose, you know, inside the Manhattan headquarters. And it's also, you know, it's not a matter of like policing other people's drug use. There's also a pattern that she found of men rating their female colleagues, including very, very young ones by their looks, and ogling and staring at their bodies as they walk by.

I think that, if it's fair to expect a certain level of intensity and, and competitiveness, that's certainly fair, but it's also fair to expect that at some of the biggest companies in the world, like, people shouldn't, um, be objectified and be stared at and sort face, uh, sort of an unusual degree of drug use, like, uh, on, on a, on a random day.

Holder: Absolutely. What did Citi say about some of the specific allegations that you raised?

Smith: A Citi spokesperson did respond to many of our questions, and one of the responses that we received that was that while several of the alleged incidents would have violated the bank's code of conduct, you know, some of them did not receive a complaint, or others were old, or others complained allegations that the bank said were perhaps too vague or involved too much people who had left the firm. So we, we did get some sort of specific responses to individual incidents that we asked for comment on, but others were sort of, um, not commented on by the bank.

Holder:  In Citigroup’s response to Bloomberg, a spokesperson said in part, “Citi’s values and expectations are clear. No one should ever be discriminated against or harassed in the workplace. He continued, “While we will not comment on individual internal matters, simply put, where warranted, we exit employees who fail to meet our high standards of respectful treatment in our workplace.”

Abelson: What he told us is that the attempts to, like, be inclusive, and to be equitable, don't stop. And that, the spokesperson called it a continuous and proactive process. I was interested by that. You rarely hear a Wall Street bank say, like, you know, we're trying to make things better. And it's not necessarily making any concessions.

In fact, I think it's fair to say CitiGroup did not concede to any of, any of our reporting. But I think that the reality is no matter what industry we're talking about, it's not easy to have thousands of employees and it's not easy to change a culture and chauvinism and misogyny — no industry has a monopoly on those things.

Holder:  I want to talk a little bit more about Citi versus all these other banks or in the context of these other banks. Before this story, how did you guys think about Citi in terms of its culture and in terms of its progress on dealing with some of these issues?

Abelson: You know, Citigroup has cultivated an image of, of inclusivity and, you know, they've also had some pretty impressive benchmarks.  In my reporting on race and especially, Black executives and black staffers at, at the big banks, Citigroup's numbers have been awfully impressive and not, not just in a short time span.

I think it's fair to say that over, really, several years now, they have been ahead of the pack of Wall Street when it comes to racial inclusion. 

On the other hand, you know, what we've seen is a bank that, while we were finishing our reporting, they put someone on leave because of a verbal altercation, and told investment bankers, like, not to embarrass the firm when it comes to drinking. So it's a bank that has made strides for sure, but  I think it's fair to say, what, Paige, what's a good phrase? Inconsistent culture? Something like that?

Smith: I would say inconsistent is very accurate and also just these things don't exist in a vacuum, right? You can make strides in hiring and representation but also have a workplace that is very toxic and toxic enough actually to cause people to leave because they feel their complaints are not heard.

I think it's also worth noting that Citigroup is one of the largest US banks, obviously, but also has a female CEO who was appointed in, 2021, the only of the largest US banks to have a female CEO. And it's also made significant efforts and, um, set pretty intense goals for itself in terms of pay equity and hiring goals and representation in the workplace. 

But at the same time, these patterns of harassment were occurring and the equities division specifically within Citigroup was a business that lagged peers on Wall Street for many, many years, in terms of revenue and rankings, and continues to lag peers, in fact.

Abelson: In a big picture, Citi has never, really gotten things right compared to rivals. You know, their share price, it's in a different ballpark than Goldman Sachs’s, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan's, of the world.

And then when it comes to not just Citigroup as a global institution, but the equities business in particular, that's they've gone up and down. They, they had a hot streak. Then there was like a, a, what we call a “fat finger trade.”

It reminds me of Homer Simpson and one of my favorite episodes of some of the Simpsons when I hear the phrase fat finger.

But, it just means that there was a mistake and not a small mistake, but a big mistake that had large ramifications. And you don't want that to happen because it does not reflect well on the unit. And if it happens at a large enough scale, it doesn't reflect well on the CEO either. 

The equities team has lagged rivals. They've really tried to figure it out. And I, I one reason that I've enjoyed working on this story with Paige is that it's not just about culture, it's also about underperformance, too.

Holder: Well, I mean, you mentioned some of these issues with a bad trade, profitability issues. Has this toxic culture that you'd identified contributed to these broader business problems at the bank?

Abelson: The only thing I would add is that the reason you don't want bad behavior inside of a company isn't just out of morality and ethics, although, you know, morals matter too. It's also because, like, it's alienating. You don't want to have to go work— 

Smith: It's distracting. 

Abelson: Yeah, it's distracting. And I think that, if you see bad behavior and then you complain about it and nothing happens, you end up leaving or just disliking your job. And in fact, we have met several people, right, Paige, who ended up leaving. 

Holder: And especially if it's happening with rotators or people young in the industry, if that's your first experience in the banking world, I'm assuming you're not going to continue, at least not there.

Smith: Definitely. And we also had some reporting even before this story was, was published that showed that, uh, as you sort of continue up the corporate ladder, there are just not as many women represented in kind of the upper, upper echelons.

Holder:  After the break: what does this pattern of behavior at Citi reveal about the rest of Wall Street… six years after #MeToo?

I want to take a second to talk about the banking industry broadly and the way that these allegations that you've unearthed fit into this broader pattern. 

Max, you wrote a story back in 2018 called “Why Wall Street Hasn't Had Its #MeToo Moment Yet.” Why were big banks insulated from the reckoning that was rippling across industries at that time, especially?

Abelson: Well, if you wanna go back, not just a couple years, but like decades, Wall Street really was a bifurcated industry. There were essentially either no women or very, very few women at the top of Wall Street for a really long time.

I think that a firm like Goldman Sachs didn't have a female partner until, I think, until my lifetime. And I'm old, but I'm not that old. This, so we're talking the 1980s.  

Then in the 1990s, there were some really famous lawsuits that revealed and alleged sort of cinematic bad behavior. The kind of things that make it into movies like the Wolf of Wall Street, but happening at, at big firms.

So by the time the #MeToo movement rolled around, I think there was an expectation among women and men on Wall Street that the world would sort of be hearing about what happened behind closed doors.

And what we've reported on over the last few years is the way that cultural and financial and legal forces have kept a lot of allegations of bad behavior quiet.

So, for example, you have a kind of alternate system called arbitration, which definitely applies to all sorts of corporations, including the media, but Wall Street has been at the forefront of using forced arbitration, which is a way of saying to someone who has signed a contract, if something bad happens, you are not going to be taking it before a judge, you're going to be going in this quieter, kind of more shadowy system, that's essentially kind of like a privatized version of justice. And that has happened a lot on Wall Street.

Smith: So if you are a worker in any workplace and you signed any sort of arbitration agreement on your first day of work, you essentially waive your right to appear in an open court and disagree with your employer about what happened. Wall Street has very frequently turned to these sort of nasty tools to quiet workers.

Abelson: Although it has begun to change. I think Paige and I have — maybe one of our first pieces of reporting together was about federal legislation that changes harassment laws so that you don't have to go into arbitration.

Smith: Arbitration agreements now are not binding for workers who signed them on their first day. So, workers who do come forward with allegations like the ones Ardith Lindsey outlined in her lawsuit against Citigroup, they can appear in an open court and disagree with their employer about what happened.

Holder: Yeah I mean, it seems like this is an example of, being able to make public these allegations, which then allowed more people to come forward and speak to you. Though, you've spoken with 22 people but none of them would go on the record. What did you make of that, given what's changed over the past few years?

Smith: I would say that things have certainly changed over the past few years. And of course, Ardith Lindsey's lawsuit in particular does change things in this particular division at this particular bank. But I think that people are still very scared to share their experiences publicly or on the record.

Either they're still in the industry or they are fearful of what sort of retaliation might come down the line. I think people think of Wall Street as being this giant, you know, conglomerate of big banks with thousands of employees. A common theme that I heard was that it is still quite small and people, um, do hear about things. So I think that that was certainly a concern.

Abelson: And Paige’s reporting shows that, that people do not necessarily have a good experience when they speak up that this story has some some really key details about talking to HR and talking to senior executives and sharing, uh, things that happened. And then I think I think that's it. There's like a half a dozen people in this story who felt really dissatisfied that there was a lack of change after they spoke up. And so, I, I feel like I can sympathize, really, with why, you know, one might think, well, if I go public with a journalist, that's not going to end any better than, than my previous attempts.

Holder: Mhm. Well, so, I mean, as you were doing reporting on this especially since 2018, does it feel like Wall Street's #MeToo moment has finally come?

Abelson: No, I don't. I don't. I think that, um, you know, to watch what happened with Harvey Weinstein and with Hollywood was to see an industry whose moors were completely turned on their head. Um, I think you might be able to say the same about, about politics, um, other kinds of entertainment, but, Wall Street by and large, I don't think you can say that anyone who has accumulated vast power, the way that Weinstein did, has been outed and publicly revealed the way that he had been.

Wall Street is, um, a place where things go wrong and things go right, but by and large, we see the same executives and the same companies accumulate and keep power. And I would say that in order to qualify as like a vast #MeToo moment, that would mean change, and I'm not so sure we've seen dramatic change.

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