In an early scene in “Equity,” a new movie about women investment bankers, the protagonist, Naomi Bishop, delivers an address at her alma mater and describes how she became one of the top bankers for a firm that might be modelled after the former Bear Stearns. “I like money,” Bishop, played by Anna Gunn, tells the audience. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I only do what I do to take care of other people, because it is O.K. to do it for ourselves. For how it makes us feel. Secure? Yeah. Powerful? Absolutely.” She pauses, as if contemplating the political correctness of what she’s about to say: “I am so glad that it’s finally acceptable for women to sit and talk about ambition openly. But don’t let money be a dirty word. We can like that, too.”
If Bishop’s unapologetic admission sounds jarring coming from a woman, it may be because we rarely see realistic film depictions of women on Wall Street. Most Wall Street movies focus on money-obsessed men, and the few women who appear are either secretaries or prostitutes (or a promiscuous S.E.C. official, in the case of “The Big Short”). “Equity,” which was financed by a handful of actual female bankers, tells a different tale, in which a group of women try to claw their way up the financial hierarchy while being stymied and sabotaged at every turn by male colleagues and clients who range from raging sexists to sociopaths.
Bishop, a straight-talking blonde who prides herself on being able to elbow her way into any trading scrum or boardroom, isn’t shy about the fact that she, alone, pays for her SoHo loft and diamond earrings the size of ice chips. She never had children, so she can devote herself completely to her obsession with doing deals. Her go-to Internet password is “bankerchick,” intended without irony. Right from the beginning, though, her gender works against her in all of the ways we’re used to reading about in white papers about why there aren’t more women C.E.O.s. “Naomi, I’m going to be frank with you,” her male boss tells her early on, when she inquires about a promotion. “I just don’t think this is going to be your year. You rubbed some people the wrong way.”
The movie, which will be released on July 29th, was made by a female screenwriter (Amy Fox), female director (Meera Menon), female producers (Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas, who also both star), and arrives at a time when Wall Street women have become more open about discussing the challenges they face. The industry has been unwelcoming to women since the signing of the Buttonwood Agreement, in 1792, when twenty-four male brokers started the earliest version of the New York Stock Exchange, but that fact became infamous after a series of lawsuits in the nineteen-nineties, including one which came to be known as the “Boom-Boom Room” sexual harassment case. In 1996, twenty-three women filed a class-action suit against the brokerage firm Smith Barney, charging it with rampant gender discrimination going back to the nineteen-eighties. The suit’s revelations shocked people outside the industry who had never considered what went on inside places where thousands of young men spent their days jabbing on keyboards and screaming into phones.
The boom-boom room was an actual place, a basement party den at a Smith Barney office in Garden City, New York, where vats of liquor, lewd jokes, and groping were regular features. One female plaintiff was sexually assaulted in the office. The litigation dragged on for years; eventually Smith Barney paid a settlement of a hundred and fifty million dollars. Topless dancers have disappeared from major Wall Street firms, which have become vastly larger and more influential since the boom-boom-room days. Such firms are now global, and layers of compliance and human-resources executives are in place to help defuse potential lawsuits.
Discrimination suits, however, have not disappeared. Wall Street women have brought dozens of cases—against Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, U.B.S., and others—but the claims have gradually moved away from accounts of strippers and other frat-house behavior to the stubborn, more subtle forms of bias involving who gets promoted, paid more, or handed the best assignments. In 2010, two plaintiffs, Cristina Chen-Oster and Shanna Orlich, sued their former employer Goldman Sachs, accusing the firm of fostering a “culture of discrimination” and of paying female vice-presidents twenty-one-per-cent less than their male counterparts. Goldman denied the charges and is still fighting the plaintiffs’ attempt to gain the court’s permission to bring a class action.
Just two months ago, Megan Messina, a managing director at Bank of America, filed a complaint accusing the bank of paying women less than men and of excluding her from important meetings. Her bonus was millions of dollars lower than a male colleague—$1.55 million to his $5.5 million—who was doing the same job, she alleged. Most colorfully, she accused the bank of fostering a “bros club” work environment. (Bank of America officially denied there was any such thing.)
Like power-hungry people in real life, the women in “Equity” are no saints, which lends the movie a roughness that makes it more entertaining. The women are guided by a “whatever it takes” philosophy, willing, like the guys around them, to ignore the rules when they become inconvenient.
That the women are more complex than one-dimensional victims was what attracted Linda Munger, one of the film’s backers, to the project in the first place. Munger, a former bond saleswoman who once worked at Lehman Brothers, recalled that one of her first negative experiences in the business occurred in the early eighties, when she was at Bankers Trust. Her antagonists were two women who “had their knives out” for her, and it was her male boss who came to her defense at the time, whispering, “Hold your own!” into her ear on the trading floor like a director feeding lines to an actress onstage. It was an important lesson, and as soon as Munger read the screenplay she recognized elements of her own experience.
“I loved the script in that it wasn’t trying to glorify women—‘oh, those poor things, they never get a fair break, and gosh, there’s sexism,’ “ Munger said when I spoke with her. “Just as often, women screw women just like guys screw guys.” What defines them, she said, first and foremost, is that they are both products of their environment, one where money trumps just about everything.