Lauren Bonner followed a privileged path through life, from an all-girls private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Harvard, and eventually to a position at Bridgewater Associates, the giant hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio. There, she managed a team that did hiring for the firm, and later she helped oversee the firm’s pool of research analysts. “I was really attracted to it because it was a place of real integrity, meritocracy, transparency, accountability,” Bonner told me recently. “All the things that I had been seeking culturally. It felt very refreshing.”
The money wasn’t bad, either. After three years at Bridgewater, she left to work at a series of startups. Then, in 2016, a headhunter contacted her about the possibility of taking a position at a company called Point72 Asset Management. Point72 wasn’t the average investment company; it was started by the stock trader Steven A. Cohen, who had achieved Wall Street infamy as the founder of the hedge fund S.A.C. Capital. S.A.C. was shut down, in 2013, after a nearly decade-long government investigation into insider trading at the firm. Eight former S.A.C. employees were convicted or pleaded guilty to criminal charges as a result of the investigation, and, though Cohen himself was never charged, S.A.C. was indicted. The firm eventually paid the government $1.8 billion to settle the case. (Charges against two of the former employees were dismissed as a result of an appeals-court ruling.) As part of the settlement, Cohen was barred from managing other people’s money until January, 2018.
The rise and fall of Cohen’s hedge fund was, on a basic level, a tale of men behaving badly. The story, which I recounted in my book about the case, “Black Edge,” had barely any female characters on either the hedge-fund side or the government side. Earlier this year, a former hedge-fund manager named Dominique Mielle pointed this out in an article for Business Insider, arguing that the financial industry was hurting its own profits by refusing to be more inclusive toward women and other underrepresented groups. Herd behavior, Mielle wrote, leads to bad decision-making. Around the same time, Bonner was taking steps to illustrate Mielle’s point: on February 12th, she filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit in federal court against Cohen, Point72, and the firm’s president at the time, Douglas Haynes, charging them with fostering an environment that is hostile to women and accusing them of paying women less than their male peers. (In a statement, a Point72 spokesperson said that Bonner’s complaint was “without merit” and “replete with allegations that are either false or based on unsubstantiated hearsay.”) In the past year and a half, while companies in the movie business, advertising, media, and other industries have had toxic workplace cultures exposed and faced calls for accountability over gender discrimination and harassment, the financial sector has largely escaped public attention. Bonner’s case brought the #MeToo movement to Wall Street.
Her lawsuit accuses executives at Point72 of paying her substantially less than several “lesser-qualified” male peers, and of being generally reluctant to promote women at the firm. Out of a hundred and twenty-five portfolio managers at Point72, according to the complaint, only one is female, and the hiring committee tasked with bringing in investment professionals is exclusively male. The suit also accuses certain company executives, including Haynes, of commenting on female employees’ looks, and other male executives—among them Mark Herr, the company’s head of corporate communications—of describing women at the company as “hysterical” and saying that women aren’t as hardworking as men. The firm’s chief operating officer, Tim Shaughnessy, is accused of holding “no girls allowed” meetings, while other unnamed male executives are cited as stating that they try to avoid hiring or promoting women. In one baffling episode that Bonner recounts in her complaint, Haynes, a former McKinsey director whom Cohen had installed as president of the firm, left the word “pussy” scrawled on a whiteboard in his glass-walled office for weeks, with no apparent explanation. In her previous jobs, at Bridgewater and at tech companies, Bonner told me, “I was the only woman in the room, but I was treated with respect.” At Point72, by contrast, “it felt creepy.” She said that other female employees she spoke to had made note of the “pussy” written on Haynes’s whiteboard, but that everyone was too uncomfortable to say anything about it. (Haynes could not be reached for comment.)
Recently, Bonner agreed to meet with me to discuss her case. We sat together in an airy conference room in the offices of the Wigdor law firm, in downtown Manhattan. Since filing her lawsuit, Bonner has continued to report to work every day, and she told me what that has been like. Mostly, it has been awkward; she believes that people are scared to talk to her. Conversations tend to end when she enters a room, and she says that her responsibilities have been reduced, so she feels that there isn’t all that much for her to do. Still, she remains employed at Point72. “Look, we make a lot of money in this business, and there’s no way to mince words about that,” Bonner told me—in 2018, according to her lawsuit, she expected to make a three-hundred-thousand-dollar base salary and a bonus of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “But fairness and equality should still apply. And if someone like me, with my background, can’t be paid at parity, or break down some of the doors, I don’t know who can. . . . A lot of the women around me had mortgages, had kids, were primary breadwinners, or were more junior and hadn’t worked at other places, didn’t have track records, didn’t have relationships. And there was so much fear. I just thought, I don’t think I can live with myself if I don’t do something about it.”
When Bonner was being hired at Point72, she pitched the firm on an idea that she believed would help diversify its employee pool while at the same time improving its profits. The past few years have been difficult for many hedge funds, as average returns have sagged despite a boom in the stock market. This dynamic makes it more difficult for funds to justify the high fees they charge their clients, and competition among funds for the brightest and most talented employees has grown increasingly intense. Bonner believed that her idea could help the company recruit the best people, which would give it an advantage over competitors. “Contrarian thought is always the money-making thought, so you’re looking for differentiated thinking,” Bonner said. “That also means that the actual business case for diversity has never been stronger in financial services than it is now.” Her idea was to create a proprietary system—she could not describe it in detail, due to a nondisclosure agreement—that would use algorithms and data analysis to help the company screen for prospective employees with atypical backgrounds. “If you know what the right traits of a great investor are, you don’t have to keep hiring the president of the investment club at Wharton,” Bonner told me. “You can find the person who’s majoring in agriculture in Iowa. We found someone in Tehran who I really liked. You can find people who have the raw intrinsics of what you want but, by nature of not growing up in New Canaan and playing lacrosse and going to Wharton, they have a different perspective, and that’s financially valuable to us.” Point72 agreed to let her develop the new recruiting system in addition to doing the main job that she was being hired for. Bonner started working at Point72 in August of 2016.
Point72 was initially set up to invest Cohen’s personal eleven-billion-dollar fortune, but from the start Cohen—with an eye toward an eventual return to managing outside investors’ money—tried to distance himself from the reputation that had formed around S.A.C. He pushed out his previous team of executives, hired new compliance officers, and pledged to run a rule-abiding company. (On the “Our Story” page of the Point72 Web site, the words “Ethics,” “Excellence,” and “Opportunity” are the first thing you see. The first point in the company’s values statement reads, “We are professionals who conduct ourselves ethically and with integrity at all times.”) In January, when Cohen became eligible to manage other people’s money again, he quickly raised about three billion dollars from outside investors.
In her complaint, Bonner says that she tried for months, to no avail, to get her salary and title adjusted to be on par with comparable male employees at the firm. Women just didn’t seem to be taken seriously, she said, no matter how strongly they were performing. The lawsuit quotes the firm’s chief legal officer saying that “the reality is that this is just a really tough place for women and that’s not going to change.” Bonner received glowing performance reviews, according to her complaint, and her recruiting platform was embraced as a success. Still, men with resumes thinner than hers continued being hired for positions above hers. Filing a lawsuit, she told me, “was my last option.”
A few weeks after Bonner filed her case, Point72 announced that it was hiring Jamie Gorelick, a partner at the law firm WilmerHale, to lead an internal review of its culture. Around the same time, Haynes—the executive who’d had “pussy” written on his office whiteboard—resigned from the firm. “For the first time, it felt like I had my dignity back,” Bonner said. (On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Mike Butler, Point72’s head of human resources, had decided to retire.)
Point72 is fighting vigorously against Bonner’s lawsuit, and, if it goes to trial, the firm is likely to argue that Bonner was paid exactly what she deserved. But part of the power of her complaint is that the professional environment it portrays doesn’t seem so unusual; rather, it seems utterly familiar to many people who have worked on Wall Street—women being undervalued, talked over, given less important work, passed over for promotions, and forced to listen to banter about strip clubs. Bonner’s claims are notable for their ordinariness.
I asked Bonner why she thought that more discrimination cases haven’t been filed against Wall Street companies. She paused for a moment. “Someone asked me recently if it’s as bad as it is, why haven’t more women come out?” she said. “My response is, more women haven’t come out because it is as bad as it is. That’s why. It’s a small club, and it’s an all-boys club, and people are terrified of not getting another job.” She went on, “When you’re paid less than someone who’s doing the exact same job, and probably at the same performance level as well, women start to develop a sense of, ‘I’m lucky to have this job. If I’m not paid as much, God, I’m lucky to even be here.’ ”
