Meet the woman who wrote a shocking account of her life on Wall Street

cnbc.com:

Jamie Fiore Higgins didn't leave her job at Goldman Sachs planning to reveal the most personal, demeaning and, at times, outright scary moments from her 18 years at the investment bank.

But after resigning in 2016, having risen through the ranks to become a managing director — the second-highest role behind partner — conversations with people from outside of that world made her realize how shocking some of the things she'd experienced were.

And so in the book «Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs,» published last summer, she chronicled them.

Some anecdotes, from her early days in the late 1990s but also later, were sexist comments and inappropriate actions she characterizes as the «white noise of Wall Street.» She says a colleague created a spreadsheet ranking the body parts of female recruits. She recalls being told she had only been promoted «because of [her] vagina,» and a series of junior male colleagues making clear they would not respect her authority.

She also says she witnessed sex and drug-taking in the office, and work socials being held in strip clubs (she notes at the start of the book that some of the people featured in it, who are all given pseudonyms, are composites of various people she knew and the timing of some events has been compressed).

A Goldman Sachs spokesperson said the company «strongly disagrees» with the characterization of its culture described in the book, and what it called «anonymized allegations.»

«Had Ms. Higgins raised these allegations with our Human Resources department at the time we would have investigated them thoroughly and addressed them seriously,» the spokesperson told CNBC. CNBC could not independently verify any of the accounts made in the book.

Fio