As the #MeToo movement shines a spotlight on rampant sexual harassment in multiple industries, the financial services industry has avoided the brunt of the movement, but that is liable to change, Bloomberg reports.
Three-quarters of financial advisors are men, and one in 11 of those advisers has a record of misconduct, three times the proportion of women in the field, according to a 2017 study by a Stanford researcher and two others.
Top firms such as UBS, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley let advisers use their own salary to pay their assistants, which is a system designed to give brokers, who often work in multiple offices, freedom to act more like entrepreneurs. Assistants, most of whom are female, average $50,000 in annual pay, while top brokers can earn hundreds of thousands, even millions, according to federal and industry data.
These freewheeling personnel arrangements for assistants are unheard of in the rest of corporate America, according to Melissa Mahoney, chief operating officer for the International Association of Administrative Professionals, a trade group representing assistants.
The arrangements also leave the assistants vulnerable to harassment.
In March, Michael Ladge, a member of the President’s Club at Morgan Stanley, was accused of showing his administrative assistant photos of prostitutes he’d slept with and trying to pursue a sexual relationship with her. In 1996, a class-action suit against Smith Barney, now owned by Morgan Stanley, described a locker room atmosphere in which male brokers threatened to take female employees who displeased them to a basement “boom-boom room.”
