The Girls' Guide To The Economy Part 10--When It Comes To Cutbacks In The Financial World, You'll Never Guess Which Is The First Gender To Go

Why are we not surprised that corporate misogyny is alive and well during the economic downturn:

Rosario Buendia, a former managing director in Standard & Poor’s structured-finance ratings group, says in a lawsuit that McGraw-Hill Cos. discriminated against women in reorganizing the bond-rating subsidiary’s leadership.

Since credit markets collapsed in August 2007, S&P has replaced at least five female executives with men, according to the complaint filed on March 6 in New York State Supreme Court. The dismissals allegedly came as the parent company announced four rounds of job cuts at S&P eliminating 512 positions.

McGraw-Hill “favored male employees and discriminated against women,” according to Buendia’s complaint, which says she was paid “considerably less than her male counterparts, despite her exemplary performance.” Buendia seeks $5 million in compensatory damages and a $15 million punitive award.

The female executive team that once led S&P’s ratings business was an exception in an industry where women occupy about 8 percent of the best-paid jobs at financial companies with more than $1 billion in assets, according to a study for Bloomberg by Inc., a Redwood Shores, California-based pay consultant. Equilar prepared the analysis, based on the 2008 proxy filings of publicly held corporations, for this story.

The median annual compensation for the best-paid women was 30 percent less than the $797,774 for men, Equilar reported.

According to  New York attorney Douglas Wigdor. a similar situation exists at Citigroup:

Women formerly held about 10 percent of the managerial jobs in Citigroup’s public finance business and have borne about 45 percent of the unit’s job cuts since November,  Wigdor says.

Citigroup spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos says the reduction “was done fairly and lawfully and was based on legitimate business reasons unrelated to gender.” Citigroup doesn’t disclose the gender makeup of its workforce and hasn’t quantified the job cuts publicly, Romero-Apsilos says.

Many thanks to Women’s Space for drawing our attention to this story.