Lindsay MacMillan, former vice president at Goldman Sachs said she quit her high-paying job at Wall Street giant two years ago to become a novelist because of its “man’s world” culture that left female employees “not feeling valued”.
Ms MacMillan, who advanced to the position of Vice President in the bank’s marketing department, shared that she ended a promising career at Goldman after six years because she felt pressured to “keep my feminine side tucked away” as one of the few women in her division.
In her essay for Business Insider, she explained that her demanding schedule, which ran from 7 a.m. to 10 pm daily and included long hours on weekends, was driven by “whatever the male leadership pushed.”
“Under my desk, I would keep a pair of black pumps that I called my ‘Hollywood heels,'” she wrote. “When I put them on every morning, I channelled a thick-skinned character who thrived in a man’s world.”
Ms MacMillan wrote that she “had to mimic the masculine way to succeed.”
“I wore a pantsuit and suppressed my personality,” MacMillan wrote, noting the recent departure of several high-ranking women from Goldman and a $215 million class action settlement over allegations of gender pay discrimination and sexual harassment against female employees.
“I played golf, discussed football, and cried in the bathroom stall to avoid being seen shedding tears at my desk,” Ms MacMillan shared.
According to her essay, MacMillan was instructed to stop using exclamation points in her emails.
Ms MacMillan wrote that when she posted poetry on her Instagram account, she received “negative comments” from colleagues “about how emotional the poems were”.
Ms MacMillian who became a vice president at the age of 28 wrote that she was “burned out – not from the work itself but from the parts of me I had to dim along the way.”
“The internal balancing act pushed me out,” she wrote.
Disappointed by the headline posted by Business Insider, Ms MacMillian wrote on LinkedIn, “Not only did I not write these words, but I made clear that the headline needed to be about CELEBRATING women, not bashing men.”
MacMillan added that she “didn’t hate my job by any means” and that she found the work “intellectually stimulating.”
She gushed over the fact that she “met wonderful mentors and friends” while “learning about the business world from the best of the best.”
“I just loved writing so much that I couldn’t justify keeping it as a side hobby any longer,” MacMillan wrote at the time.
