‘Hands down dresses and up skirts’ – just a regular day at work for women in the City?

It’s not a blip in the market or a black swan event. Allegations of harassment in the high-stakes world of finance and business are persistent. The latest focus is Odey Asset Management. Sex in the City? Please – it ain’t that glamorous.

The Financial Times’s extended report on Crispin Odey, the founder of the hedge fund who is also known for vociferously backing Brexit – as well as his friendship with Boris Johnson – is gruesome reading.

It contains allegations from 13 women who have worked or had professional dealings with the firm, with gritty details such as hands down dresses in the back of taxis, as well as hands up skirts and Odey forcing a female friend to put her hand on his penis. He is also accused of masturbating on a female entrepreneur after a business meeting. New women in the office, the report claims, were advised to take the stairs rather than risk getting in a lift with him. Odey denies the allegations.

If true, this would be yet another example of senior male executives getting away with it. So why, in the supposedly well-regulated City of London, are stories of sexual harassment still rife?

Earlier this year, there was a meltdown at the CBI – the Confederation of British Industry – after allegations which led to the dismissal of its chief executive, Tony Danker. Among other instances, in 2019 the Bank of England had to tell insurance companies to clean up their workplace cultures after nearly 500 workers at the insurance market Lloyd’s of London reported in a survey they’d either been a victim of – or a witness to – sexual harassment in the previous year.

The FT reports that Odey was given a final written warning by the firm’s financial executive committee and that the FCA was informed, as they were legally required to. One woman took him to court for indecent assault and lost.

But there were more who wanted to speak out – and it’s telling that the extent of the complaints, stretching back to 1998, have only just emerged. Are the City and its Mayfair counterpart, the hedge fund quarter, so behind the times?

Maybe. The Financial Times noted that the Odey Asset Management hiring strategy in its early years was “earls and girls” – men from the public schools of Eton and Harrow – which Odey had attended, plus a smattering of aristocracy. Men from those schools are not all rotters, but there is arguably an inherent tribalism among them which may lead them to excuse and defend their own.

Cultures can take generations to change, and it would be unfair to say that many big City institutions haven’t: there has been a root-and-branch reform of attitudes to women in many workplaces. Lloyd’s of London, mentioned above, itself dealt out punishment when issuing its largest ever fine in 2022 against Atrium Underwriters for its unpalatable office culture, including its annual “Boys’ Night Out”.

But the closed nature of some powerful firms may be making the problem worse. There’s secrecy about financial transactions, and also about emotional and sexual transactions. Men don’t talk about these in general, at least in public. But the absence of open discussions about what the parameters are makes for some very strange ideas about what’s acceptable.

I recall, during the slew of sexual allegations against Dominic Strauss-Khan, former head of the IMF, including the rape of a hotel maid (which was settled out of court), his sexual life was referred to repeatedly as merely “adventures.”

That is the problem with the City: it is too often treated as a game, one of power and money. “Risk and reward,” says one old-timer I’ve spoken to. “You are being asked to play it every day. At some point, it becomes part of your outlook on life.”