The names of two Goldman Sachs Group executives mentioned in years-old internal complaints won’t be made public in one of Wall Street’s biggest gender discrimination lawsuits.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Lehrburger Thursday rejected an attempt by a class of former female employees who sued the bank to unseal the identities and other information about one current and one former executive who were named in internal complaints almost two decades ago.
Lawyers for the bank had argued that release of the names would violate the men’s privacy and unnecessarily sensationalize the case. The women claimed that the public has a right to the information.
Lehrburger ordered the names remain confidential in a brief, two-paragraph order that didn’t disclose his reasoning.
The ruling won’t affect the progress of the long-running lawsuit, which is still mired in pretrial disputes. Goldman Sachs is seeking to decertify the class-action lawsuit, claiming the plaintiffs can’t prove that all the women in the class were harmed financially. As an alternative, the bank asked the judge to let it appeal certification of the class action. The judge hasn’t ruled on the bank’s requests yet.
Cristina Chen-Oster, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, first complained about her treatment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2005, then sued five years later. The suit, which won class-action status in 2018, covers thousands of women and is closely watched on Wall Street, where men hold most positions of power.
The women claim Goldman permitted its managers to make biased pay and promotion decisions, systematically denying women opportunities they deserved.
The women claim Goldman Sachs is again attempting to delay a trial, with its request for an appeal.
“There is no reason to delay the trial of this case — now in its twelfth year — with another unnecessary attempt at appellate review of class certification,” they said in an April filing. “This case is ready for trial, and should promptly be tried.”
The case is Chen-Oster v Goldman Sachs Group Inc., 10-cv-6950, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
