Two years ago, Tania Mirchandani, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. vice president in Los Angeles, told her boss she was pregnant with her third child. He was skeptical she could balance a large family with her demanding job, she recalled. That’s “a lot of mouths to feed,” she quoted him as saying.
Mirchandani, a 15-year Goldman Sachs veteran, figured that her supervisor, of all people, would have understood her dilemma. John Mallory, then a Goldman partner and rising star overseeing wealth management for the West Coast, had four children of his own.
In October 2016, weeks before she was scheduled to return, Mallory called her with some bad news: She was out of a job. “I’m on maternity leave, John,’’ she remembered telling him, as she fought back tears.
Mirchandani detailed her dismissal in a 2017 gender discrimination complaint against Goldman -- a document only recently disclosed through a public-records request to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
Mallory referred questions to Goldman, which denied any bias in her dismissal. Spokesman Michael DuVally said she had been terminated “for strategic business planning reasons” that had nothing to do with her pregnancy or leave. As part of a review of the company’s private wealth management business, male managers also lost their jobs, he said.
“Goldman Sachs is committed to supporting employees who are new parents, and takes its obligations and the laws relating to them very seriously,” DuVally said in an email.
In her complaint and an interview with Bloomberg, Mirchandani alleged that she lost her job because she took Goldman’s entire four-month paid family leave. In an arbitration proceeding still pending before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, she is seeking more than $1.5 million in damages.
The dispute reflects a tension in Corporate America, especially on Wall Street. Goldman and other elite companies promote more generous family-friendly policies as part of widely publicized diversity initiatives considered essential to attracting talent.
Yet, for all these efforts, only a quarter of a million women take paid maternity leave each month, a level that has remained essentially unchanged since the 1990s, according to a 2017 study by Boston University business school professor Jay Zagorsky. That figure may indicate that women avoid taking leaves for fear of damaging their careers, he said. U.S. companies continue to face thousands of pregnancy discrimination claims each year, according to federal data.
Even if women do come back to work, “very often they aren’t returned to the same position,” said Cara Greene, an employment lawyer at Outten & Golden. “They aren’t given back their accounts or clients.”