Women’s Network Raises Its Voice

They called themselves the Glass Ceiling Club.

A group of young and ambitious women in the 1990s from the investment bank Bear Stearns would gather at restaurants every couple of months to discuss how to make the workplace more female friendly. The conversations would inevitably turn to their male colleagues, including the ones who behaved badly, said Maureen Sherry, a former managing director, who attended the meetings regularly.

“Of course, our conversations would revert to sharing facts we knew about the men we worked with,” recalled Ms. Sherry, who spent nine years at Bear Stearns before leavi ng i n 2000, adding, “Yes, it was mostly the same men who preyed on young women.”

For women who had to interact with some of the most notorious sexual harassers, Ms. Sherry said she recommended they stay on the trading floor — a very public space. “Survival hints like that were shared pretty freely,” Ms. Sherry wrote in an email.

That was the whisper network at work.

For as long as women have been in the labor force, this kind of support system has served as a vital source of shared information and a safe space for communal commiseration. Advice on salary negotiations and office politics would be disseminated.

But the network also allowed employees to clue each other into a spectrum of behavior that was often un-