As Lady Bracknell might have it were she an entirely different character, to suffer one gender bias allegation, Mr. Cohen, may be regarded as a misfortune; to be hit with a second (and third!) looks like carelessness. And yet.
Sara Vavra, who departed as head of global macro in October, and Shannon Gitlin, who works in Point72’s investor relations department, filed grievances with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities in recent months, according to court documents and interviews with members of the body.
This is bad enough on its face. It looks even worse when one notes that Vavra joined Point72 shortly before Laura Bonner filed her lawsuit and left more than a year-and-a-half later, meaning that Cohen & co. apparently didn’t get the #metoo message and clean up their act before alienating one of their most senior female traders and vice president in the division whose job it is to speak to their clients. It’s almost as if putting the guy with “pussy” scrawled across his whiteboard and the other guy who thinks it’s the perfectly natural order of things for women to struggle at Point72 in charge of changing the culture were not mere innocent missteps, but additional signs of a deeper problem. The powers that be at Point72 might not have noticed, but unfortunately for them, least one person—a person whose job it is to sniff out those sorts of deeper problems—seemed to.
Jeanne Christensen, an attorney who represented Bonner, is also working with Gitlin, court documents show.
Cohen’s Point72 Faces Discrimination Claims From Female Staffers [Bloomberg]