Polly's press & media appearances
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Rediscover your Passion - Go It Alone
Finansmiljøet i London - et Jobbhelvete
Fear and Loathing in the Heart of the city
My Glittering City Career Turned into Golden Handcuffs
Do Women Really Get a Raw Deal in the City?
My High Flying City Job was not worth a Life of Misery
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My glittering prize of a City career turned into golden handcuffs 2nd September 2006 by Rachel Porter
POLLY COURTNEY knew she was being seduced as she polished off another glass of expensive wine. The smartly turned-out young man across the table was promising her the world. Yet he was not a potential suitor but a graduate recruiter from an investment bank seeking new blood like her to sign away her life in exchange for a big salary. He cottoned on to her ambitions and said she could achieve them all. Big money and a jet-set lifestyle were hers for the taking. “Until then I’d never really considered a career in banking, “ she says. “But after a few of these wine-fuelled dinners, I started to feel convinced.” All around her, similarly wide-eyed undergraduates – cherrypicked from Britain’s top universities as the movers and shakers of the future – were receiving the same treatment. “I knew the money was great but that was never my motivation,” Polly recalls. “It was when they spoke about the job itself that I really started listening. “They said I’d make groundbreaking deals every week and fly all over the world. They said: ‘The hours are long but the perks are great and the job is so exciting.’” In reality, once she started working for the US investment bank, things were very different. For Polly, who was 22 at the time, the starting salary of £37,500 was no compensation for the misery of life at the bottom of the heap. After 12 gruelling months working hours beyond endurance, battling sexism and struggling to earn the respect of her seniors, she threw in the towel for £10,000 redundancy. She set to work on her first novel, Golden Handcuffs – a work of fiction based on detailed notes she made of her “year in hell”. It blows the lid on the culture of cruelty that prospers within London’s Square Mile. She reveals how newcomers are regularly subjected to psychological bullying and forced to work for 48 hours without sleep. She also vents the frustration she felt to be a woman, consistently underestimated and undermined, in a man’s world. “I don’t expect sympathy for my story. I have never claimed I was harassed or persecuted, “ she insists. “I just want to open people’s eyes to the culture of the City and the rites of passage that juniors go through. I was naive. They made promises of an exciting career but they were huge exaggerations.” The bubble burst as soon as she started work in London. One of 300 ambitious new recruits, she had spent the summer at the company’s two-month workhard/play-hard Manhattan “boot camp”, where she frittered away most of her £7,500 “golden hello”, partying through the night with colleagues. “I was completely exhausted by the time I flew home. I remember thinking my liver and kidneys couldn’t take much more of this punishment. But I had no reason to worry – the fun stopped as soon as we landed. “In some ways I was lucky. Working weekends wasn’t the norm in my department and, although I would regularly stay until midnight, it was rare that I had to work right through the night. “Elsewhere my colleagues would do one all-nighter after another. “They would buy a toothbrush from a vending machine, they would shower in the corporate gym, then buy a clean shirt from the in-house shop and be back at their desk for another day’s work. They had it so much worse.” Polly, now a 26-year-old freelance management consultant, is “certainly not scared of hard work”.
Had her time been
well-spent, she could have coped with the long hours. She says the
problem was that, as the only woman in a team of 21, she was seen as a
secretary not a banker. When managing directors scanned the office for
an analyst, she was usually Polly was one of two trainees assigned to her department. While her male counterparts were busy assisting with important deals, she was slaving over meaningless tasks. Determined to avoid being labelled a “whinger” too “soft” to hack it in the cut-throat world of banking, Polly is by no means the kind of girl who would feel fazed in a male-dominated environment. At home in Kent, she was one of a handful of girls at an all-male secondary school and has a firstclass degree in engineering from Cambridge. She even considers herself pretty tolerant of sexism and accepts it was bound to rear its ugly head in the office. “OK, there will always be jokes and there will always be people who don’t realise how sexist they are. But I’d learned to give as good as I got,” she says. “But when they made such comments as: ‘You must have slept your way into university,’ or ‘Sorry Polly – we would invite you along, but we’re planning to pull tonight, ‘ it got harder not to take it personally. I was even told I’d only got the job because I had good legs. “The fact is, I was never given a chance to prove myself.” So it may come as a surprise that Polly has chosen to speak out against women who sue their City employers for huge sums to compensate for harassment. EARLIER this month, secretary Helen Green won more than £800,000 from Deutsche Bank. She claimed to have suffered a mental breakdown after colleagues waged a campaign of victimisation that included blowing raspberries at her across the office. Polly’s immediate reaction was one of fury; in a hurried letter to a national newspaper she wrote: “Thank you, Helen Green, for yet another kick in the teeth for women trying to make it in the City. Her win against Deutsche Bank may have left her £828K better off but it has lumbered the rest of us with the task of proving to already nervous City employers we’re not just gold-digging crybabies.” Today, having now read the report of the case in full, Polly admits she has a little more sympathy for Ms Green. “The raspberry-blowing and the name-calling do sound trivial but the constant drip, drip, drip, of abuse was what ground her down in the end. That’s something I can identify with,” she explains. “I still find it difficult to convey the hostility of the environment I worked in. I can cite examples and people will say ‘How pathetic,’ ‘So what?’ or ‘I’ve been pinched on the bum before, get over it.’ “But it’s never about that one incident. It’s the accumulation that leads to misery.” The treatment Polly herself found hardest to endure was meted out to every trainee, regardless of gender, and that was the long and unpredictable hours that put paid to any life outside the workplace. “Once or twice I attempted to meet friends after work but always had to cancel at the last minute. I remember one poor guy organised a huge party for his birthday on a Saturday night but ended up having to work all weekend. “At six o’clock, just as you thought you were done for the day, a director would dump a pile of work on your desk and say: ‘Could you have that on my desk by 7am? Oh, and don’t spend too long on it, will you.’ You would stay until 2am checking figures or writing presentations only to be told in the morning that it wasn’t needed after all. “One night, after leaving at 11pm, I was called back in at 1am. I was so fast asleep I missed my mobile phone ringing, so they sent a taxi driver to wake me up. “They hauled me back in and I spent the night checking ‘urgent’ numbers. I didn’t get home until the following midnight.” Although it wasn’t commonplace, Polly knew of one colleague who would slip out of the office to pep himself up with cocaine. She says: “The first and second year graduate trainees still had enough energy to survive the week on cans of Coke and Nurofen. But it just wasn’t possible to sustain that lifestyle for long. In a way I don’t blame anyone for turning to drugs to keep themselves going.” A great camaraderie developed between Polly and those she calls her “fellow sufferers”. Together they even calculated their “Break Even Day” – the point at which they would have earned enough to pay back their golden hellos (their contracts stated that if they chose to resign within their first year they would have to repay their signingon fee). It is one of the only reasons she stuck it out for so long. Polly had fully expected the publication of her novel to provoke a hostile reaction from the industry and, by and large, that is what she has got. But she says she was surprised to find herself being lambasted by some newspapers this week after a photograph of her pole-dancing was discovered online. One disapproving headline read: “City woman who quit over sexism admits pole-dancing” – as if to suggest that one girls’ night out could discredit her whole account. Polly says she is also aware of the emerging backlash against her story among the blogging community on the internet. Among other things she has been accused of being a “poor little rich girl”, who “would have plenty more to moan about if she worked in a dull low-paid ordinary job like the rest of the population”.
“I’m not complaining,”
she says. “I walked away from that year with £55,000 before tax, which I
know is ridiculous for a 22-year-old. All I can say is that, since
leaving that job, I’ve had to scratch around for work and money. I know
how stressful it can
“Some people thrive in
the City environment. Some people love to compete all day long. They
love to brag about how little sleep they had, or how late they stayed.
“But these companies actively look for people like me. They choose
high-achieving academic, all-singing, all-dancing types with plenty of
strings to their bow. So when the option of voluntary redundancy came her way, Polly grabbed it, much to the surprise of her bosses. “Although I was worn down and miserable on the inside, I had never let it show. I’d made a point of taking on work with a smile but I had become a zombie. “I could have done my work in my sleep but trying to hold a proper conversation was impossible; I was just too exhausted. “As an analyst, I had never expected thanks or praise. But the first time I heard any appreciation for my effort was when I handed in my notice. And, of course, by that time, my mind was made up.”
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Polly's TV & Radio appearances
From Engineer to Investment Banker to Novelist
Berliner Zeitung Magazin, 2007
I Know the Pressure Matthew was Under
I Sold My Soul to the City - then Wanted it Back
Banker Novel Shows it's not all Success in the City
Taste of High Life in City can Seduce Interns
City Woman who quit City over Sexism admits Lapdancing
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SOME
THRIVE IN THE CUT-THROAT WORLD OF BANKING BUT TRAINEE POLLY COURTNEY
ONLY JUST SURVIVED. NOW SHE IS LIFTING THE LID ON HER ‘YEAR IN HELL’
