- Goldman exec Jon Reeves took a six-month paternity leave after the birth of his second child, and his colleagues began to exclude him from meeting invitations. His manager allegedly said he was “lazy,” and the firm began to unlawfully regard him as expendable, an employment judge ruled. Reeves is seeking $5 million in compensation.
Goldman Sachs unfairly dismissed an employee while he was on paternity leave, a U.K. employment tribunal found, ruling that this amounted to unlawful sex discrimination. The executive is seeking nearly $5 million in compensation.
The employee, Jon Reeves, had been with the firm since 2007 and had previously worked in Salt Lake City and Sydney before transferring to London, according to the judgment. As deputy global head of Goldman’s “control room,” Reeves helped monitor the flow of sensitive corporate information to guard against breaking regulatory rules or breaching confidentiality.
Reeves was a rising star in his department, the ruling said. He was rated in the top quartile of his peers each year from 2012 to 2019 and was at one point put on track to be promoted to managing director.
Yet slowly, Reeves’ reputation at the firm began to deteriorate, and he claimed it was in part because he took paternity leave. “I think in my situation, I’m like a white man that tried to walk into a restaurant and got told that I can’t sit down. So, I was discriminated against. What happened to me would not happen to a woman at Goldman Sachs, 100%,” he said, according to the ruling.
A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs said in a statement that the firm encourages its employees to take parental leave: “The firm is deeply committed to supporting working parents, with hundreds of Goldman Sachs fathers having taken up our market-leading 26 weeks paid parental leave since it was introduced in 2019. We are carefully reviewing the judgment and the reasoning supporting its findings.”
During the COVID pandemic, when Reeves was working from home, he said he received no sympathy from his managers when he brought up the difficulty of managing his work and childcare. He recalled that his manager, Omar Beer, was dismissive and told him repeatedly to “figure it out,” according to the ruling.
Reeves claimed he was treated differently after his manager couldn’t reach him via email during a work emergency over a holiday weekend. He was driving at the time with his family and first child and wasn’t aware of the urgency of the issue until another manager, Ada Liu, called him the next day.
The incident was repeatedly mentioned to him as a “missed opportunity” despite his answering a day later and working through the rest of the weekend to help solve the issue. When he said he would be taking a six-month leave for the birth of his second child, from November 2021 until May 2022, in line with company policy, his managers were happy for him, according to his complaint. But soon things changed.
Liu asked for Reeves to be excluded from meetings related to the control room. In an email, Liu also questioned whether Reeves was “officially now no longer CR [control room],” owing to the leave period. Liu claimed that she wanted to remove Reeves from meeting invitations so he did not worry about work while on leave, but the tribunal found that argument to be “disingenuous,” according to the ruling.
His manager, Beer, later said that Reeves was “lazy,” and it was during Reeves’ leave that the firm first saw him as expendable.
Just before Reeves was set to return full-time, he was notified that he could soon be laid off. He wasn’t allowed to return from his parental leave as planned and was placed on “garden leave” (paid leave during which an employee is contractually barred from seeking further employment) until he was fired in September 2022.
There had been no fair process made by Goldman before the firm dismissed Reeves, the tribunal found.
“The Tribunal decided that the Respondent had made a final decision to dismiss the Claimant, even before he was told that he was at risk of redundancy,” the ruling read.
The panel will decide in January how much Goldman will have to pay Reeves. The former Goldman employee is asking for £3.8 million ($4.85 million) in compensation.
