For Crying Out Loud, Another Wall Street Woman Falls

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- So she was tearful. Do we care?

The chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), who resigned Monday in the wake of the bank's announcement of an embarrassing $2-billion-plus loss on her watch, is but the latest high-ranking woman to depart a business famous for its gender discrimination.

Ina Drew, who reported directly to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, joins a barely visible group of big-shot women who got fired or pushed out of their jobs after blunders or corporate restructurings.

There isn't a lot of argument that she should have lost her job, having overseen a trading group that made a really bad bet in London that will long have reverberations in Washington. But it is a reminder that powerful women and Wall Street don't mix well.

Remember Zoe Cruz, fired from Morgan Stanley (MS) in 2007? Or Erin Callan, who lost her chief financial officer job at Lehman Brothers in 2008? How about Sallie Krawcheck, whose job disappeared after Bank of America (BAC) bought Merrill Lynch?

Men get booted out of Wall Street jobs all the time, of course. But there are a lot more of them, so there's nobody losing sleep over a dearth of guys at the top.

And when a woman's career blows up, it stirs up all the old stereotypes. "Men's failures tend to be attributed to bad luck," says Joan C. Williams, distinguished professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. "With women, people start saying "I always knew she really didn't have it."

It also stirs up issues like women and tears.

Drew cried -- a bunch of times, according to the New York Times. "Ms. Drew had tearfully offered to resign multiple times since the scale of the loss became apparent in late April, but Dimon had held off until now on accepting it," the paper wrote on May 13, citing people familiar with the situation.

In another Times story referring to her resignation on May 14, Drew again was described as having "tearfully resigned" that day. Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, said she had no comment on the depictions of executive emotion.

1 2 3 4 Next › Last »