The crash of Zoe Cruz

at NY Magazine:

Succeeding in the upper echelons of a Wall Street firm is as much a matter of nuanced power politics as anything else. You need to be good at the actual job, to be sure. But you also need to be good at favor-trading, strategic maneuvering, and convincing the board of directors that you’re good at your job. If Cruz had loved the black-and-white objectivity of being a trader, she was now stumbling into gray territory.

“If you ask a woman now if it’s different than it used to be, they say it’s the same or worse,” says Linda Bialecki, who runs a Wall Street search firm. “It’s worse because it’s gotten so much more subtle. It’s hard to argue about subtle. But it’s a thousand cuts.”

What was happening to Cruz didn’t seem all that subtle. She was seen as a ballbuster: “We understand that she is very fierce and enjoys shredding inflated reputations into small packets of confetti,” wrote a financial-gossip columnist around the same time that the pejorative “Cruz Missile” first appeared in the press. She was seen as overly emotional, her voice sometimes cracking in contentious meetings. (“Having an emotional reaction to things is where I’ve made most of my mistakes,” she told a group of students at Harvard.) Much like Hillary Clinton, she was accused of crying for the purposes of manipulation. “She wanted to compete with the guys, but she was not beyond crying when it was useful,” says a onetime male colleague.

The real problem is that the proverbial glass ceiling is self-reinforcing. The traits that a woman must develop to duke it out on the trading floor will come back to haunt her as she ascends the ranks of management. As a current Morgan Stanley woman puts it, “He gets ‘Mack the Knife’ and that’s cool, and she gets ‘Cruz Missile’ and that’s bad?”