Early in her career, Jewelle Bickford, now a partner at Evercore Wealth Management, worked at a global bank in New York with a male colleague who was on his best behavior during the first half of the day, she said, but during and after lunch, his work ethic devolved. “When he came back, you would walk by his office, and he would have his head down,” Ms. Bickford said. “And you knew he had had quite a few drinks.”

At the end of the year, when bonuses were announced, a friend of Ms. Bickford’s who worked in human resources told her how much that male colleague had received. “It was many multiples of what I made,” Ms. Bickford said. “He stayed there. I left.”

It was a Monday in late January, and Ms. Bickford was at a table with four other women in a semiprivate room at Kiki’s, a Greek restaurant in the Chinatown neighborhood in Manhattan. They included Gayl Johnson, a director of administration in New York City’s Department of Sanitation; Alix Keller, the director of product technology at Hello Alfred, a home concierge service; Melissa Robbins, a Philadelphia-based political strategist; and Kimberly Webster, formerly a lawyer at a New York firm.