It could be the script for a movie. A brave woman comes forward to talk about the sexual harassment she’s experienced in the office. She feels terrified and alone. But many others have been in similar situations, and soon her voice is joined by a chorus, backing her up and supporting her. Then it spreads. Using the hashtag #MeToo, nearly five million people generate 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook in a 24-hour period. At one of her industry’s premier events, men and women alike wear black to show support for the cause, while Hollywood celebrities come together to form a group called Time’s Up, to fight sexual harassment. The list of powerful, allegedly abusive men who are no longer invincible grows to include a Hollywood mogul, famous journalists, radio personalities, and even a Las Vegas casino owner. Yet no one thinks it’s over.

Many believe the movement is changing the world, but in many places, including one industry that has long been regarded as a path to great wealth, there is mostly silence—in fact, it’s been “eerily silent,” as one woman puts it. She is talking about the world of finance. “#MeToo is not an equal-opportunity movement,” says Nicole Page, a lawyer at New York’s Reavis Page Jump, which handles employment cases, including those involving harassment and discrimination. Or as a recently retired senior Wall Street woman puts it, somewhat ruefully, “We all wear all black every day, and it doesn’t help.”

On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Dennis Chookaszian, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, recently polled his 130 students to see whether they have personally experienced harassment or observed it happening. Seventy percent of the women said they have been harassed, and roughly half the men and two-thirds of the women in the class said they’ve observed it or were aware of it happening. “Wall Street has to be the worst,” a senior Wall Street man tells me. He says that’s because of the nature of the work: the long hours, the travel, the pyramid-like structure, where there are plenty of junior women, but disproportionately fewer and fewer as you get toward the top. One woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s and eventually became a partner at her firm recounts having lunch with a prominent male banker, who asked her, “Did it [sexual harassment] happen to you?” “I guarantee it happened to every woman in this restaurant,” she replied. “It impacts every aspect of your career.”

In private groups, women, especially those who have been on Wall Street for decades, are talking about it. Some believe that a tidal wave is coming. But a close look at the industry’s shameful history, and at the realities of being a woman in finance, belies that optimism.

‘I was the only woman,” recalls the woman who started on Wall Street in the late 1980s. “My very first day of work, all the men and I were given office assignments. There was an odd number. So all the men got offices to share. I got a reconfigured utility closet. I was told it was in case I needed to change my nylons. And it just went on from there.”

“It was no-holds-barred,” says Sallie Krawcheck, who started at a junior level at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and rose to run wealth management at Citigroup. “One day [at Salomon Brothers], I leaned over a colleague’s desk to work on a spreadsheet, and heard loud laughter from behind me; one of the guys was pretending to perform a sex act on me,” she wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Almost every day, I found a Xerox copy of male genitalia on my desk.” In a recent conversation, she added that “the attitude was ‘Tough it out.’ You had no choice. I was 22 years old and from Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t have any money, and there wasn’t anywhere to turn.”

Maureen Sherry, who became the youngest managing director at Bear Stearns, in the 1990s, and fictionalized her experiences in a 2016 novel called Opening Belle, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that on her first day on Wall Street she opened up a pizza box to find unwrapped condoms instead of pepperoni slices.