At that time, women on Wall Street were earning 55 to 62 cents to every dollar a man in the same position earned. Afterward, Bear Stearns imploded in the mortgage market, and while I stayed close to the markets and the people who worked for them, I left. Children gave me perspective about the price of money. The women labeled stellar successes were giving up more than I was willing to part with. With the benefit of some perspective, I began to think more deeply about what I and my female colleagues had experienced.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid out to Wall Street’s victims of gender inequality and harassment. Countless books and articles have coached women to lean every which way, to share their domestic duties 50/50, and to demand the bonuses they have earned. Harvard Business School started an initiative to promote the advancement of women. Investment banks formed diversity committees and have taken a more generous stance on maternity leave, and Morgan Stanley, after being forced to settle a $46 million class-action discrimination suit, set up policies to help women succeed.

And what is the result of all these steps? While female M.B.A.s seem to be paid almost the same as men in their first job, the chasm appears quickly. According to a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek survey that tracked M.B.A. graduates from 2007 to 2009, the women earned, six to eight years later, on average 20 percent less than the guy who sat next to them in class; even more tellingly, female graduates of Columbia’s business school, a significant proportion of whom land on Wall Street, earned nearly 40 percent less. How can everything have changed and nothing change at all?

Here is one explanation. Like most employees on Wall Street, my young candidate had to sign a U4, an arbitration agreement that binds a worker to settle any job dispute with her employer in-house. Most people are so happy to have the job, they aren’t worried about the prospect of settling complaints in a conference room, usually with arbitrators chosen because they are friendly to the bank.

In fact, roughly two of every three cases are decided in Wall Street’s favor. In addition, half of the arbitration costs are borne by the complainant and what would be a few hundred dollar filing fee in court can quickly escalate to as much as $150,000 out of pocket. It’s a lot to lose should things not go your way. No wonder this practice is an effective gag for many would-be whistle-blowers.

And when the bank is on the losing end? In a deep-pocketed industry like finance, it’s considered cheaper and more efficient to settle than to risk having tales told in a court of law. A Bank of America-Merrill Lynch gender bias case that received class action status was settled in 2013 with as many as 4,800 individual payments totaling $39 million.

Many bankers will tell you that a lot of these complaints about harassment and discrimination are false. Indeed, while researching a novel about a woman working on Wall Street, I was told by people in banks’ human resources departments that men are now often afraid of hiring women because of the potential litigation. They fear that even innocently intended comments can result in expensive complaints; that if a woman isn’t working out, and doesn’t get promoted, the male employer has a legal problem on his hands. More than once I was told that it’s just easier to fire a guy or — my favorite line — that “there’s just less drama with men.”