When I used to get together with friends to discuss our jobs, the reaction to mine was always something akin to "It sounds like a frat on steroids." In one Goldman office, in the memos announcing a new crop of incoming female associates, instead of the usual corporate headshot, some joker used different semi-nude pictures of Playboy playmates. It was clearly thought to be clever, instead of puerile and wrong, but when I made noise about it, I was chided by a coworker for being "humorless" and that I probably read Ms. Magazine (I did).

Being an editor at least kept me in a marginalized, feminized enclave away from the mainstream where the hotness of the female junior analysts was judged on a daily basis. I remember being in the elevator once when one of the male analysts, wearing his Yale jacket, bragged to a junior female about his old Eli days where the august Sterling Library was great for "sex in the stacks." It was probably the least sexy thing I had ever heard, and from her face, she seemed to agree. One of my attractive coworkers was constantly dogged by one of the analysts, a middle-aged man. First, the man seemed friendly, always hanging out in the office. Then they were having long talks. Finally, she confided to us, he would sit in her office and cry about the horrible state of his marriage, the implications of which made her uncomfortable enough to request he not spend so much time with her.

The analysts indeed came and went into our doorless offices as if we had no personal space. In this servile position, like the scullery maids in Downton Abbey, we editors swam around people like billionaire Leon Cooperman (now, hedge fund CEO; retail company analyst, then), recently profiled in the New Yorker for comparing Obama's election with the rise of the Third Reich; or Bill Dudley, the economist who appears in the documentary about Goldman's role in the financial crisis, Inside Job.

Most of the analysts were men used to getting what they wanted when they wanted and never having their own behavior questioned. Their secretaries (almost all middle-aged white women) were almost wifely in their devotion and were rewarded with huge bonuses at the end of the year, new fur coats and diamonds making the place look like a Gilded Age opera house. Most of the big-name analysts treated us as interchangeable widgets, not learning our names, stomping into our offices while gobbling a sandwich, wordlessly handing us their garbage. Once, an analyst started flossing his teeth in my office and was affronted when I asked him to desist.

For being affronted, I was chastised for having poor social skills, the first black mark in my record (later removed when I challenged it—it actually said in its wording that I was not "submissive" enough). I was already on a kind of probation for breaking an unspoken but ironclad sartorial rule that it was verboten for editors and "above" (it was okay for the buniony secretaries) to wear sneakers in the building—as if wearing dress shoes to walk the mile or two that I did was an option. In fact, it was widely thought that it was a professional responsibility for women to wear heels, the higher the better. The most sartorially admired women wore tightly sheathed skirts and hobbled around on pencil-thin stilettos (I remember at a company Christmas party while the male analysts took town cars home, the junior women walked to the subway, half of them getting their heels stuck in the subway grate).