A Goldman Sachs banker fired by the Wall Street giant while on paternity leave was unfairly dismissed from his job, an employment tribunal in London has ruled.
It said Jon Reeves, an ex-Goldman vice-president for compliance who is suing for $5 million in damages, had been a victim of sexual discrimination after being laid off by the firm in 2022.
Reeves was sacked upon returning from six months of paternal leave, usually offered by European employers to new fathers, when he complained to bosses of struggling to strike a proper work-life balance, the hearing was told.
He said at the tribunal that Goldman was ‘dismissive’ towards fathers trying to juggle their career and childcare, claiming that one executive Omar Beer told him: “You’re a grown man, you can sort this out.”
Reeves argued that the bank disapproved of male employees taking extended leave to look after their children. The bank told the hearing that his dismissal was performance-related.
“What happened to me would not happen to a woman at Goldman Sachs, 100%” Reeves was quoted as saying.
Reeves started with Goldman in its Salt Lake City office in 2007 before moving to Sydney, Australia with the global finance titan.
He joined its London office’s compliance team in 2013, having his first child with his wife in 2019 just before the COVID pandemic struck worldwide.
The hearing heard that Reeves started working from home in March 2020 as the British government moved to shut down the country in a desperate bid to stop infections from spreading.
He described an incident during the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2020 when he and his wife and young child were on their way to Cornwall in southwest England.
A “very urgent” issue broke out at the bank which saw senior executives drafted in to help, the tribunal heard.
Beer sent Reeves an email that read simply: “Need to talk – are you available?”
But the then father-of-one was “not regularly checking his emails when he was driving” and missed the message.
Reeves told the hearing that the matter was “repeatedly raised with me as a missed opportunity”, with one manager branding it “a really negative sound bite” in relation to his performance.
He and his wife had their second child in 2021, he informed his bosses that he planned to take six months off to raise his young family from November until May 2022.
In March 2022, one manager put his name forward to be fired after Goldman Sachs asked bosses to identify the “bottom 2.5%” of employees.
In May, Reeves learned just before he was set to return to work full-time that he was at risk of being laid off.
The bank then placed him on gardening leave before being formally dismissed in September 2022.
Shortly before his firing, Beer was recorded as saying Reeves was “kind of lazy”.
In its judgment, the tribunal ruled there was “no attempt” to carry out any “fair process” before dismissing the father-of-two.
“It was not clear to the tribunal when, and on what objective basis, his managers decided that he was ‘underperforming’,” the panel said.
“Mr Beer appeared to be unwilling to acknowledge the particular hardships or difficulties that some people, including those with very young children, might have experienced during Covid lockdowns,” they said.
The London-based tribunal, which is chaired by a judge, will decide on the size of Reeves’ damages payout next year.
A UK-based Goldman Sachs spokesman said: “The firm is deeply committed to supporting working parents, with hundreds of Goldman Sachs fathers having taken up our market leading 26 weeks paid parental leave since it was introduced in 2019. We are carefully reviewing the judgment and the reasoning supporting its findings.”
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