Wall Street Women Under Siege?

Lehman Brothers (LEH) removed the highest ranked woman on Wall Street, chief financial officer Erin Callan, from her post yesterday. The ouster came days after the investment bank announced plans to report a $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter. (According to the TheStreet.com, the announcement will mark the first deficit for the 164-year old bank since it went public in 1994.)

Lehman removed Callan along with chief operating officer and president Joseph M. Gregory. Both will remain at the bank in other positions, TheStreet.com reported.

Callan is not the only high-ranking Wall Street woman to lose her job recently: In November, Morgan Stanley (MS) dismissed co-president Zoe Cruz from her post.

Women may have started to arrive in the boardroom in unprecedented numbers and the good news—maybe, not for them—is that many interpret their firings as just another, well, firing. When a stock is underperforming and the person in charge is not creating shareholder value, then firing or demotion for poor performance is “gender-neutral,” says Jacki Zehner, a former Goldman Sachs (GS) partner and current board member of the Center for Work-Life Policy, which researches policies to promote the well-being of families in the workplace. So, is the news coverage. The headlines were all about the Lehman firings, not about the “lady executive” getting the axe.

Of course, no one should be allowed to stay in a job just to fill a quota, but the lack of women in the executive suite is still jarring. They may make up 46% of the workforce, but women held only 15.4% of Fortune 500 corporate officer positions in 2007, according to Catalyst, a non-profit that studies women’s advancement in business. That percentage is an increase from 1997, when women only had 10.6% of such positions, but clearly the boardrooms in the U.S. skew mostly male. According to Gail Evans, former executive vice president of CNN (TWC) and author of the book Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman. “There’s so few women [that] when one of them gets fired [from an executive position], the percentage drops 10 percent.”

But, experts say it is a problem that women on Wall Street feel that to remain in their jobs they must not make as many errors, and be more aggressive than their male counterparts. Expectations in the workplace are different for women, says Morra Aarons-Mele, a principal of Women and Work, a consulting firm in Boston. “When you look at women who run for office versus men who run for office, the women are usually twice as credentialed and I think the same holds for business.”

Of course, someone who is underperforming should be fired, says Aarons-Mele. “But, on the other hand it is maybe possible to think that a woman in a top job where there are very few women is more visible, and so her flaws and mistakes may be noticed quicker than a man’s.”