Wall Street’s Big Gender Lawsuit Is 13 Years in the Making

Cristina Chen-Oster’s fight with Goldman Sachs began in 2005. It just got huge.

Cristina Chen-Oster was settling into her seat for a late-March Broadway matinee of Mean Girls when she remembered to check her voicemail. The day before, she’d ignored a call from an unrecognized number. Now she hit play and heard the voice of her lawyer, Kelly Dermody: “Huge congratulations!” it said. “Really, really, really, really happy for you.”

Dermody was relaying news that Chen-Oster, a former vice president at Goldman Sachs, had been awaiting for years. A federal judge in New York had ruled that she and three other women who claim there’s ...