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Debbie Lorenzana—whose mother is Puerto Rican and father is Italian—came to New York from Puerto Rico 12 years ago. She was 21 and pregnant, and had a degree as an emergency medical technician from a technical college in Manatí, a small city on the northern coast. The father, she says, didn't want to have anything to do with her or the baby. So she moved back to the States, where she had lived in her mid-teens (pinballing between relatives' houses and group homes), and took care of her elderly grandparents in Connecticut. After her son was born, she moved to Queens to stay with a friend. Then she got her first job in finance: working as a sales representative at the Municipal Credit Union, in 2002. She moved to Jersey City and worked long hours. She was successful.
She is a immigrant from Puerto Rico who is Hispanic and Italian. In school she study to become an EMT. At 21 She became a single mother. Her 1st job in finance was in Sales for a credit union.
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And she will be well-dressed. Lorenzana is, by her own admission, a shopaholic. She shops for her work clothes at Zara, but when she has money, she says, she spends it on designer clothes. She has five closets full of Burberry, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Roberto Cavalli. In her son's closet, there's a row of tiny Lacoste, Dolce & Gabbana, and Ralph Lauren T-shirts. She says her love of fine clothes is a result of her growing up poor—she recalls running a high school marathon barefoot because she couldn't afford sneakers.
She grow up poor, so when she got her 1st taste of money she started to buy excess luxuries good for her and her son--- 5 closets worth.
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Lorenzana left the workplace to get married, but that relationship went sour after a brief time, and in September 2008, she was ready to go back to work. It was the height of the Wall Street crisis, but she lucked out. She got an interview with Citibank for a job at its recently opened branch in the Chrysler Building."
She quit working to get married, but that plan flopped. So she went back to work this time to Citibank.
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At the interview, she recalls, she wore a black Armani wrap dress and simple Christian Louboutin pumps. (The dress was form-fitting and tight in the bust: She says one size up would have been too big for her.) She remembers that the branch manager, Craig Fisher, was polite, asking her about strategies for acquiring new business and whether she had other job offers. Since she already had an offer from Washington Mutual, Fisher proposed a salary of $70,000 with three weeks' vacation, she says. Her job title was business banker, providing services to small businesses. There were three business bankers at the Chrysler Building branch; Lorenzana was the only woman.
she went to her job interview at Citibank wearing at minum 500 dollar heels and a dress that look like this :
http://shop.nordstrom.com/C/6014199/...origin=leftnav
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When she started the job, she says, a colleague told her that the branch was "pretty much known for hiring pretty girls," and that she knew Lorenzana was going to be hired from the moment she came in for her interview. "So here I am," Lorenzana recalls, "thinking I got hired because of my capabilities, and now you're telling me it's because of my physical appearance? Oh, great."
A co-work passively put her up on game on how the bank hires female eye candy not base on their skills but because how they looks . This will foreshadows her further.
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Other problems also popped up. In order to provide services to a client, a banker needs to become certified to do things like open a checking account or take a loan application. Lorenzana says Fisher didn't send her to enough of the required training sessions, which meant she wasn't authorized to do something as simple as order a debit card for a client and was forced to rely on her colleagues for favors. "When I complained," Lorenzana says, "Craig would say, 'Just go ahead and bring in new business.'
She did not have the skills to do her job which she blames the to manger for. so the manger just told her to look pretty and bait in new customers. Side note I never new bankers actively looked for business , don’t people normally just go to them.
The beginning of the debate of what she should wear
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The managers instructed her to wear looser clothing. Lorenzana refused. "I don't have the money to buy a new wardrobe," she says, referring to her work outfits.
When you ball as hard as she does sometimes it is hard to buy new outfits , when you have 5 closet full of luxury goods.
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Where I'm from," she says, switching into Spanish to explain it, "women dress up—like put on makeup and do their nails—to go to the supermarket. And I'm not talking trashy, you know, like in the Heights. I was raised very Latin, you know? We're feminine. A woman in Puerto Rico takes care of herself. The Puerto Rican women here put down our flag."
She finds time to put down the other Hispanic females in New York. She states in PR females get dolled up to run to the store. Compare to Hispanic females in Washington heights PR women from the island dress classy.
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The high-heels incident infuriated her, she says. She was getting worn down. On June 25, at 3:30 p.m., she sent a long-winded e-mail to two regional vice presidents whom she had never met, bypassing Morgan Putman at Human Resources. It was the kind of e-mail that could have used a proofreader, one a lawyer might advise a client not to send without some serious editing. (English is not her first language.) But she summed up her experiences with Fisher and Claibourne well and talked about "the cruelty of a hostile work environment," where she was harassed "on a daily basis." She ended by writing that "Mr. Fisher stated he is good friends with lots of people in the organization giving me . . . reason to believe that nothing will happen to correct the situation going on at branch 357. I have requested for the second time a transfer. . . . I came to Citibank with high expectations. Please I just want to work in a fair work environment where everyone is equal. Thank you in advance for your attention in this matter."
She went over her mangers head and wrote a horribly written letter to two regional VPs, requesting to be transferred.
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The VPs never responded in writing, but she sent follow-up e-mails in which she continued to report incidents at work. Less than a month after her June 25 e-mail, she was transferred to a Citibank branch at Rockefeller Center. The way she looked or dressed didn't draw any comments there, she says, but that branch didn't need another business banker. In mid-July, she e-mailed Morgan Putman, thanking her for the transfer, but pointing out that she was working as a telemarketer, which wasn't her job title.
she is granted the transfer. At her new Citibank job they did not need another banker so they had her working as a telemarketer, which was not under her job title . She was later let go.
