A group of six current female executives filed a class action gender discrimination case in the Southern District of New York against Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein ("DrKW"), a German investment bank, whose parent company is Dresdner Bank AG, a member of the Allianz Group. The six current executives have been with DrKW for a total of 50 years.

According to the 70-page complaint filed January 9, 2005, women at DrKW have confronted a "glass ceiling" which has denied them promotions, compensation on par with male employees, and equality with respect to the terms and conditions of their employment. The complaint sets forth surprising statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of women at senior levels and describes various forms of discriminatory and retaliatory conduct including accounts of exclusion from client meetings that took place at strip clubs, disparaging comments regarding maternity leave, and other sexual innuendo that routinely takes place at work. Women comprise less than two percent of the Managing Directors in the Capital Markets Division of DrKW.

"The glass-ceiling is unfortunately alive and well at Dresdner. I stand united with the five other plaintiffs in seeing this process through to its ultimate conclusion and we all look forward to standing before a New York jury and presenting our case," said a current employee, and one of the Plaintiffs in the class action. "We are confident that we will prevail in this litigation and ultimately show the rest of the financial community that you cannot continue to discriminate against women without paying a price. Hopefully, our new chief executive officerwill take notice of this lawsuit and immediately take steps to rectify the disparity in treatment between men and women" said another plaintiff in the class action.

Filed as a class action, the complaint seeks to represent a wider group of women employees at DrKW. The complaint details the Company's deliberate efforts to channel women into non-revenue producing roles while assigning male colleagues to the plum transactions. For example, as the complaint alleges, after three of the Plaintiffs returned from their respective maternity leaves, they were removed from promising deals and placed into positions that gave them no further room for advancement.

The suit also claims inappropriate behavior by supervisors and other male employees at Dresdner Kleinwort, including inappropriate comments, such as a supervisor describing one plaintiff as "the Pamela Anderson of trading," and others pressuring another female executive to leave a gathering celebrating the closing of a "major deal," so that male employees and client representatives could go to a strip club.

In the complaint, one female executive said salesmen on the fixed-income desk in New York have openly commented about how they chose female junior hires based on appearance and that they wished to have "eye candy" in the office, while another said a male managing director in New York routinely brought prostitutes to the office during the lunch hour.