Ex-worker sues hedge fund on discrimination charge

Westchester County Business Journal, Sep 24, 2007 by Soule, Alexander

An analyst has sued a Greenwich hedge fund that she claims fired her last year after she returned from maternity leave.

Annabelle Garrett says she filed a discrimination charge against Axiom International Investors L.L.C. in January with the US. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.

This month, she sued the company in federal court in New Haven without initially stating what she is seeking in punitive darnages. Axiom managed $9 billion in assets as of a year ago, Garrett states in her lawsuit.

Axiom has yet to file an answer in court. An Axiom spokeswoman, returning a call placed to the firm's managing director Andrew Jacobson, declined to comment on any aspect of the lawsuit or the company's operations.

Jacobson reportedly founded Axiom in 1998, having previously been executive vice president of a Stamford company called Columbus Circle Investors.

Garrett, a Brown University graduate and resident of New York City joined Axiom in 1999 from Smith Barney as its fifth employee. According to her lawsuit, in 2004 she took a 12-week maternity leave, returning to the company in July. Later that year, she proposed creating a consumer-goods limit, which she said Jacobson asked her to establish as a "paper" fund initially that tracked securities rather than actually investing money.

Garrett stated the model fund she created significantly increased in value, despite limitations she said Jacobson established that limited the types of investments she could include.

Garrett said that after she informed Jacobson in 2005 that she was pregnant again, he expressed doubts about her ability to get investors to earmark assets for her consumer fund, claiming he said "no one is going to give a pregnant woman money."

After Garrett returned to work in September 2006, she said Jacobson told her he was taking her off the firm's principal fund so she could work exclusively on developing the consumer fund. She says he largely ignored her over the next month and she was fired in mid-October.

David Lewis, president of Stamford benefits consulting firm OperationsInc., said hedge funds often overlook human resources training on topics such as workplace sensitivity and discrimination, a topic that is dominating the front pages these days as a former Madison Square Garden executive pursues a lawsuit against that company and New York Knicks coach Isaiah Thomas.

"On the one hand, (hedge funds) are a compliance machine doing everything possible to ensure they don't bring on SEC scrutiny or hasten the arrival of legislation," Lewis said, referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission. "But when it comes to their HR house, they tend to be brash, they tend to be cavalier, and they tend to pay the most attention to HR only if and when trouble arrives."

Under the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers may not single out pregnancy-related conditions to determine employees' ability to work, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Connecticut first specified pregnancy-leave rights in 1973.

In 2006, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resolved 4,600 pregnancy-discrimination charges to the time of $10.4 million. New pregnancy-related complaints filed with the agency were up 3.6 percent last year to 4,900, a new high.