A longtime Goldman Sachs executive who transitioned to a woman while working at the Wall Street giant revealed that she lived in fear of having her secret exposed in an upcoming tell-all.
Maeve DuVally spent nearly two decades as the company’s communications manager — most of them as Michael DuValley before she completed her transition in April 2019.
In her upcoming memoir “Maeve Rising: Coming Out Trans in Corporate America,” the now 62-year-old DuVally revealed going to extraordinary lengths to conceal her transition in the months leading up to her announcement to colleagues.
“As I continued my transition, I’d go to two different bathrooms as I was leaving work — first on the 29th floor and then I went to the bathroom downstairs near the exit to finish changing,” she told The Post. “I was worried I’d run into someone I knew if I put on too much makeup on the floor I worked.”
DuVally’s concerns may have been reasonable given Goldman’s history with female workers, who in past years have blasted the company’s boy’s club culture. In May, the company agreed to pay $215 million to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit, representing 2,800 current and former female associates and vice presidents, that claimed the bank systematically underpaid and under-promoted women.
Despite such controversies, DuVally said Goldman was supportive of her when she finally got the courage to tell higher-ups about the decision to switch genders.
“I was a managing director … and because I was a PR person my transition was a lot more visible,” she said.
“We came up with a plan — I’d come out on the day after Memorial Day. We let people know ahead of time internally and externally. Everyone around me knew what was going to happen and that day [her boss] Jake Siewert sent a memo that we’d just rolled out an initiative with pronouns giving people the option to identify their pronouns.”
Subsequently, Goldman gained a reputation as a “model for corporations assisting their transitioning employees” as a result of the publicity surrounding how it handled the situation, DuVally writes in the memoir, published by Sibylline Press and set for release Aug 15.
The Post reached out to Goldman for comment.
DuVally’s “searingly honest” memoir also focuses on being “raised in an Irish Catholic family with a sadistic pathologist father” and her struggles with alcoholism, according to a press release that announced the upcoming book earlier this week.
The tell-all by the 20-year financial communications specialist also delves into DuVally’s tough upbringing during which she was mostly “mired in depression and unconscious struggle.”
“After a decade in Japan, she returned to the US and prospered as a journalist and bank communications specialist, but her personal life unraveled, leaving two marriages and three children in her wake,” according to the press release.
“At Goldman Sachs, she ascended to a top communications position before her drinking began to encroach upon her work.”
It is only after DuVally “hit bottom” that she “becomes sober after a lifetime in and out of AA and rehab.”
“This book is about the power of self-discovery and self-actualization,” DuVally said.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
