White shoe firm

White shoe firm is a phrase used to describe leading professional services firms in the United States, particularly firms that have been in existence for more than a century and represent Fortune 500 companies. It typically—but not always—refers to banking, accounting, law, and management consulting firms, especially those based in New York and Boston.

The term originated in the Ivy League colleges and originally reflected a stereotype of old-line firms populated by WASPs. The term historically had anti-Semitic connotations, as many of the New York firms known as "white shoe" were considered off-limits to Jewish lawyers until the 1960s. The phrase has since lost some of this connotation, but is still defined by Princeton University's WordNet as "denoting a company or law firm owned and run by members of the WASP elite who are generally conservative," which shows that the original connotation has not changed entirely. A 2010 column in The Economist described the term as synonymous with "big, old, east-coast and fairly traditional." Today, the term is sometimes used in a general sense to refer to firms that are perceived as prestigious or high-quality; it is also sometimes used in a derogatory manner to denote stodginess, elitism, or a lack of diversity.

The phrase derives from "white bucks," laced suede or buckskin shoes with a red sole, long popular in the Ivy League colleges. A 1953 Esquire article, describing social strata at Yale University, explained that "White Shoe applies primarily to the socially ambitious and the socially smug types who affect a good deal of worldly sophistication, run, ride and drink in rather small cliques, and look in on the second halves of football games when the weather is good." The Oxford English Dictionary cites the phrase "white-shoe college boys" in the J. D. Salinger novel Franny and Zooey (1957) as the first use of the term.

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