Morgan Stanley settled a discrimination lawsuit yesterday. To avoid going to trial, the firm agreed to pay $54 million. Most of the money will go to 340 women who worked or still work for the institutional-stock division at the Wall Street securities company. The news seems good. But somehow, after reading it, you just can’t make up your mind to cheer for women’s rights.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Pamela Martens, a former employee who settled a different discrimination suit against Smith Barney six years ago. She said the $54 million was merely “pocket change” for a firm like Morgan Stanley. As to whether the settlement, which includes $2 million for outside monitoring of gender bias, will do anything to change the environment on Wall Street, Martens predicted it would do “absolutely nothing.”

Morgan’s chief executive, Philip Purcell, is reported to have personally called the Equal Employment Opportunity Chairwoman, Cari Dominguez, to work out the final settlement by midnight Sunday. The deal was reached almost four years after the lawsuit was first filed. The lead plaintiff, 43-year-old Allison Schieffelin, said, “I’m happy that there’s such a great settlement for everybody.” The EEOC’s lead attorney said she hoped the settlement would send a strong message to other Wall Street companies.

Please excuse the cynics among us, who might wonder whether the message may affect all that much. Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, said in The New York Times that the $54 million was “nothing” to a firm like Morgan Stanley. In last quarter alone, the firm earned more than $1 billion.

Probably the executives at Morgan were thinking less about the $54 million and more about the 20 or so witnesses who were scheduled to testify. Probably they were more concerned about a public airing of episodes in which employees supposedly ordered birthday cakes shaped like breasts and had strippers at work. Probably.

Vinnee Tong