I've spent a fair amount of time working for Wall Street and the broader NYC financial industry as well, and got a quite different impression. And I'm not the only one. Examples: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/07/03/goldman_sach...
http://gawker.com/5979679/id-do-her-a-brief-history-of-micha...
BTW, who's the Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, or Marissa Mayer of Wall Street?
Take your pick: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-most-powerful-women-on...
The amount of impropriety that you see in the VC darlings is off-the-charts. I worked (briefly) at an ed-tech where the married executives openly flirted with female subordinates (and one was fired for refusing advances). You'd never see that shit in finance, these days. That era ended when the people raising VC now were in diapers.
I would guess that "the upper echelons of American politics" are also less sexist than Silicon Valley, given that there are women succeeding in US politics, but wouldn't know from direct experience.