Tag Archives: Gender Issues

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After Boom-Boom Room, Fresh Tactics to Fight Bias

The headline-grabbing sex-harassment charges against Wall Street firms in the 1990s are a thing of the past, but not necessarily because things are better for women at financial firms.

In my story today for The New York Times, I discuss the progress — and lack of progress — since “The Boom-Boom Room” lawsuit against Smith Barney became synonymous with lurid behavior at brokerage firms.

Fast-forward 17 years, and such landmark cases are not as prevalent. Wall Street’s women are more aware of their rights and are not so timid anymore, says Linda D. Friedman, a partner at Stowell & Friedman. Still, she says her firm does a lot of work these days behind the scenes, assisting women who face discrimination but are reluctant to pursue litigation because of the repercussions it would have on their careers.

 

You may not be reading about these problems in your favorite newspaper or blog, but they’re still part of life for women who work in finance. You can read my story here.

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Don’t Skewer Sheryl Sandberg

There’s a lot of work to be done between here and equality for women. Rich women in good jobs have one set of problems and poor women have another. Women with children pile on a whole new set of challenges. And women most anywhere can tell you there’s still discrimination that needs to be fixed in the workplace.

So why do critics expect that Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, would be able to solve every problem that women face in one book? I review Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will To Lead” for Bloomberg Muse today. You can read it here.

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In a Sex Scandal, You Want to be the Guy, not the Gal

In the unlikely event you missed it, our former Central Intelligence Agency chief got a tad too friendly with Paula Broadwell, the author of his biography “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.” The ensuing media storm was, frankly, a gift to reporters who were dreading that the fiscal cliff would be the only news story around once the election was over.

But a gift they could have handled with a little more care.

In my Bloomberg View column this week, I take a look at the differences in both the language used and the questions raised in coverage of the two players in Washington’s latest sex scandal. Petraeus, for example, was referred to as “vulnerable.” Broadwell was referred to as a “slut.”

They both cheated on their spouses. They both were accomplished professionals. But there was a lot that wasn’t equal about the way they were treated in the media. “They threw this poor fellow to the wolves,” said celebrity divorce lawyer Raoul Felder on Daily Beast TV. Meanwhile, The Baltimore Sun called it just another “bimbo eruption.” A West Point grad with two master’s degrees, Broadwell is no bimbo. Let’s hope the coverage is a little better next time a sex scandal rolls around.

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How To Get Women on Corporate Boards: Friendly Persuasion Didn’t Work, But Quotas Would

If you really want to get a bunch of business types going, mention the q-word.

That would be quotas. The only strategy that’s made much of a difference in the long fight to get women on corporate boards of directors.

There are well-intentioned efforts from New York to London to cajole and embarrass company boards into recruiting women. Helena Morrissey, the CEO of London’s Newton Investment Management, founded the “30 Percent Club” with the goal of filling 30 percent of UK board seats with women by 2015. Joe Keefe, president of Pax World, the socially responsible investors, spearheaded a push in June to send letters to the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 — there were 41 of them — who had no women on their boards.

Four months later, Keefe’s received 14 responses.

You hear a lot of talk about how we just need to get women into the pipeline and the problem will fix itself. Consider a few statistics on that. The number of women earning undergraduate business degrees reached 108,285 in 1985, up tenfold from 1971. By 2002, women surpassed men for the first time with 139,874 business degrees earned.

Yes, I know. Women may have the pedigrees, but they are just so busy abandoning their careers and having babies — what’s a corporation to do? Take some time to read the work done by the New York-based research group Catalyst Inc., which started tracking 4,100 full-time MBA graduates in 2007 to see how similarly situated male and female MBAs would do in the real world. Men started out making $4,600 more than women in their first post-graduation jobs. Even when Catalyst focused only on men and women who aspired to be senior officers, or when they looked only at men and women who had no children, they found men advancing faster and earning more.

In other words, there’s more to the problem than inferior education or time-outs for maternity leaves. Some of us call it gender discrimination.

Viviane Reding, the European Union Justice Commission, is calling for mandatory quotas of women on corporate boards. My guess is she’s right that it’s time to conclude that cajoling and pleas for self-regulation are a waste of time. I write about the flap over quotas in my column for Quartz.com today. Read article.

Let me know your thoughts on this issue. You can email me at susan.antilla15@gmail.com or send me a note @antillaview.

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Looking for success in biz? Change your name from ‘Jennifer’ to ‘John’

In the academic world, if your name is John, you’re more likely to be well-thought-of than you would be if your name were Jennifer. When science professors were asked to evaluate the same one-page summary of a promising, but not stellar job applicant, they gave higher scores to the potential applicant whose name was “John” than they did to “Jennifer.”

They estimated that the “Johns” ought to be making more money, too. And they were more likely to be willing to mentor “John.”

The New York Times tonight published a story about new work by researchers at Yale University that adds to the evidence that people making evaluations about the talent and worth of job applicants think more highly of candidates who are men. Even when the men are armed with identical qualifications described in precisely the same words. And even when its a woman making the evaluation.

Combine these findings with the story of “James Chartrand,” a female website developer who ditched her identity and began pitching her newly named company — “Men With Pens” — as an operation run by a guy. Business picked up. Online negotiating became easy.

And then there is the famous study about hiring practices by symphony orchestras. Hide a female musician behind a screen during an audition, and she is more likely to be hired. Here’s a link to that study. Read article.

In a column for CNN.com last week, I talked about the lopsided bylines that readers are exposed to when they read articles in newspapers or online. Women write only 20 percent of newspaper op-eds, yet they’ve received between 70 and 76 percent of all the journalism and mass communications degrees earned over the past ten years. If you have a daughter who isn’t in the workforce yet, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let her know what she has ahead of her. The fight for gender equality is not finished. It’s barely begun.

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What’s the Deal with Women in Journalism?

Reading an op-ed in a major newspaper? Chances are eight in ten it’s written by a man. In fact, 60 percent of newspaper employees are men and almost 70 percent of the commentaries you read on major websites are written by men.

In my latest column for CNN.com, I take a look at what’s happened in journalism since the groundbreaking gender discrimination lawsuit by women at Newsweek 42 years ago.

In her just-published book “The Good Girls Revolt,” Lynn Povich, a 47-year journalism veteran who started as a secretary in the Paris bureau of Newsweek magazine in 1965, tells how 46 women with degrees from top schools fought back after being relegated to jobs checking facts and clipping newspaper stories while men with similar credentials got the bylines and big salaries.

Today’s statistics sound out-of-line when you consider that over the past 10 years, between 70 and 76% of all journalism and mass communications graduates have been women.

Let me know what you think about who’s shaping most of the coverage you’re reading. Read article.

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Judge to Kleiner Perkins: Sex Suit Goes to Trial, Not Arbitration

A San Francisco Superior Court judge said this afternoon that he didn’t buy arguments by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers that a sex discrimination case against it should be heard in private arbitration. The venture capital firm was sued in May by Ellen Pao, who said she was pressured into sex by a junior partner and then retaliated against when she complained.

Judge Harold Kahn had already told Kleiner that he wasn’t persuaded by its argument that Pao had no legal right to be in open court, but gave the firm a chance to file a revised motion. Today, Kahn told Kleiner “I thought your papers were terrific,” adding, “and I disagree with all of them.”

Here’s a story by the Mercury News about the action in court today.

I wrote about the Pao case in my Bloomberg column last month; Pao had said in her complaint that the top guys at Kleiner didn’t invite women to power dinners with big clients because women would “kill the buzz.” Kleiner denied her allegations.

Kleiner said today that it will appeal the judge’s decision. Companies fight hard to keep sex discrimination and other cases out of the public eye, and nothing serves that goal better than forcing cases into private arbitration. Here’s a story I wrote describing how the public has suffered from 25 years of business forcing litigants into closed-door arbitration hearings.

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Lots of secrets when your employer wants to keep your discrimination complaint out of court

Here’s a great example of how hard a company will work to keep its dirty laundry out of the public eye. Ellen Pao, a junior partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sued the firm for sex discrimination in May. Kleiner filed its response yesterday, denying Pao’s allegations. Along with its denials, Kleiner also said that Pao shouldn’t be in court at all — she signed documents agreeing to arbitration in the event of a dispute, according to Kleiner. If the firm prevails on that, there will be no public record of the dispute after these initial filings.

And it gets worse, according to the Mercury News, which has reported on documents that aren’t yet available on the San Francisco Superior Court website. Not only does Kleiner say that Pao’s case doesn’t belong in court. It also says that the documents that support that argument should be kept under wraps.

Take a look at my Bloomberg column marking the recent 25th anniversary of an important Supreme Court decision that let brokerage firms force customers to use industry-run arbitration instead of court. It’s only gotten worse for investors, consumers, and employees since that June 8, 1987 decision. It’s too early to make a judgment on either side’s arguments in Pao v Kleiner. But the push to keep things quiet is part of a long, worrisome trend.

I’m always happy to hear from readers. To get in touch with me about my articles, email me at susan.antilla15@gmail. com, or, if you’d prefer, send me a message @antillaview.

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Could Silicon Valley Sex Discrimination Case Get Kicked Out of Court?

Sex discrimination isn’t the iPad, folks. It’s more like
the electric typewriter.

When you see the words “tech” or “venture capital,” you think of brilliant geeks coming up with cool new stuff you’d never heard of before, right? Well tech types are in the 1980s when it comes to sex discrimination cases. Ellen Pao, who sued the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last month, is claiming that the guys she worked with excluded her from meetings and held fancy dinners with big clients and left the women out. One of her partners said it would “kill the buzz” to have women at one power dinner, according to her suit. We didn’t fix that leaving-the-girls-out thing a couple decades ago?

Kleiner has said the suit is “without merit,” and its star general partner, John Doerr, said in a letter posted on the firm’s website on May 30 that it all amounted to “false allegations against his firm, which boasts “the most” women of any leading venture capital firm. As luck would have it, Kleiner’s woman numbers rose by one the next day, when the firm announced a new partner to focus on investments in consumer internet business, Megan Quinn, would begin in late June.

We’ll see if Pao can even get to court. Kleiner spokeswoman Amanda Duckworth told me in an email that the firm believes Pao’s claims “are covered by an arbitration agreement.” Alan Exelrod, Pao’s lawyer, declined to comment when I asked him if she’d signed anything obligating her to arbitration. Kleiner hasn’t filed any request to have the complaint kicked out of court, but companies in employment disputes usually love the idea of getting a case out of the public eye. Here’s my Bloomberg column on the Pao case and its striking resemblance to lawsuits 20 years past. Read article