Mandy Brown comments on the ruling in Ellen Pao’s suit against Kleiner Perkins.
The law has been constructed in such a way that only extremely blatant discrimination counts. More subtle sexism (and racism) can hide behind all kinds of gender- or race-neutral justifications which can never be wholly dismissed. So Pao wasn’t passed up because she was a woman, but because she wasn’t likeable. She wasn’t fired because of her lawsuit, but because she didn’t have what it takes. She was both too pushy and not pushy enough. She wasn’t a “thought leader.”
The message here is you can discriminate all you want so long as you aren’t completely stupid about it.
“Thought leader”? That made me jump. I didn’t know it was a catchphrase; I thought it was something special that Edwina Rogers dreamed up for the Global not-Global Secular Thingummy. Thought leader. Lead me to your thought thinkings. Lead me into the sunny uplands of skilled thoughting. But not about gender bias or stereotype threat or double binds or always having to be better and still not getting the promotion – none of that kind of thoughting. Only the approved kind – lead me to that.
The Times quotes Peter Fenton, an investor at Benchmark, in response to the ruling: “I really worry more that there will be a chilling effect on the risk-taking appetite toward getting diversity into venture. Kleiner took the risk and look what happened.” Ho boy. Let’s unpack that. Kleiner did not “take a risk” in hiring a woman; Kleiner hired a demonstrably competent and talented woman who even by their own testimony seems to have been pretty damn good at her job. The notion that every woman you may hire has some measurable risk associated with her—as if we’re all ticking discrimination lawsuit timebombs—is itself discrimination. The “risk,” if there even is any, isn’t located in the women a firm may or may not hire, but in the structure of their own organization.
Oh come now. Be fair. Hiring a woman is pretty much like hiring a hungry bear. Women aren’t normal. They aren’t like everyone else. You don’t know where you are with them. They’re always flipping out, or spilling milk on the floor, or being way uglier than you wanted them to be. They’re nothing but risk. With men you know where you are.
I didn’t know it was a catchphrase; I thought it was something special that Edwina Rogers dreamed up for the Global not-Global Secular Thingummy.
Nah, it’s been around the tech industry for years — sansbullshitsans knows all about it. Second-last place I worked for got a “thought leader” for a CEO in the late 90’s — he was all about the future direction of the Web, and Innovation and whatnot. And when the tech bubble burst in 2000, they were possibly the hardest hit of all the large telecom equipment providers, and limped along until the 2008 crash finished them off (they’d fired the Thought Leader back when the wheels first fell off, but the damage was already done).
That’s where Thought Leaders get you.
Yeah, because it’s the women’s fault for suing, not the guy’s fault for harassing them into suing.
“thought leader” – I also work in tech. When someone uses that term un-ironically, I know I am dealing with a marketing person, or someone who easily falls for marketing (i.e.: a shithead)
Re: “thought leaders” — you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.
“Thought Leader in a search engine gives you a long list of hits, the first few pages sadly lacking words like “Dawkins” or “Shermer” or even “Secular”.
A South African newspaper’s blog by that name won a Webby award back in ’08, but the Wikipffft attributes the invention of the phrase to one Joel Kurtzman back in 1994 (dunno how Newt Gingrich failed to stake a claim to it back in his glory days).
She’s the CEO of reddit, so as you can imagine, there was even much dramz over there. With all the tact, civility, and refraining from prejudice that reddit is known for.
Don’t be ridiculous, Ophelia. Who ever heard of a bear suing for discrimination? It’s much riskier to hire a woman.
Disingenuous. Any business knows that hiring a woman is a real risk, because they’re always breeding… and when they do that, they have a whole load of rights to not turn up to work. With men, you know where you are, because men don’t have any of those rights.
The sooner they do – the sooner a man’s right to time off when his wife has a child exactly matches his wife’s right to time off – the better, for everyone.
In Ontario, it’s not quite exactly matching, but:
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pubs/guide/pregnancy.php
Summary:
– A pregnant woman gets up to 17 weeks pregnancy leave prior to the due date
– Any new parent gets 37 weeks parental leave (or 35 if the person has already taken pregnancy leave, for a total of 52).
Note that ‘Any new parent’ explicitly covers same-sex couples and adoptive parents as well as genetic mothers and fathers.
Of course, even here, companies often try to cheat around the rules by claiming other reasons for firing and discrimination.
Perhaps if we made it as obviously difficult and expensive to not hire women as it is to fix a workplace culture that leads to harassment the ‘rational’ choice might also be more obvious…
I can’t see the ins and outs of the case from the linked article but it is at least possible that the jury got it right surely? I tend to think juries are pretty reliable, although they screw up sometimes.
The trouble is, in a sense this is true. Women, as a group, are more expensive to hire then men as a group in may employment situations and those tend to be more professional situations where there is a major cost in replacing senior staff. So, if you want to limit your risk, all other things being equal, it is rational to prefer male candidates. We have seen an interesting example of this recently in the NHS, where the increasing number of women doctors has increased the cost of hire substantially. I think some activists do women a disservice denying this because it means that efforts are concentrated in the wrong places, trying to tackle imaginary prejudice instead of real structural problems.
Bluntnose @ 11,
You’ve got an awful lot of assertions in there, all presented as hard fact.
To say something meaningful on this subject you would need to show correlations with the legal situation, as regards parental leave, in each country you include. Also useful would be some analysis of staff turnover by gender, how interested top management is in non-discrimination and what messages they send out to staff and those in supervisory roles, whether the HR team are clued-up professionals or mere lapdogs – and several other factors you appear to believe are entirely overridden by the possible ownership – no-one ever checks! – of a uterus.
One of the problems with the NHS has been the constant attempts to reconfigure it as though it were a Fordist 1920s production line. No-one whose high technical skills only work when backed by keen observation and exceptional inter-personal skills should be working 16-hour shifts in an understaffed clinic or ward.
You’ll also need to explain why women are paid less as a matter of course, even when they’ve had a hysterectomy, even when their children left home 20 years ago.
Can you do it?
I don’t think they are, I haven’t seen any evidence that they are anyway. But employment effects happen across the economy, not just locally.
The NHS is interesting because that is one professional area where women have been very successful in going from near-zero presence to dominating in terms of numbers, with every sign being that this domination will continue to grow, so discriminatory practice in management doesn’t seem to be an issue here. And the evidence seems to be that this makes employment more costly. It makes sense that it should be. There have been various NHS reports that make the claim, although I can’t point you to one off the top of my head I am sure others will remember where to find them.
Bluntnose,
Try these …..
(US) http://nursinglink.monster.com/benefits/articles/11915-are-male-nurses-paid-more
(UK) http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/oct/24/birmingham-equal-pay-victory-women-city
(UK) http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca20090515_314494.htm
(UK) http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca20090515_314494.htm
(Africa) http://www.k2corporatemobility.com/B-Remuneration-in-Africa
(US) http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/business/gender-gap-female-executive-compensation
(UK) http://www.xperthr.co.uk/blogs/pay-intelligence/2013/08/xperthr-pay-data-reveals-bonus-gap-between-men-and-women/
(UK) http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/19/gender-pay-gap-women-bosses-earn-35-percent-less-than-men
(UK) http://www.addleshawgoddard.com/view.asp?content_id=6211&parent_id=6210
(UK) http://www.addleshawgoddard.com/view.asp?content_id=6211&parent_id=6210
(UK) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371155/ – yes, it’s a movie but the story is true.
(UK) https://www.tuc.org.uk/equality-issues/gender-equality/equal-pay/shock-rise-gender-pay-gap-after-years-slow-steady-progress
Found at random in a five-minute google search. The evidence is there.
@Maureen Brian, 12:
Can you really not come up with an answer to that question yourself?
Suggestion: the most critical part of a professional career to lifetime earnings is the second and third half-decade. In the first five years post-graduation you’re finding your feet, getting rid of that wet-behind-the-ears fresh-graduate omniscience you came out of university with. Five to ten years in is the time you lay the serious groundwork for your future progress – achieving professional accreditations, perhaps an MBA or other post-graduate qualification, making professional contacts who will function as your mentors and referees for the later steps in your career. If you don’t do that groundwork, if you choose to do something else instead, it’s not unreasonable to expect that that failure will be something from which your earning potential never recovers.
And that time coincides with your late twenties and early thirties – precisely the time you might choose to start a family. If you’re a man in the UK, any potential for impact that will have on your career will be non-zero but tiny. You will be entitled to a couple of weeks off work, over and above your existing allowance. A few years later, you might start leaving early to pick the kids up from school, and so on, assuming you’re still with the mother. But if you’re a woman, your entitlement to not turn up for work goes way beyond that, stretching for months. While the employer is legally obliged to keep your job open for you to return to it, you’re under no obligation to do so. Is it in any way surprising or unreasonable that a group of people with a unique entitlement like that don’t progress as fast or as far in their careers, on average?
If everyone, male and female, was entitled to the same *aternity leave, there’d be no rational reason for employers to favour men over identically-qualified and experienced women. If it was socially expected – even required – that ALL new parents would take a career break when their children were born, one would reasonably expect to see the gender pay gap close, and a new one open up between those with children and those without. And would that be a bad thing?
Bluntnose
You argue that because there will be more women doctors, there will be less work done because women often work part-time. You are making a lot of assumptions, such as more hours means a better outcome. I could not really find how many hours a week women physicians do work. It would take more research than I have time for, but part-time work could be as much as 30 hours/week. However, in the Baltic states, about 70% of physicians are women. The British Medical Journal looked at the health systems in those countries and report their health systems are equivalent to Western European health systems. These countries have improved their healthcare significantly in the past 30 years and they didn’t need to hire more male doctors.
There are also other factors that are contributing to a shortage of physicians. I think men are also wanting a more balanced work and personal life and why shouldn’t they. In general, it is much healthier for a doctor to have a more balanced life. Medicine has changed over the years. We have more treatments available which means a need for more specialists. It is hard to keep up with all the advancements in medicine even as a specialist.
The UK already has to hire doctors from other countries and I read that 40% of their doctors are from other countries. so I think there are other problems contributing to the shortage of doctor hours.
sonofrojblake @ 15,
I know perfectly well what one of the reasons is. I stress that it is only one.
Let’s start in the mid-C19 when the proportion of the population needing a secondary education or a professional qualification rose suddenly. A handful of self-taught geniuses – Telford, Brunel, etc – was no longer sufficient and the growth of the towns meant that informal methods of of resolving disputes no longer worked hence lawyers, accountants and the rest.
Universal secondary education in the UK came in 1870 and included girls. So by the end of the century there were significant numbers of women looking for professional jobs. From then on it suddenly became necessary to the men to protect themselves from competition so that barriers to women’s participation arose, one of which was the idea that everyone’s career should follow the same pattern – a pattern devised as convenient to men, the one you describe. It is not the word of god or the natural order of things. It was artificially created. And it happened to be very convenient for the men who would, at that stage expect to have both a stay at home wife and very likely servants.
For most of the C20 women were engaged in dismantling one barrier after another but the male career path was by now seen as the norm and sticking to it may have become some sort of holy mission.
There is no need to retain it. The more advanced countries now have shared parental leave and that situation is improving. There are few servants about and experience has shown there is more than one route, more than one timescale to do this on. I won’t bore you with the details but I became a bloody good manager by an entirely different route and successful and innovative with it.
I have met too many senior people who went to the right school, got the right degree and have learned nothing since to accept your argument as valid.
Did you even read my final paragraph?
Yes.
Sure, employment discrimination cases can be hard to prove, and it’s reasonable to believe the plaintiff could not prove her case. Reading some of the reports on the case, it looks like the company successfully protected itself by having performance reviews that contained sufficient non-discriminatory reasons tor Pao not getting the promotion.
Of course, that’s not Ophelia or Mandy’s point. The reason this case got to a jury is that Kleiner Perkins did lots of things wrong. As plenty of commentary on the case pointed out, it’s very hard to read the testimony and believe that it was a good work environment for both men and women. That’s why they got sued, and that’s why the case went to trial rather than being dismissed at an earlier stage. Peter’s claim that hiring women is risky is just plain asinine.