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Carri Bugbee

Why Women Aren't C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...women-ceos-glass-ceiling.html

female women C-suite sexism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 22 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Women are often seen as dependable, less often as visionary. Women tend to be less comfortable with self-promotion — and more likely to be criticized when they do grab the spotlight. Men remain threatened by assertive women. Most women are not socialized to be unapologetically competitive. Some women get discouraged and drop out along the way. And many are disproportionately penalized for stumbles.
  • Like many women who became senior executives, she said she rose fastest and most smoothly when she was measured by the straightforward metric of profits.
  • When women act forcefully, research suggests, men are more likely to react badly. A Lean In/McKinsey & Company survey in 2016 of 132 companies and 34,000 employees found that women who negotiated for promotions were 30 percent more likely than men to be labeled intimidating, bossy or aggressive.
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  • Looking back, she is convinced that being a woman hurt her. “I rewrote the entire strategy for the company, doubled its share price,” she said. “We had a little bit of a dip. All of the guys had missed their numbers more. There’s a guy positioning himself as the successor. He hasn’t made his number in seven years. He’s tall and good looking and hangs around the right circles.”
  • She drew an unwelcome conclusion. “Women are prey,” she said. “They can smell it in the water, that women are not going to play the same game. Those men think, ‘If I kick her, she’s not going to kick back, but the men will. So I’ll go after her.’ It’s keeping women in their place. I truly believe that.”
  • The parallels with politics are striking. Research in both fields, including some conducted after Mrs. Clinton’s loss, has shown it’s harder for assertive, ambitious women to be seen as likable, and easier to conclude they lack some intangible, ill-defined quality of leadership.
  • men were being promoted within two years, women in three. “It wasn’t as overt as, ‘She’s too aggressive,’ ” she said. “It came down more to, ‘We’re not sure she’s ready for that job.’ ”
  • The bleakest perceptions are from minority women; only 29 percent of black women think the best opportunities at their companies go to the most deserving employees, compared with 47 percent of white women.
  • male colleagues sometimes told her they were reluctant to have dinner or drinks with female subordinates — important bonding activities in the corporate world — because it might be seen as flirtatious.
Carri Bugbee

Shown the Door, Older Workers Find Bias Hard to Prove - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-find-bias-hard-to-prove.html

shared by Carri Bugbee on 07 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Spirit AeroSystems — formed from Boeing’s 2005 sale of its Wichita division and Oklahoma operations — is an important supplier for Boeing, its biggest customer, and a rival, Airbus, chalking up nearly $1.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter of this year.When it laid off 360 workers in summer 2013, the company was not closing down or moving jobs to Mexico or anywhere else. Spirit, which has 11,000 employees in Wichita and operations in Europe and Asia, said layoffs among its salaried employees and managers were necessary to remain competitive.
  • Today, a lawsuit filed by 70 former employees, including Ms. Raymond, is in proceedings in the Federal District Court in Wichita. The lawsuit was cleared first by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which must decide the validity of any claim of age or disability discrimination before it can proceed.The workers brought the suit after discovering that nearly half — or 164 — of those in the 2013 layoffs were 40 or older, the age that initiates federal age discrimination law protections. And workers charge that they were singled out, in addition, because either they or their spouses had serious medical conditions.
  • Such lawsuits are popping up as the nation’s work force ages and as many longtime workers claim that they are being deliberately targeted for such reductions.
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  • “Once layoffs were done by reverse seniority. It was last in, first out, so the more senior workers kept their jobs,” said Robert J. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, who studies the country’s growth and work force productivity.“Now we’re seeing a transition from the age of favoritism to that of age discrimination,” Mr. Gordon said, “because newer workers are allowed to stay on while more costly, older workers are let go.”
  • One of the few recourses for employees is to file a job discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
  • In recent years, the number of filings has hovered in the 21,000 range, and age discrimination accounts for nearly a quarter of the overall complaints filed with the agency
  • he Age Discrimination in Employment Act — which Congress passed a half-century ago — may not be up to the task
  • nd a 2009 Supreme Court ruling has made proving age discrimination more difficult legally.
  • proving age bias is difficult. Even companies that decide that older workers are too expensive, with their larger paychecks and costlier health insurance, rarely detail this in internal documents or emails. And court rulings have given companies significant leeway to defend against such lawsuits.
  • Age-related harassment complaints, especially remarks that belittle or demean longtime workers’ skills or contributions, are up noticeably. They rose to 4,185 last year, an increase of almost 14 percent since 2011, according to E.E.O.C. data.
  • But under the law, comments that perpetuate stereotypes — like “older workers are deadwood” — do not carry a stigma equal to that of similar remarks on race or sex. While such demeaning remarks are not seen as conclusive proof of bias, they can help persuade a fact-finder, mediator or court that some wrongdoing has occurred in a workplace.
  • In Wichita, dozens of laid-off Spirit employees who are challenging their layoffs say their situation was exacerbated by the company’s use of personal medical information to single them out for layoffs.
  • A short time before the dismissals, they said in legal papers, Spirit switched to self-paid medical insurance, giving it an incentive to jettison higher-risk or sick employees to save money, they say.Then a few months after the 2013 layoffs, Spirit held a job fair to recruit for empty jobs, some of which appeared to have the same or very similar duties to the positions that had been vacated.But, according to Ms. Raymond and others, the company, Wichita’s largest employer, with few exceptions, would not accept résumés, interview or rehire the discharged workers.
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