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Carri Bugbee

If You're Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won't be Yours - ProPublica - 0 views

www.propublica.org/...-out-of-work-forced-retirement

ageism workers

shared by Carri Bugbee on 09 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • between the time older workers enter the study and when they leave paid employment, 56 percent are laid off at least once or leave jobs under such financially damaging circumstances that it’s likely they were pushed out rather than choosing to go voluntarily. Only one in 10 of these workers ever again earns as much as they did before their employment setbacks, our analysis showed. Even years afterward, the household incomes of over half of those who experience such work disruptions remain substantially below those of workers who don’t. “This isn’t how most people think they’re going to finish out their work lives,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist and veteran scholar of the older labor force who worked on the analysis. “For the majority of older Americans, working after 50 is considerably riskier and more turbulent than we previously thought.”
  • An additional 13 percent of workers who start their 50s in long-held positions unexpectedly retire under conditions that suggest they were forced out. They begin by telling survey takers they plan to keep working for many years, but, within a couple of years, they suddenly announce they’ve retired, amid a substantial drop in earnings and income. Jeffrey Wenger, a senior labor economist with the RAND Corp., said some of these people likely were laid off, but they cover it up by saying they retired. “There’s so much social stigma around being separated from work,” he said, “even people who are fired or let go will say they retired to save face.”
  • Taken together, the scale of damage sustained by older workers is substantial. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently 40 million Americans age 50 and older who are working. Our analysis of the HRS data suggests that as many as 22 million of these people have or will suffer a layoff, forced retirement or other involuntary job separation. Of these, only a little over 2 million have recovered or will. “These findings tell us that a sizable percentage, possibly a majority, of workers who hold career jobs in their 50s will get pushed out of those jobs on their way to retirement,” Burtless said. “Yes, workers can find jobs after a career job comes to an early, unexpected end. But way too often, the replacement job is a whole lot worse than the career job. This leaves little room for the worker to rebuild.”
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  • in recent years, employers’ pleas for greater freedom to remake their workforces to meet global competition have won an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have reacted by widening the reach of the ADEA’s exceptions and restricting the law’s protections. Meanwhile, most employers have stopped offering traditional pensions, which once delivered a double-barreled incentive for older workers to retire voluntarily: maximum payouts for date-certain departures and the assurance that benefits would last as long as the people receiving them. That’s left workers largely responsible for financing their own retirements and many in need of continued work.
  • The share of U.S. workers who’ve suffered financially damaging, employer-driven job separations after age 50 has risen steadily from just over 10 percent in 1998 to almost 30 percent in 2016, the analysis shows.
  • The turbulence experienced by older workers is about the same regardless of their income, education, geography or industry. Some 58 percent of those with high school educations who reach their 50s working steadily in long-term jobs subsequently face a damaging layoff or other involuntarily separation. Yet more education provides little additional protection; 55 percent of those with college or graduate degrees experience similar job losses.
Carri Bugbee

40 Online Resources All Women in Tech Careers Should Know About | PCMag.com - 0 views

www.pcmag.com/...in-tech-careers-should-know-ab

women female harassment careers women in tech

shared by Carri Bugbee on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 20 Jun 19
     
    48 percent of women in tech reported a marked lack of mentors and advisors.
Carri Bugbee

The Numbers of Women in Tech Rise and Fall, But Sexual Harassment is Ever Present - IEE... - 0 views

www.spectrum.ieee.org/...ual-harassment-is-ever-present

women in tech silicon valley female sexism entrepreneurs women harassment startups tech

shared by Carri Bugbee on 12 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • In a recent survey of startup founders, 78 percent of female founders said they’ve been sexually harassed or know someone else who has.
  • Women dominated computer programming in its early days because the field wasn’t seen as a career, just a something someone could do without a lot of training and would do for only a short period of time. Computer jobs had no room for advancement, so having women “retire” in their 20s was not seen as a bad thing. And since women, of course, could never supervise men, Hicks said, women who were good at computing ended up training the men who ended up as their managers.
  • But when it became clear that computers—and computer work—were important, women were suddenly pushed out of the field. “As the gender labor flip was occurring, a whole lot of talent was being shown the door,” Hicks said. “The young men being trained to do [computing] a lot of times don’t like it and don’t stay long—and why should they? They have career prospects in other areas, why go into the nascent field?”
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  • “It’s not about the skills, it’s about who’s doing the work. The work gets valued in different ways depending on who is doing it.” That’s why, Hicks pointed out, today software developers have a higher status and pay than people who do quality assurance and testing—jobs that require similar skills but “because of who usually does these jobs are valued differently in a way that is disproportionate to the content of the work.”
  • he fix for it doesn’t involve a better pipeline, she says, but changing things at the top. We have an opportunity to do that now, she says, because “tech is becoming more diffuse; the higher you go, the fewer tech skills you need.
Carri Bugbee

New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iscrimination-jobs-hiring.html

bias hiring ageism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • It is complicating an already challenging juncture of life. Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.More than half of workers over 50 lose longtime jobs before they are ready to retire, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute and ProPublica. Of those, nine out of 10 never recover their previous earning power. Some are able to find only piecemeal or gig work.
  • “If you lose your job at an older age, it’s really hard to get a new one,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist who worked on the analysis.‘The Look in Their Eyes’Tom Adair dressed in a sharply pressed white shirt and a blue blazer with gold buttons for the weekly meeting for ExperiencePlus, a group for job seekers over 50 held in the small library at St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, Ala., near Huntsville.A former quality manager at Toyota and an Air Force consultant, Mr. Adair said he has had temporary consulting assignments over the last decade but has not been able to get a steady full-time job since the recession’s nadir in 2009.
  • “I ace the phone interviews,” Mr. Adair said. “They say: ‘Your résumé speaks volumes. You could hit the ground running. It looks like you’re the perfect fit.’”“But you come in, and you’re D.O.A.,” said Mr. Adair, who is 71 and has neatly clipped gray hair. “You can see the look in their eyes.”“My wife says: ‘We need to get you a face-lift. We need to get your hair dyed,’” he said.Older workers are much more likely to wrestle with prolonged joblessness than younger ones, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, a 54-year-old job hunter will be unemployed for nearly a year.Repeated inquiries can go unanswered, like space probes lost in a distant galaxy. In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.
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  • Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.
  • As for Mr. Adair, he said he had been through the same job-application routine so many times that it felt like “Groundhog Day.” Over the years, he consulted three lawyers about age discrimination. Each time, they advised that an individual lawsuit would not be worth the legal costs.
  • With a small pension and Social Security, he said, he and his wife are “just getting by.”“It’s devastating,” Mr. Adair said. “You go through the stages just like dying. First you can’t believe it. You’re so sure and your wife is so sure, and even the recruiter is. Then you get mad.” By the end, you feel like giving up, he said.Wanted: Greener EmployeesHiring complaints and lawsuits are rarely filed because they are difficult to prove and the cost is high, said Robert E. Weisberg, a regional attorney with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Florida.
  • To bring a case against Seasons 52, a national restaurant chain, Mr. Weisberg said, the commission looked to establish a pattern of bias over a period of years by combining statistical analyses with testimony from applicants.The agency examined whether the chain could have hired so few applicants 40 or older if there had been no age discrimination, and calculated the odds at less than one in 10,000, according to court documents. The commission also collected affidavits from 139 applicants at 35 restaurants.George Simmons was 45 when he applied at a Seasons 52 in Lone Tree, Colo., in 2014. “My interview was going well until the interviewer asked me my age,” he stated. After he answered, he said, he was shown the door. “I asked what was the problem,” he said, “and the interviewer responded that the restaurant was looking for younger people.”
  • Heidi Barsaloux was 44 when she applied for a bartender position at a Seasons 52 in Schaumburg, Ill., in 2010. “An interviewer told me that they were not looking for people with that much experience and wanted people who were more green,” she said.
  • A third applicant was told, “We are not looking for old white guys.”Ultimately, the chain, part of Darden Restaurants, agreed last year to pay $2.85 million and hire a monitor to prevent discrimination against applicants over 40. As part of the settlement, the chain denied any wrongdoing.There have been other legal offensives.The Communications Workers of America has filed a lawsuit on behalf of millions of older Americans against Amazon, T-Mobile and Cox Communications, accusing them and hundreds of other major employers of systematic age discrimination in hiring based on targeted online advertising.
  • The union and several workers have also filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against more than 70 employers and employment agencies related to age discrimination in recruiting. It expects that some of those will turn into class-action lawsuits.By exposing so much of the help-wanted process on the internet, “the transformation to digital recruiting has shined a spotlight on how discrimination happens, and it’s made it much easier to do so,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer at Outten & Golden working with the union. “We’re going to start going after these companies, one by one.”And in a broad settlement with civil rights groups and the union, Facebook agreed to eliminate the ability of advertisers to screen out minority groups, women or older job seekers from seeing particular help-wanted listings.
  • “We want the E.E.O.C. to declare that this type of exclusionary advertising is unlawful” on any online platform, Mr. Romer-Friedman said.Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, said the company had taken steps to combat hiring discrimination and was exploring what more to do.A Cap on ExperienceDale E. Kleber had been out of work for three years when he saw a posting in 2014 for a legal position at CareFusion, a medical technology company. At 58, with three of his four children living at home, in a suburb of Chicago, he was feeling the financial strain of prolonged unemployment.So even though the ad specified that applicants should have no more than seven years of experience, Mr. Kleber applied. CareFusion ended up hiring a 29-year-old.
  • Mr. Kleber, a veteran lawyer and former general counsel of a national dairy and food company, sued, arguing that a limit on experience effectively ruled out older applicants.“Litigation is a terrible way to settle disputes,” said Mr. Kleber, who during his career had defended companies against complaints filed with the E.E.O.C. “It’s a very uncertain process, it is fraught with risk, and sometimes it comes out wrong.”Putting a cap on experience, though, “just seemed so egregious,” he said.The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not agree. In a ruling this year supporting CareFusion, it stated that recruiting practices that have the effect of screening out older applicants — what is known in legal terms as having a “disparate impact” — did not violate the law.
  • The decision mirrored one involving R. J. Reynolds Tobacco made earlier by the Court of Appeals for 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which the Supreme Court declined to review. It ruled that unlike employees already on the payroll who can show that a policy has a negative impact on a group regardless of the motivation, applicants would have to prove intentional discrimination.Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesman for Becton Dickinson and Company, which owns CareFusion, said, “We are deeply committed to providing equal employment opportunities and a workplace free from discrimination, and as such we are pleased with the decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.”In April, Mr. Kleber and the AARP Foundation asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case.“It defies common sense,” Mr. Kleber said, to think Congress “intended to offer greater legal protections to people who have jobs than people looking for jobs” when it passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967.
  • Other older workers and advocates elsewhere are making the same argument, pushing for a broader interpretation of the law.In a federal court in California, a class-action lawsuit against the global accounting firm PwC that claims “substantial evidence of age disparities in hiring” was certified in April. The company noted on its career website and in reports that the average age of its 220,000-member work force was 27, and that 80 percent of the staff members were millennials (born after 1981).PwC responded that the company’s “hiring practices are merit-based and have nothing to do with age.” It added, “The plaintiffs’ accusations are false, and we will prove that in court.”
Carri Bugbee

Gender pay gap: new study shows it worsens with age | Considerable - 0 views

considerable.com/gender-pay-gap-by-age

gender pay gap women

shared by Carri Bugbee on 28 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • New data from PayScale shows that women age 45 and older earn 70¢ for every dollar that men earn, before adjusting for factors like experience and industry. By comparison, women age 30 to 44 earn 78¢ for every dollar men earn, and women in their 20s receive 83¢.
  • That gulf between so-called controlled and uncontrolled pay gaps represents what PayScale calls the “Opportunity Gap”—societal and business forces that keep women in lower-paying jobs and industries while men continue to advance and earn more. 
  • Women are opting out of—or being excluded from—some of the highest-paying industries, such as technology, where women make up just 29% of workers, and they’re not being promoted into management as quickly as men are.
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  • In addition to earning fewer promotions and smaller raises, women are more likely than men are to take time off from work to care for family members throughout their careers. Over time, that absence contributes to the widening pay gap. In an earlier study, PayScale found that workers who took at least a year off from a job earned 7.3% less on average than similar employees who did not take a break.
Carri Bugbee

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy.' - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hours-greedy-professions.html

women female gender

shared by Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 28 Apr 19
     
    American women of working age are the most educated ever. Yet it's the most educated women who face the biggest gender gaps in seniority and pay: At the top of their fields, they represent just 5 percent of big company chief executives and a quarter of the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies. But recently, mounting evidence has led economists and sociologists to converge on a major driver - one that ostensibly has nothing to do with gender. The returns to working long, inflexible hours have greatly increased. This is particularly true in managerial jobs and what social scientists call the greedy professions, like finance, law and consulting - an unintentional side effect of the nation's embrace of a winner-take-all economy. It's so powerful, researchers say, that it has canceled the effect of women's educational gains. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother. [Sign up for In Her Words, a twice-weekly newsletter on women, gender and society.] This is not about educated women opting out of work (they are the least likely to stop working after having children, even if they move to less demanding jobs). It's about how the nature of work has changed in ways that push couples who have equal career potential to take on unequal roles. "Because of rising inequality, if you put in the extra hours, if you're around for the Sunday evening discussion, you'll get a lot more," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who is writing a book on the topic. To maximize
Carri Bugbee

Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517788

startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech racism

shared by Carri Bugbee on 04 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • it was a reminder that as a woman in tech, she should be prepared to have her authority questioned at any moment, even by some guy trying to get a job at her company.
  • at some point, something inside her broke. Maybe it was being at tech conferences and hearing herself, the “elder stateswoman,” warning younger women to cover their drinks, because such conferences—known for alcohol, after-parties, and hot women at product booths—have been breeding grounds for unwanted sexual advances and assaults, and you never knew whether some jerk might put something in your cocktail. She couldn’t believe that women still had to worry about such things; that they still got asked to fetch coffee; that she still heard talk about how hiring women or people of color entailed “lowering the bar”; that women still, often, felt silenced or attacked when expressing opinions online.
  • At one party, the founder of a start-up told Wu she’d need to spend “intimate time” with him to get in on his deal. An angel investor leading a different deal told her something similar. She became a master of warm, but firm, self-extrication.
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  • Wu is struck by “the countless times I’ve had to move a man’s hand from my thigh (or back or shoulder or hair or arm) during a meeting (or networking event or professional lunch or brainstorming session or pitch meeting) without seeming confrontational (or bitchy or rejecting or demanding or aggressive).” In a land of grand ideas and grander funding proposals, she found that the ability to neatly reject a man’s advances without injuring his ego is “a pretty important skill that I would bet most successful women in our industry have.”
  • a recent survey called “Elephant in the Valley” found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions.
  • nly about a quarter of U.S. computing and mathematical jobs—a fraction that has actually fallen slightly over the past 15 years, even as women have made big strides in other fields. Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do.
  • Studies show that women who work in tech are interrupted in meetings more often than men. They are evaluated on their personality in a way that men are not. They are less likely to get funding from venture capitalists, who, studies also show, find pitches delivered by men—especially handsome men—more persuasive. And in a particularly cruel irony, women’s contributions to open-source software are accepted more often than men’s are, but only if their gender is unknown.
  • For women of color, the cumulative effect of these slights is compounded by a striking lack of racial diversity—and all that attends it
  • Three years in, Silicon Valley diversity conferences and training sessions abound; a cottage industry of consultants and software makers has sprung up to offer solutions. Some of those fixes have already started filtering out to workplaces beyond the tech world, because Silicon Valley is nothing if not evangelical.
  • The industry’s diversity numbers have barely budged, and many women say that while sexism has become somewhat less overt, it’s just as pernicious as ever.
  • When Silicon Valley was emerging, after World War II, software programming was considered rote and unglamorous, somewhat secretarial—and therefore suitable for women. The glittering future, it was thought, lay in hardware. But once software revealed its potential—and profitability—the guys flooded in and coding became a male realm.
  • The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.
  • “workplace conditions, a lack of access to key creative roles, and a sense of feeling stalled in one’s career” are the main reasons women leave. “Undermining behavior from managers” is a major factor.
  • gender bias is a big problem in start-ups, which are frequently run by brotherhoods of young men—in many cases friends or roommates—straight out of elite colleges. In 2014, for instance, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was two years out of Stanford and already leading a $10 billion company when his frat-boy-at-his-misogynistic-worst undergraduate emails were published and went viral. In them, his only slightly younger self joked about shooting lasers at “fat girls,” described a Stanford dean as “dean-julie-show-us-your-tits,” and for good measure, saluted another fraternity because it had decided to “stop being gay.”
  • “I, and most women I know, have been a party to at least some sexist or discriminatory behavior in the workplace,” she wrote, explaining that she and many other women had witnessed things like “locker-room discussion during travel with colleagues,” which they tried to brush aside, since “any individual act seems silly to complain about.” The Pao trial, however, shifted her attitude.
  • Eighty-four percent of the respondents had been told they were too aggressive; 66 percent had felt excluded from key networking opportunities because of their gender; 90 percent had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company off-site meetings; 88 percent had had clients and colleagues direct questions to male peers that should have been addressed to them; and 60 percent had fended off unwanted sexual advances (in most cases from a superior). Of those women, one-third said they had feared for their personal safety.
  • many people there believe—despite evidence everywhere to the contrary—that tech is a meritocracy. Ironically enough, this very belief can perpetuate inequality. A 2010 study, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” found that in cultures that espouse meritocracy, managers may in fact “show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women.”
  • telling participants that their company valued merit-based decisions only increased the likelihood of their giving higher bonuses to the men.
  • a 2015 study published in Science confirmed that computer science and certain other fields, including physics, math, and philosophy, fetishize “brilliance,” cultivating the idea that potential is inborn. The report concluded that these fields tend to be problematic for women, owing to a stubborn assumption that genius is a male trait.
  • “The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,”
  • At Google, the initial tally showed that just 17 percent of its technical employees were women. The female technical force was 10 percent at Twitter, 15 percent at Facebook, and 20 percent at Apple.
  • Lately, unconscious-bias training has emerged as a ubiquitous fix for Silicon Valley’s diversity deficit. It’s diversity training for the new millennium, in which people are made aware of their own hidden biases.
  • “That sort of discipline really, really resonated effectively with the hard scientists we have here.” Facebook put unconscious-bias training front and center in its diversity efforts, too; both companies have posted online videos of their training modules, to offer a model for other workplaces. Since then, talk of unconscious bias has spread through Silicon Valley like—well, like a virus.
  • Too many decisions are made on gut instinct, the training argues: A time-pressed hiring manager looks at a résumé and sees a certain fraternity or hobby, or a conventionally white or male name, and bang—thanks to the unconscious brain making shortcuts, that person gets an interview
  • “Virtually every company I know of is deploying unconscious-bias training,” says Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute. “It’s a fast and feel-good kind of training that helps you feel like you’re making a difference.”
  • Unconscious-bias training may not work. Some think it could even backfire.
  • even just talking too much about gender inequities can serve to normalize them: When you say over and over that women come up against a glass ceiling, people begin to accept that, yes, women come up against a glass ceiling—and that’s just the way it is.
  • “You would think all things are equal,” she said, “but these backdoor conversations are happening in settings that women are not invited to. The whole boys’-club thing still applies.
  • Mike Eynon, wrote in a Medium post that bias training makes “us white guys feel better” and lets the “privileged realize everyone has bias and they aren’t at fault,” while nothing changes for discriminated groups.
  • if you can’t easily dispel bias, what you can do is engineer a set of structural changes that prevent people from acting on it.
  • the first 20 seconds often predict the outcome of a 20-minute interview.
  • The problem, he wrote, is that such quick impressions are meaningless. He added that Google strongly encourages interviewers to use a combination of skill assessments and standard questions rather than relying on subjective impressions.
  • It is, for example, a hallowed tradition that in job interviews, engineers are expected to stand up and code on whiteboards, a high-pressure situation that works to the disadvantage of those who feel out of place. Indeed, whiteboard sessions are rife with opportunities for biased judgment.
  • “Tying bonuses to diversity outcomes signals that diversity is something the company cares about and thinks is important,” she says. “Managers will take it seriously.”
Carri Bugbee

Google Employee Memo: Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's Response | Fortune.com - 0 views

fortune.com/...google-diversity-memo-wojcicki

women sexism female silicon valley Google Youtube harassment

shared by Carri Bugbee on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • “Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?”That question, whether it’s been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone’s mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology.
  • Time and again, I’ve faced the slights that come with that question. I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.
  • I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I’ve written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we’ve been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science.
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  • Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions. But while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender
Carri Bugbee

Anita Hill: Class Actions Could Fight Discrimination in Tech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ould-take-sexism-to-court.html

tech women harassment google silicon valley STEM technology

shared by Carri Bugbee on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • The recent leak of a Google engineer’s screed against the company’s diversity initiatives is a reminder that the notion of Silicon Valley as the seat of human progress is a myth — at least when it comes to the way the women behind the latest in technology are treated.The tech industry is stuck in the past, more closely resembling “Mad Men”-era Madison Avenue or 1980s Wall Street than a modern egalitarian society. It may take the force of our legal system to change that.
  • While the document may be unusual in its explicit embrace of this kind of backward thinking, the attitudes that underlie it are nothing new in Silicon Valley.
  • Sadly, these types of cases represent only one element of the industrywide discrimination against women in tech. There’s also an alarming gap in pay and promotions, which has devastating effects on women’s careers.
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  • In the tech industry, women under 25 earn on average 29 percent less than their male counterparts. Women of all ages receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company 63 percent of the time. They hold only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies and own only 5 percent of tech start-ups. Only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms are women. It is no wonder that the rate at which women quit tech jobs (41 percent) is more than twice as high as the corresponding rate for men.
  • By and large, women are the only ones distressed by such dynamics. Eighty-two percent of men working for start-ups agree that their companies already spend the “right amount of time” addressing diversity. Nearly half of women — 40 percent — disagree, saying inadequate time is devoted.
  • We can’t afford to wait for the tech industry to police itself — and there are few indications that it will ever do so. Consider what lawyers for Google said in May, in testimony in a suit alleging wage discrimination against women: It would be too burdensome for the company to collect data on salaries.
  • t’s hard to foresee serious government intervention coming from the current administration. Nor can we wait for bad press and shareholder class actions to force out negligent chief executives responsible for cultures of inequality.Instead, women in the industry should collectively consider their legal options. Top among these would be class-action discrimination cases against employers.
  • The tech sector is not the first white-collar “boys’ club” to demand an industrywide correction. In the 1990s, Wall Street firms faced a slew of class-action discrimination lawsuits.
  • The lesson of these cases is clear: Class-action lawsuits can force industrywide change, even in the most entrenched, male-dominated industries.
  • Women in tech no doubt have hurdles to bringing class-action lawsuits, including the requisite preponderance of statistical evidence and the prevalence of confidentiality clauses and arbitration agreements, which are, in effect, designed to pre-empt class actions. But this challenge doesn’t mean the suits cannot be brought, or won. This is a route that the women of Silicon Valley should consider, especially if regulation is not an immediate and viable solution.
  • Advancing women’s equality, which includes minimizing the gender gap in labor force participation, holds the potential to add $12 trillion to global G.D.P. by 2025.
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