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Carri Bugbee

Proposed California Law Targets Sexual Harassment in Venture Capital | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-harassment-in-venture-capital

shared by Carri Bugbee on 23 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • A California state senator says she will introduce legislation to clarify legal protections for entrepreneurs facing sexual harassment. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson says the proposal, which she revealed Thursday, is in response to “recent and stunning” allegations by women entrepreneurs of harassment by venture capitalists.
  • The proposal would amend California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sexual discrimination at California businesses, to clarify that it covers sexual harassment in relationships between entrepreneurs and potential investors. Current law specifies doctor-patient and attorney-client relationships, but does not explicitly mention entrepreneurs and potential investors.
  • Equal Rights Advocates, a national nonprofit that champions gender rights in workplaces and schools, will support the measure. The organization has previously worked with Jackson to successfully strengthen California’s Equal Pay Law.
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  • The tech industry “can’t claim to lead innovation at the same time it lives in the dark ages about the value of women and their ability,”
  • The National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group, welcomes these legislative efforts
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.
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

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

A template for investor/founder sexual harassment policy | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...harassment-policy-template

investor founder harassment policy startups women entrepreneurs female founders sexism silicon valley tech

shared by Carri Bugbee on 06 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Founders should expect and push their investors or those they consider partnering with to have made a clear commitment to eliminating harassment. Those looking to support this drive can share this template with the hashtag #HarassmentPolicy. 
  • Statement of values regarding why protecting founders from harassment by investors is necessary due to the imbalanced power dynamic Explanation that standard  sexual harassment law does not adequately cover the investor/founder relationship, so voluntary policy is needed Recognition that harassment and discrimination perpetrators and recipients can be of any gender or identity, though most often women are harassed by men Discussion of the need for a culture of explicit consent
  • Zero-tolerance for investors overtly sexually assaulting, harassing, or discriminating against founders or their teams
Carri Bugbee

Is Homework for Job Applicants Effective? - 0 views

www.shrm.org/...homework-job-applicants.aspx

shared by Carri Bugbee on 20 May 19 - No Cached
  • Carri Bugbee on 20 May 19
     
    In California, pre-employment training must be paid, but employers don't have to compensate candidates for tryouts that: Truly qualify as skills tests. Involve productivity that is of no use to the company.
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