EQUALITY MYTH

Guest Post: Peggy Olson, Don Draper, and Why Congress Must Pass the ‘Paycheck Fairness Act’

Guest blogger Jillian Weinberger weighs in on the Paycheck Fairness Act, endorsed this week by the Obama administration as “a common sense bill”:

The fourth season of Mad Men premieres on Sunday, but this week, as Obama urged the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, I found myself reflecting on season three—when Peggy demands a raise from Draper.

It may be 40-plus years since the Equal Pay Act prevented employers from discriminating based on sex, but when it comes to pay parity, we’re hardly any further along from the Mad Men days. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that while the pay gap has certainly narrowed since Peggy’s time, the chasm is still wide: in 2009, women earned only 80 percent of men’s weekly wages, and in some jurisdictions, it’s even worse. (In Louisiana, for example, women earn just 65 cents on the male dollar.)

All of this is yet another reason why we need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, now up before the Senate—which would close existing loopholes in the 1963 law. As the National Women’s Law Center has put it, the Act would give women “the same remedies for [pay discrimination] that are currently available” for those who suffer based on race or origin. But critics, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and Rep. John Boehner, from my home state of Ohio, I’m embarrassed to admit), have a different view: Boehner (ed: what a name, what a name…) contends the law wouldn’t actually empower women, but “empower trial lawyers whose junk lawsuits will clog up the courts.”

When Peggy demanded her raise, Don Draper lost his patience, denounced her as ungrateful and overly demanding, and ushered her out of the room. By invoking the specter of “junk lawsuits,” critics of the Paycheck Fairness Act hope to do the same to millions of women who deserve equal pay for equal work. Americans have certainly made great strides since Peggy and Don walked the hallowed halls of Sterling Cooper, but sex-based pay discrimination continues to haunt us. Women need legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act to ensure that they can challenge unfair and illegal practices in the workplace.

Jillian Weinberger is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. 

The State of the American Man in 2010. And Why Cosmopolitan Isn’t Doing Anybody Any Favors.

So askmen.com just released the results of its annual “Great Male” survey, and damn if their results aren’t fascinating.The best bits:

• When asked what defines a “real man” in 2010, a full fifty percent said “being a great father and husband who takes care of his family.”
• Similarly, the ultimate male status symbol? Having a family, which ranked higher than a high-profile career, a beautiful wife, a sports car, or a nice house.
• And ninety-four percent said that they either are in a relationship with a woman who makes more than them or that being in one wouldn’t bother them.

Given the “mancession,” what’s going on with boys in school, and the gains that women have made in the last couple of decades, we’re going through a critical moment of re-evaluation when it comes to men and women and the roles that we play. And these responses feel eerily like the responses that women might have given fifty years ago, no? Are men the new women? Is this shift going to end with a full role-reversal? Maybe.

But not so fast. Cosmopolitan magazine did a corresponding survey this year, and damn if it isn’t the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen. The Great Female Survey doesn’t ask nearly the same number of questions, and sticks to stale stereotypes and gag-worthy ideas about what’s important to women today. “Money Matters” is limited to a single question about who should pay for a date. Vomit.

The few interesting findings are relegated to a random miscellaneous other insights category. They are:

• 46% of women say that a beautiful house is the ultimate status symbol. A successful husband or boyfriend came in second place, with 29%.

• 44% of women define a “real woman” as someone who can “do it all.” Being a good mother and wife who takes care of her family came in second, with 33%.

Cosmo, this is interesting. How many women wish they had a C-cup, not so much. Ugh. If a site as vapid as askmen.com can make one of the leading magazines for women look dumb, we’ll hold off on declaring victory just yet. Where, oh where is the modern-day Sassy? We miss you! We need you!!!

-jesse

The Promise of Beauty: Women, Work, and Whether Beauty Really Pays

Remember Debrahlee Lorenzana, the chick who sued Citibank, claiming she was hired for being “too hot”? Well, she may be a total attention-obsessed moron, but she does highlight the double-bind of women at work: that we’re expected to be attractive at all times, but if we’re too attractive, we might just be punished for it—by men and women alike.

NEWSWEEK has a new poll on the role of appearance at work coming out next week, and while we’re not allowed to reveal the full results just yet, here’s a disturbing sneak preview:

* Sixty one percent of the corporate hiring managers we surveyed (60 percent of whom were men) said they believed a woman would benefit from showing off her figure at work.

Yet at the same time…

* Forty seven percent of those same managers said they believe some women are penalized for being too good-looking in the office.

Gross, right? Tune in to NEWSWEEK on Monday to see the full poll results—as well as various essays and photos, and even a Michael Jackson-inspired morphing face graphic to show our changing beauty ideal.

It’ll all be online at Newsweek.com/BEAUTY

-jessica

Today in We’ve Heard This Before… WaPo Says: Good News! But Hold the Applause

You know, we’re getting a little tired of holding the applause. The Washington Post today reports on yesterday’s census numbers and reading it is like an emotional roller-coaster! Seriously. It’s all “Good news! But wait not so fast cause bad news too. However, also, good news!” And so on. It’s exhausting.

Anyway, the good news!:

In the years preceding the recession, the ranks of minority and female entrepreneurs exploded, according to census statistics released Tuesday. By 2007, minorities owned one in five small U.S. businesses, and women owned almost one in three.

The bad:

But even as the statistics were released, they were eclipsed by the recession that started in December 2007, leading economists to wonder whether the downturn will reverse much of the progress.

The good!:

A study published last year by the Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute projected that small businesses run by women will create one-third of all new jobs.

The bad:

However, the challenges and inequities many minorities and women face in business remain formidable.

And the AWESOME:

More women are starting firms in nontraditional fields; they own about 11 percent of construction firms, for instance.

Melissa Schneider and Amber Peebles, both former Marines, have 12 employees at their Dumfries firm, the Athena Construction Group. Schneider started the company in 2003 to do home remodeling after sensing that she was bumping up against a glass ceiling at the international technology firm where she was a network operations manager … Neither regrets branching out in such a severe downturn.

Big ups to these ladies, for starters. We really wish we’d had a female contractor when we went through renovations, cause our contractor was a cocky little shit.

Anyway, despite all the caveats, these numbers are a big deal. Will they change the working world? We’ll see.

-Jesse

Even Female Law Partners Suffer Wage Disparities—to the Tune of $66,000 a Year

Jesse’s got a new Newsweek piece about wage disparity in the legal profession—even among the best lawyers at the most elite firms. A new study found those women, within the highest ranks of the most respected firms, make, on average, $66,000 each year less than men.

First of all: ouch, apparently we’re in the wrong field. But second: double ouch, that is totally appalling. As one employment attorney put it:

“The numbers are so stark that it really does call into question whether there is a systemic problem.”

We’d go with yes.

-jessica

Men Were the Main Victims of the Recession. Why the Recovery Will Be Female.

Our latest from NEWSWEEK, about the rise of women in emerging markets.

When historians write about the great recession of 2007–08, they may very well have a new name for it: the Mancession. It’s a term already being bandied about in the popular media as business writers chronicle the sad tales of the main victims of the recession: men.

If they are lucky, they’ll have wives who can take care of them.

Read the full story here.

How Lawsuits Against Novartis, WalMart Could Change How Women—Especially Mothers—Are Treated at Work

We’ve written about the Novartis case before, but we did a little more digging and found that the precedent-setting judgment—which could amount to company paying perhaps a billion dollars in fees—will have an even bigger impact than we thought:

The Novartis verdict is deemed precedent setting because it went far beyond simple pay discrimination. Employees alleged discrimination based on pregnancy and motherhood, too—claiming that women were fired when they were on maternity leave and mocked by superiors if they were visibly pregnant. It’s these motherhood-related allegations that may have tipped the scales to the tune of the multimillion-dollar penalty. “Juries tend to react quite strongly to discrimination against mothers,” says Joan Williams, a law professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law and the director of the Center for WorkLife Law. “After all, these mothers, assuming they’re doing all that they should at work, are then being penalized at work for trying to live up to the ideals of motherhood; $250 million in damages? You had a jury that appears to have been incensed.”

The irony is that Novartis has been publicly praised for its policies toward women and families. Last year, Working Mother commended the company’s “impressive” pretax child-care accounts and said its policies strive to make life easier for parents. As employment lawyer William Martucci put it, companies are now going to have to do a great deal of “soul searching” to ensure that internal realities match up to external perceptions.

Ultimately, Martucci says that the verdict “will serve as a bellwether for others to speak out.” More important, it raises the stakes. “The notoriety of this verdict is likely to arouse greater interest both in individuals who believe they’ve been victims of discrimination, and in the plaintiff’s bar,” he says. With a judgment this large, more lawyers will be willing to take on similar cases, especially if they know that they can successfully represent a whole class, not just one individual. “It really does mean there’ll be a lot more litigation. The impact will be dramatic.”

Yeah, we think if we were on a jury and heard that pregnant employees were told, “oops, too late,” we would be pretty pissed too.

Once again, big ups to the twelve very brave ladies who brought this about. Their efforts stand to do more for working women and families than they probably ever imagined.

The Richer Sex: Why Companies Need to Cater to Women

Colleague Rana Foroohar has a great piece in this week’s Women & Leadership issue of Newsweek, about female spending power.

By 2024, Foroohar writes, the average woman will outearn the average man (even with the wage gap!). But what’s shocking is that more companies haven’t tapped into that spending power.

The most obviously female-oriented sectors, like food, packaged goods, and apparel, do a decent job of appealing to their core customers. (Remember the Dove ads from a couple of years ago that celebrated all sizes of female bodies? They drove up soap sales 600 percent.) But there are still many industries—cars, travel, health care, and consumer electronics—where women are neglected in product development and marketing, even though they make the majority of purchasing decisions. “A lot of the people making these decisions at top firms are still older men,” says demographer Maddy Dychtwald, the author of Influence, a book on female economic power.

Better catch up, fellas. Women are going to control the majority of the world’s  income over the next decade—and as Rana puts it, they’ll be buying a lot more than $800 gold heels.

Boners, Tossed Salad, and the Perils of Being ‘Too Hot’ In the Workplace

The Village Voice has an excessively long profile this week, “Is This Woman Too Hot to Be a Banker?”, about a woman fired from Citibank last year because her bosses told her they “couldn’t concentrate” around her—she was simply too hot. The woman, Debbie Lorenzana, is—as the Voice so eloquently puts it, alongside a ginormous photo of her (not the one pictured here)—“is J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack meets Audrey Hepburn elegance—a head-turning beauty.” Um, OK.

Anyway: this woman got fired from her banking job last summer because of “work performance” (or so Citibank claimed). But she’s suing the company, alleging that her bosses told her that “as a result of the shape of her figure, [her] clothes were purportedly ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear.”

This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.

It’s not your typical sex-harassment lawsuit, for sure. But, as Lorenzana’s lawyer puts it, it all boils down to self-control. He told the Voice, “It’s like saying we can’t think anymore ‘cause our penises are standing up—and we cannot think about you except in a sexual manner—and we can’t look at you without wanting to have sexual intercourse with you. And it’s up to you, gorgeous woman, to lessen your appeal so that we can focus!”

We’d also make the point that even though it’s fact that unattractive people are discriminated against more frequently, being hot in the workplace—especially for women—can indeed be a double-edged sword: women lose by being either too attractive or not attractive enough. “It’s so tiring,” Lorenzana tells the Voice. “My entire life, I’ve been dealing with this. ‘Cause people say, ‘Oh, you got a job because you look that way.’ So you gotta work four times harder to prove you are capable. To prove you didn’t get this because of the way you look.” But then you get fired for it, apparently.

Which can leave managers, colleagues, and, apparently, even the Village Voice, confused. In between descriptions of the woman, a single mom, having to skip Christmas gifts, the Voice story is peppered with “More Images of Debbie Lorenzana here!” amid sexy photo after sexy photo (and one not-sexy photo, staged by her lawyer) of the woman. Perhaps our lovely former colleague put it best when he said:

she is HOT
and got … fired? … because of it
so … naturally, we’re outraged
but running pictures of her being all hot?
so confusing
so many messages all mixed up.
it’s like a tossed salad of outrage and boners!

And there you have it. Boners, tossed salad, and the perils of sexuality in the workplace.

Come On, Do Men Really Make Better Bosses?

Male bosses are competitive and strategic thinkers, writes Forbes, while women are team-builders and energizing. So who do employees prefer?

Men, apparently—at least according to fans of “Forbes Woman” on Facebook. They asked readers, “Would you rather work for a man or a woman?” and the majority replied, in the words of one reader,  “A man—any day of the week.”

Does that mean men actually make better bosses? Of course not. But it does mean something is wrong. As Forbes put it,

It’s not just anecdotal that male bosses are perceived to be better at their jobs. “It’s a general cultural phenomenon,” says Alice Eagly, Ph.D., a social psychology professor at Northwestern University.

In the most recent Gallup data, from 2006, 34% of men preferred a male boss while 10% preferred a female boss, while 40% of women preferred a male boss and 26% preferred a female boss. (The remaining respondents of both genders had no preference.)

So, what gives? There’s of course the idea that this preference is deeply ingrained in us—we trust men more, whether they be politicians or bosses or the men steering our commercial flights safely home. But we’ve also heard, from young, progressive, men and women like us, that female bosses are harder to deal with, screechier, less direct. (And female-boss on female-employee relationships can be even more complicated—especially in firms with few women at the top.)

But here’s the bottom line. Even in 2010, women, in the corporate world, must still ascribe male traits to succeed. They must be bold, direct, assertive—and thus, “bitchy.” As one woman, the head of the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard’s Kennedy School, tells Forbes, when she worked her way up the corporate ladder at Sony, “They thought I wasn’t assertive, and so they sent me for assertiveness training for women, called ‘guerrilla war tactics for women in business,’” including how to  lower and project your voice.

As long as women have to act like men at work, employees will prefer men to women. And as long as there are so few women in power at work, women will have to act like men. Do we sound like a broken record?

How to Ask For a Raise: Be Nice, But Not Too Nice. Be Self-Confident, But Not Pushy. And So On. Sigh.

We know how important advice like this is. Believe us, we do. But still, this piece, in the New York Times, just has us sighing and shaking our heads. It summarizes a study showing that women, duh, need to take a different tack when negotiating a raise—one that lets them ask for what they deserve without seeming, you know, pushy, or, god forbid, “unattractive.”

Yes, the advice itself is good. The problem is, it’s so damn complicated! It’s also dependent, unquestionably, on maintaining your role as a “good girl.” Some highlights:

• Avoid undermining your relationship with your boss.

• Explain why your request is appropriate, but in terms that also communicate that you care about maintaining good relationships at work.

• Instead of explaining why you deserve a raise directly, frame it in terms of why it makes sense for the organization or the person you’re trying to persuade.

• If you’re thinking about using an outside offer to help negotiate a raise, take heed. It’s effective …but studies have found that it tends to leave a more negative impression on women.

• Before you even start negotiating for a raise, or a promotion, consider how it might affect your life at home

The best advice, in our opinion? Talk to each other. Salary transparency, as many have argued, may be the best possible way to resolve the pay gap. So, dearests, please do as we’ve just done. Go to glassdoor.com and tell them what you make. For all our sakes.

People Saying “The Glass Ceiling Has Been Shattered” Is Beginning to Remind Us of When Bush Declared “Mission Accomplished”

Bloomberg has found that female heads of companies earn “substantially more” than their male counterparts—averaging over $14 million annual pay, and getting double-digit raises in 2009 while men took pay cuts.

“When you see numbers like this, one can truly say that the glass ceiling in corporate America has been shattered,” said Frank Glassner, CEO of San Francisco-based Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. “I don’t remember seeing women ever getting paid more than men.”

Hang on there, Frank. All this is well and good, but it comes with a HUGE caveat. For starters, only 16 of the companies in the S&P 500 are actually headed by women. And, as abcnews.com notes, it’s possible that these women are making so much because CEO salaries are transparent, and no board would underpay a female CEO “for fear of public backlash.”

Plus, as we all know too well by now:

In the broader workforce, women working at least 35 hours a week in the first quarter of 2010 received 79 percent of the wages earned by men, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Female heads of companies of all sizes made about 75 percent of what men did in a 2009 department survey of 1.1 million CEOs. About 24 percent were women.

Pay riches for women CEOs at big companies may be “an important indicator, but not a milestone because of what happens down the line” among average workers.

That Bloomberg would declare the glass ceiling shattered some seven paragraphs before introducing some critical caveats is irksome (but also totally not surprising), so we like abc’s takeaway better:

The hope is that the few who have made it to the top can start that change from the highest levels.

We hope so too.

Power of the Purse: A Note on Women’s Global ‘Influence’

We came across an interesting interview with the author of “Influence,” about how women will transform business in the 21st century. Some highlighted factoids to impress your friends:

• Over the last two decades, womens’ increased employment has contributed more to the growth of the global economy than either China or India, or even global technology. Says the author: “We’re at a tipping point: a critical mass of women have had an explosive rise in education and earning power which has opened the door for them to exert their influence.”
• Adding women to the corporate board of directors increases a company’s return on equity.
• Developing countries have found that when you educate young girls and women, you increase GDP. Those women also reinvest 90 percent of their income in family and community, compared to just 30-70 percent among men.
  
  
• Women start businesses at twice the national average

Harvard: Why Focusing on the Pay Gap Misses the Point

Great piece from Harvard Business Review blogs, brought to our attention by a reader (thank you!), about how we must shift the conversation about work and gender from the problem with the wage gap to solutions for corporations. Some highlights:

• Women represent one of the world’s biggest and most under-reported opportunities—a growth market twice as big as India and China combined.

• The business world has been so focused on stories like the rise of China that it has not been invited to see that, much closer to home, business could be reaping the benefits of the rise of women.
• We must stop asking “What’s wrong with women that they’re not making it to the top?” and start asking “What’s wrong with companies if they can’t retain and promote the majority of educated Americans?” (That’s us, womyn!)

(Oh, and maybe we shouldn’t be high-fiving yet. But we kinda liked this picture.)

The CEO Gender Gap: A Graphic

The good news is that in Europe, the executive European Commission has laid out plans to address the pay gap as part of its Europe 2020 strategy, a 10-year plan to boost economic growth and create jobs. Women in EU earn, on average, 82 percent what men do.