This long NYT piece on sexual harassment, discrimination, and rape at Signet Jewelers was especially scary. It read like the upper management treated the entire company as a pipeline for asymmetric sex. (And of course it checks out that one single company owns most of the big mall-chain jewelers...)
Haven't read all the links yet but I'm not surprised. I've mentioned that my wife Cassandane worked for a Congressman. I'm not sure I've mentioned that that's in the past tense, because of lot of issues and a suspected glass ceiling is part of it. (We're fine. She starts a new job at the end of this month and it's better than the last one in pretty much every respect.) No sexual harassment of her, unless a glass ceiling itself counts, but getting passed over for promotions for less and less understandable reasons and ultimately getting pushed out when male colleagues were demonstrably treated differently. She's talking with a lawyer who thinks she has a case. I hesitate to say more for obvious reasons, but if the story develops, I'll provide updates somehow.
I took a Law and Econ class way back in law school, that turned out not to be classic law and econ (which I was interested in as problematic) but instead various mathy topics the professor was interested in -- a fair amount of game theory and so on. And the prof had written a paper he taught us on a mathematical model of the effects of discrimination. I'm going to get it the details wrong, but the assumptions were something like employment is a five-level pyramid, promotion decisions are made at each level, a fairly small percentage of decisionmakers are actively racist, and see what percentage of minorities make it to the top of the pyramid. And you didn't need a large percentage of racist decisionmakers at all to create a huge skew in the outcomes at the top of the pyramid, all you need is a few people screwing over the disfavored class, and everyone else making fair decisions on the basis of all the decisions that have been made about a candidate in the past.
And of course in the real world, employment isn't a five-decision pyramid, your employment history is the sum of thousands of decisions that have been made about you.
If you worked for Gary Gygax, you employment decisions might have used a five-sided die.
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Been mentioned before, but Better Things is really good.
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thousands of decisions
Open to persuasion, but I think this wrong. Actually, there are are only a handful of decisions in any person's career, most of them not much better determined than a die toss.
Thousands might be an overstatement, but things do accumulate. One of the links in the OP was to a woman talking about working at a law firm, and having the experience of having to scramble to get work while the men seemed to be consistently busy on interesting, responsible assignments. And each assignment decision is no big thing, but after a couple of years of biased assignment-handing-out, the men are genuinely more experienced and competent than the women. That one was very, very familiar from my law-firm experience: I was shockingly underexperienced for my seniority when I flipped over to government, and had a tense year or two claiming to be perfectly comfortable doing things I'd never done before but should have been doing for years already.
They really shouldn't be asking lawyers to do vasectomies regardless.
The full orchidectomy comes more naturally, but the patients tend to be upset if you get the two procedures confused.
7: Fair. I wonder how representative your experience is over the whole economy? In flow-based rather than project-based work. (Assuming flow is the norm.)
Like Heebie, keeping my priorities away from work meant that it's hard to complain about lack of advancement -- though there were plenty of opportunities for "lack of fit" to rear their heads, even among basically all white male offices. (Maybe that discrimination matters more when the big differences of race and sex aren't on the table.)
I liked the blogger and her reflections on the Corporette threads; it's been a long time since I tried to plan 5 years out. My current position is enviable, so most of my plans are about keeping what I've secured and developing flourishes and expertise. But that's largely because without my official position changing, over the last 7 years I've gone from a "remote from the office contractor only barely connected to my company" to developing the template for remote work and leading my peers. I've taken on enough ambitious work that I'm on the various managers' shortlists when assembling project teams, and am now getting tapped to train, both formally and informally for new people on our team.
Unfortunately, I've seen some of my peers have been less embraced -- the woman who originally lead our team left when her complaints went unheard and no title manifested. Three months later, they'd created the position she'd been denied and recruited to fill it. Or, more recently, a woman on my team gave up -- she'd been clear on hiring that she was interested in ~30 hour per week part time work, to juggle young kid obligations -- and found her assignments sharply limited in scope and ambition.
Some of it is like the Kyle Korver article we recently discussed about racism; I can understand the conflicts between my woman peers and management, and create stories to explain how things worked out... but if it keeps happening, it's probably not just a series of interpersonal conflicts.
I can understand the conflicts between my woman peers and management, and create stories to explain how things worked out
This, always. I complain about law firms, but I do always feel strange about bringing up my experiences with them because I am a far from ideal employee. I just sort of suspect that the dudes who fit in better were also less than ideal in their own ways.
14.last is true based on my experience.
And of course in the real world, employment isn't a five-decision pyramid, your employment history is the sum of thousands of decisions that have been made about you.
This reminds me of something else about Cassandane's job hunt. Her old salary was A. Her initial offer at the next job was 86 percent of A. This is based on a strict salary schedule with no room for negotiation or discretion, but explicitly has room for increases based on prior salary. She produced her last pay statements and got hired at 103 percent of A with little fanfare. We'll never know how much would she be making now, or in 5 years, if there hadn't been a glass ceiling at her old office.
My 5-year plan... thinking back 5 years before today, I'm pretty much on track. I've become a parent, which was a possibility but not a definite goal 5 years ago, and is going about as well as can be expected for better or for worse. I'm at a different company, doing a broadly similar job. My belief that I'm not management material has gone from 60 percent to 80 percent. It's a little more interesting to think about how things went starting from when I was 25, which is the age of that Invincible Summer blogger in 2013, or 20 or just out of college, just because.
I could take the whole thread listing ways in which I am less than ideal. But I won't because I'm a feminist.
My belief that I'm not management material
We don't know you.
It's a little more interesting to think about how things went starting from when I was 25, which is the age of that Invincible Summer blogger in 2013, or 20 or just out of college, just because.
Yeah, I was struck by this, too. My five year plans from 2009, 2014, 2019, and looking out to 2024, are really dull and repetitive.
All about grain and iron and coal.
It's about the 10th anniversary of my giving notice that I was leaving my Biglaw partnership, and the 41st anniversary of dropping out of Cal and hitchhiking to Montana. I'm not that big on following plans. Instead, it's basically one partially thought-out decision after another. That it seems to have more or less worked out is purely a matter of privilege and luck.
With a time machine, I'd make some better choices. But probably just get hit by a bus somewhere along the line.
Early in my law career, I was really helped by being a straight while man, and also by (a) starting law school at 30 and (b) getting gray hairs pretty early in life.
I once got dinged in an associate review for not moving more aggressively to take over the portfolio of a colleague and friend while she was on maternity leave. Oh I worked on her cases, but kept in touch with her, acting more like a caretaker than an owner. I just plain stopped reading my associate evaluations after that, thinking that it was just going to make me mad, that I knew better than they did how my year had actually gone, and that if there were going to fire me, they'd probably tell me.
Re, 19:
1. I'm not personally inclined to management in general. At my previous job it seemed like it would have been a natural progression, but experiences there made me think I probably wouldn't like it, and experiences here have solidified that. At my current one there's just so much change and churn in general that I can't help wondering about what comes next. Nice place overall but after less than three years here I've outlasted two peers and one manager and seen dozens of co-workers come and go. I have no idea what is causing this.
2. Heh. You kid about the name, but if Atossa gets to the right history class before she develops teenage disdain for her parents, we're going to have a lot of fun with our names. There is a similarity. It wasn't planned but it's obvious in hindsight.
I once got dinged in an associate review for not moving more aggressively to take over the portfolio of a colleague and friend while she was on maternity leave.
Yep, I still hate law firms.
I once got dinged in an associate review for not moving more aggressively to take over the portfolio of a colleague and friend while she was on maternity leave.
omfg.
My life plan from early adulthood until probably two years ago, and I am really not exaggerating, has been:
- do not get fired
- do not commit suicide before exhausting every other option
- write several masterpieces
- save the world
- learn everything
- avoid blocking traffic
My current life plan is:
a) don't ruin your daughter's life
b) write polished prose (not comments) of any length that has a beginning, middle, and end, as often as humanly possible
c) do everything possible to jeopardize b), often with the excuse of a)
d) avoid blocking traffic
For Sale: Baby shoes, well-worn but outgrown. If picking up in person, please don't double park in front of my house.
I gave up trying to write anything longer than a blog comment about five years ago.
I don't know if it's relevant, but: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/03/larry-nassar-gymnastics-film-documentary-hbo
I feel like we straight men (no racial qualifier there, b/c well *all* guilty) haven't a goddamn clue, and the only thing we can do, is step back and hope that women can do a better job than we have. Hence SPW/Cop Harris/Franken-shiv-er Gillibrand/etc. Men need to step back.
But it's worse than that, even. Worse than that. B/c I have a (former, b/c fricken' GrOPer for all that) friend in NC, and she's experienced *enormous* gender-based discrimination in her career. She's still done well, b/c y'know, she's a fucking fighter. And her conclusion from this is that she shouldn't preferentially nurture and promote other women. [GAH! GAH!] B/c reasons. It kills me. I mean ... just .... killin' me. She's like a *poster child* for "Kick ass and you'll do OK", and I just ... "what about all the women who are just average or a little better?"
And the worst is that she's a GrOPer: She'd vote for Kasich in a heartbeat, and can parrot the Lee Atwater line without reflecting on it.
I'm very willing to be a comfortably-paid mediocrity so that capable, ambitious women can get ahead. Because I'm a feminist.
I wonder how representative your experience is over the whole economy? In flow-based rather than project-based work. (Assuming flow is the norm.)
I think this is similar in programming, which may be the kind of thing you're thinking about? Programming jobs are arguably project based, but they're not project based the same way law firms are project based.
Just for example, at my most recent job, less than a year in, I'm told that I'm a shoe-in for the next promo, which is a promotion to a level that's generally considered to be hard to get to and my manager thinks I can probably hit the next level up not too long after. Compensation is exponential in level at most major tech companies (for companies on the Google or FB leveling scale, roughly 2x every two levels), so this is significant.
Getting promoted was pretty much impossible at my last job because I kept getting work that was considered unimportant that I couldn't drop because it wasn't actually unimportant. Without some kind of nepotism, you can't get promoted for things people think aren't important, so it was hopeless. The big difference on my current team is that I don't have an infinitely long backlog of tasks no one will appreciate and I can go find work that's both important and considered important. Every time I do one of these, people are happy and it makes it easier to get permission to do more of this kind of work -- a lot of important work needs sign-offs from Very Important People because it impacts a lot of teams. If you have a track record, people will sign off based on your reputation. If you don't have a track record, it's hard to get one. I was able to get a track record because my manager has a good reputation and went to bat for me in a way that my previous manager would never do. I'm not going to speculate on the reasons for that, but it's easy to imagine a path by which some small bias would cause significant effects via a mechanism like the one in LB's model.
In terms of my work, the quality of work I'm doing isn't any different at the two jobs, I just have a manager who was willing to bet that I'd do ok at one or two things before I built up a reputation at the company.
Maybe this doesn't apply if you're stocking shelves, but I've had a white collar job in two industries in my career and it's been the same in both industries. Once you're successful, more success comes very easily and initial success is made much easier if someone will go to bat for you. My success in previous jobs before the last also opened up jobs on teams where success is more likely to be easy, so this kind of thing follows you around even after you change companies.
Should I mansplain exponents? Maybe later.
In Massachusetts employers are no longer allowed to ask about salary history, so maybe we'll see some improvement in the pay gap, at least at the middle level.
We probably lost the fruit basket six years ago.
Once you're successful, more success comes very easily and initial success is made much easier if someone will go to bat for you.
That does make a lot of sense, regardless of industry.
Some vignettes from current position:
I get hired in my current department to bring new technical capabilities online. It's a big job. There is one coworker at the same level who has complementary skills but can't do what I do. Everyone assumes I'm his assistant.
We hire a "lab manager" who is not my supervisor. He has been on site a week. Equipment breaks. I am explaining what's broken and how I will fix it, and get asked repeatedly whether I need to go get the lab manager for help (not by my boss).
We hire a "resource manager" who is, again, not my supervisor. I hand off a few nontechnical "projects" (ie commence nagging another department to do something I need). I follow up with the other department and they call him my "boss" and tell me they're working on it with him.
My coworker and I are told we need to provide project reports as we complete projects. I learn after 6 months that he just hasn't done any. I ask my boss whether these reports are necessary. He says yes. I explain that perhaps they aren't, because only one of us does them. He tells me coworker is "bad at paperwork." I say, "Me, too. So, can I stop now?" It's been two years. I write reports for each project. He does not. Coworker just took on one of my projects. (I had six open projects; he had zero. He told me he was too busy when I asked for help. I turned to our boss, who reassigned it.) The project lead came to me and asked if I'd be handling the report. Um, no? Talk to our boss? The project closed with no report. Because something is wrong with me, I checked in with our boss whether he needed me to write it up, because I am dumb. He did. I did.
We were interviewing associates yesterday. Coworker asked detailed questions about handling waste disposal. I jokingly asked whether he'd ever done it. He said once. He's been at the company nine years. I did it monthly before we created associate positions.
I had to smile and keep working with a guy who told me "Equioment X is like a woman. All these young guys who've just worked on one, they think they know how it works, what it needs. What they don't understand is that every one is a little different, so to keep them happy, you have to learn each one." And that I reminded him of his daughter. That seemed sweet until I learned she's a fitness model and he carries photos of her in competitions.
How fucking exhausted am I? It's a really good thing I like the day to day of this job. And that my coworker is very nice and pleasant.
38. AUUUUGH !
Just reading that is so exhausting.
#NotAllMen. Mostly do only like half of those things.
Being in the same industry, I'm sorry to hear 38. I know there are places that are better or worse but I'll admit that I'm not in a position to really known if similar things are going on at places I know- my impression is they're above some of the worst things you describe but it's possible they're not.
42: I suspect as the field gets more technical, the sexism gets worse.
The thing is, only the middle one about reports strikes me as out of the ordinary/signal above baseline. This is worse than the post-doc in DC. Not worse than grad school. Suspect it's better in Big Pharma, but probably not much. I'm leaving out so much that is truly identifying. Reading the Salk Institute article only makes it register a bit more than usual. The thing is, I'm tough as nails. This doesn't get in my head. It does, however, waste my time and energy. I walked away from academia for a reason. I know I've got to be twice as good as a dude in my position. The killer is that no one seems to recognize the uphill battle it is to be me.
38-41; Thanks. It's nice to have recognition that this sucks. It's worth it to me, but the personal cost is pretty high, if I'm honest with myself.
In summary, I had avoided reading the Salk article -- too real. I can imagine measuring lab space with a tape measure. I can imagine going to the powers that be with metrics. I can't imagine anything changing. I was thinking this morning about drafting a paper that would be critical for best safety handling practices and I was trying to imagine who would be the senior author. I could think of two senior male colleagues. Then I realized I could submit as a single author. But then, what journal would accept an "unknown" clearly female author?
43: Submit using initials instead of full first name?
If you write an academic article under a pseudonym, it really doesn't help your professional advancement and that professional advancement is one of the main reasons people do that work even when they aren't directly paid for it.
Best case scenario is it works like "Remington Steele" before Remington Steele showed up.
It worked out pretty well for Joanne Rowling.
I believe Ursula K. LeGuin's only story published in "Playboy", in 1969, was by "U. K. LeGuin." Not because she wanted it that way, of course. This was after being a widely regarded, published author for over 7 years, and the year after "A Wizard of Earthsea." Six years later, "Playboy" hired Alice K. Turner as their fiction editor, and she held the job for 20 years.
I am not at all sure what the moral of that story is, if any.
We should have a UKL reading group. By which I mean, the rest of you should read books and write erudite OPs that I can waffle about vaguely in comments.
43: That's so appalling (though not at all surprising). I teach a number of bright freshmen women majoring in STEM fields every year, and I just don't know what to tell them.
43: holy shit. Fuck all of that. I'm sorry you have to put up with so much bullshit.
51: I ran into "what do I tell them?" A little while ago. I had a new associate who was great. We had a big preventive maintenance scheduled on some equipment, and I asked her to shadow the engineer. I'd worked with him for years, respected him. He's a big strong guy, who could be intimidating, but was generally easygoing and a good teacher. I left her to learn while I did other work. He spent two days, every time I left the room, harassing her. Apparently, he basically propositioned and intimidated her. She complained, not to me, because she thought he and I were friends and I would be mad at her (?!). It ended with my escorting the engineer offsite before maintenance was fully complete, and my boss calling his company, and demanding a replacement immediately. I had a meeting with my boss and her boss where her boss (who seems nice but is pretty young) told me he totally got the struggles of women in science because his wife has a hobby in a male-dominated sport, and guys can be awful to her. I managed to keep my mouth shut. Well, not exactly, but I did explain that one's hobby and one's livelihood might carry different weight.
So, then, I was left with this fresh-out-of-college associate, who apparently had never run into this before (yay!) who was just traumatized. I had no idea what to say. Sorry, kid, despite #MeToo, it still sucks? It's better than it was but some folks haven't read their memo? Eventually, as you age and aren't as cute anymore, the same people will stop trying to get into your pants and ignore you or think you're a bitch? I was grasping for something positive to be able to say, and "it's getting better," while true, was sadly inadequate as consolation.
The associate ended up leaving after six months and two less serious but still definitely offputting encounters with folks within the company. She left for a solid reason, to work in the family business, but I have to imagine all that made it an easier decision.
I should probably stop telling stories; it's really unbelievable how many I have at this point.
Sorry to hear all of it, yd.
So, is the same engineer expected back, now that cute young associate is gone?
54.2: Never. He has a permanent site ban, courtesy of my boss. A shame one of their best engineers (my former favorite, whom I used to request specifically) turned out to be a legal liability and a shitty human being. He's still employed, but I hear his dispatches have changed somewhat (internal vs third party/external).
FFS what the hell is wrong with people that they see their job as an opportunity to try to get random people to have sex with them.
If it were really random, it would probably be less of a problem.
Well, you know, random in the sense of "I'm visiting this company for three days on business so I'll harass someone I've never met before to have sex with me then I'll do it again at another company next week."
I was thinking like Javier Bardem in a bowl haircut, but with a penis and not a captive-bolt gun.
Funny you should say that.
58: It's deeply confusing. He mentioned he is on Tindr ("Why are all the women here holding fish in their profile pics?") - why do this at what is functionally a client site with an ongoing business relationship? Leave at 5 and fuck all the ladies you can convince, fella. Oh right, because it's not actually about that. It's about making a cute 23 year old who is basically trapped with you feel deeply uncomfortable.
55 first: Good.
55 last: I wonder how long that goes. Whoever is in charge of the HR function over there has got to be looking for a way to ease him out.
61 last: Doesn't that require that he care, at some level, about her as a human being? That's overstated: that he recognize her as a human being with thoughts, feelings, etc? Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that she was cute, present, and maybe would respond to a dominant style?
I just read Kate Mann's Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, and she makes the point that expecting random women to care for you and service your ego does require them to be human. Someone doing that sort of thing wants a person to obediently cater to his sexual and emotional 'needs', not a nonhuman object. He just wants her to do what she's told.
I can agree with that. A human. She can even have feelings, but if they aren't about how she's going to do what he tells her, he's not interested in them. Just to grossly generalize with no real information whatsoever.
And the fish? That's a Godfather reference: hit on one of the women at this workplace, and your career will sleep with the fishes.
Right. You can't degrade a Roomba, or at least not in nearly a comparable way.
50: Got several of them written up already:
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/tag/ursula-k-le-guin/