November 1, 2021

Gender Bias Adds Up

       

In 2021, hiring and pay discrimination based on gender are at least on people’s radars, not to mention illegal. But what if the discrimination is more subtle and quotidian? The everyday kind of discrimination that doesn’t add up to a lawsuit can be just as damaging to women’s careers as any landmark hiring settlement, but is ignored by the law and marginalized by HR. This is Jessica Nordell’s argument, which she lays out in a recent New York Times op-ed describing the research for her recent book The End of Bias.

Nordell contends that, although much of the discrimination women face in the workplace would never lead to formal complaints on their own, the effects are the same, marginalization, being frozen out of decision-making, and being passed over for promotions.

In the op-ed, Nordell describes a model she and several computer scientists developed to simulate what would happen to cohorts of workers over a 10-year period based on a set of rules that incorporate the kind of gender bias discussed in the research literature Nordell reviewed. Her findings, while not surprising, are certainly dismaying, with women less likely to make it to the highest level in her workplace simulation and more likely to spend more time getting there than male counterparts.

Unfortunately, what is to be done is not entirely clear. Generally, Nordell says that leaders need to be fully committed to overhauling practices and culture, but the specific interventions, unlike in her simulation where they imposed quotas which had some effect on bias, are still so dependent on the profession, social pressures beyond the workplace and who is actually involved in the decision-making process.

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Women's Employment Still Reeling from Pandemic’s Effects

January 12, 2021
Gender Discrimination
According to the latest analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic and lockdowns continue to have an outsize effect on women’s employment in the U.S. with fewer than half (44.6%) of the jobs women lost between February and December returning. Another way of looking at it is that roughly 12 million jobs simply disappeared. Or, as Representative Katie Porter tweeted, “Women. Accounted. For. All. The. Losses.”

Paid Maternity Leave Finds an Unlikely Champion, But Is That Enough?

January 8, 2021
Pregnancy Discrimination
Paid Family Leave
On the heels of some important wins for paid leave in the 2020 election, paid maternity leave has found a new supporter. One who you might not have expected: conservative co-host of The View Megan McCain. The challenge is, as Monica Hesse notes, “how we can speed up this process so that it doesn’t require every leave-denier to personally birth a child before they also get on board.”

Motivational Speaker Tony Robbins Sued over Covid-related Discrimination

December 29, 2020
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A new lawsuit, filed by an employee of the motivational speaker Tony Robbins, alleges that Robins’s company, Robbins Research International, along with Robbins and his wife Bonnie, discriminated against the employee who requested reasonable accommodations be met for her recovery from coronavirus.

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