Intel Leads the Way: How Transparency Can Fix Pay and Promotion Gaps

Intel became the first company in the United States to voluntarily disclose pay, race, and gender data required by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Jeff Green and Hannah Recht, writing for the Los Angeles Times, explain that while the Obama administration required the EEOC to collect 2017 and 2018 data on gender, race, and pay disparities from nearly all US companies, the data can remain private unless a company chooses to make them public. Intel released their data voluntarily, hoping to encourage other companies to do the same. “It’s difficult to really fix what you aren’t being transparent about,” explained Barbara Whye, Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.

The Intel data for fifty-one thousand US employees reveals disparities that are not surprising for the technology industry but are disturbing nonetheless:

  • White and Asian men dominate the top levels of pay.
  • Among the fifty-two top executives, twenty-nine are white men, eleven are Asian men, eight are white women, one is a black woman, one is an Asian woman, and one is a black man.
  • The ratio of race and gender representation for top executives is similar across managerial, professional, and technical job titles.

Green and Recht note that “overrepresentation of white men in the highest-paying jobs contributes to the nation’s wage gap: American women earn 20% less than men do, and the gap is even wider for women of color.” The authors point out that simply raising the salaries of women and minorities is not enough. These underrepresented groups need to get promotions into the higher paying roles, and organizations need to ensure they are welcome and supported once they get promoted in order to keep them.

Wage and hiring transparency is important, but the EEOC says that it does not plan to collect this information in the future. The Obama law requiring the collection of this data by the EEOC was terminated by the Trump administration. This first round of collection was only completed because of a federal court order to do so. We must keep pressure on our government for wage transparency going forward if we want any chance of closing the wage gap.

 

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

#MeToo Wins for Low-Wage Workers

Low-wage workers, particularly those who are not fluent in English, are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment by supervisors. Jeremy C. Fox, of the Boston Globe, writes about four women who were harassed by the same supervisor at the Atlantic Capes Fisheries in Fall River, Massachusetts, where they worked as shellfish packers. More than five years after the harassment began, with the help of the nonprofit Boston-based workers’ rights organization Justice at Work and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the four workers were awarded a settlement by US District Court Judge Patti B. Saris. Fox explains that the women were subjected to sexual harassment that “left lasting emotional scars” and affected their marriages. Even though each woman complained to human resources about the harassment while it was occurring, managers did nothing to help them. Fox notes that this case is a sign that the #MeToo movement can extend beyond Hollywood and the executive boardroom into factories. A representative of the EEOC, which filed the federal lawsuit on behalf of the four women, said this case is significant because it shows employees that, “the agency will take them seriously if they come forward.” One of the four women interviewed by Fox explained that she feels a kinship to all the other women and men who “stood up to say, ‘me too.’” I feel proud of them and of myself. . . . I had the courage to lift my voice.” We should all say thank you to these brave women for being our role models.   Photo courtesy of https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/woman-showing-a-note-with-the-text-me-too-gm866106596-143920055?clarity=false (iStock standard license).]]>

Sexual Harassment: Women Who Work in Prisons

I can understand why women want jobs in federal prisons: the prisons are usually located in rural areas where decent-paying jobs are scarce, and they are often the main employer in the area. Caitlin Dickerson of the New York Times explains that few women worked in federal prisons until the 1970s when a series of legal decisions in a changing social environment forced the Bureau of Prisons to allow equal access to jobs. While the prison population is 93 percent male, and male employees vastly outnumber female employees, ten thousand women now make up a third of the bureau’s workforce, holding jobs ranging from secretary to regional director. The problem for women working in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system is that they have never been fully accepted as equals by their male colleagues and supervisors. Long before #MeToo, in 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a strongly worded report saying that sexual harassment claims were routinely mishandled and retaliation was unusually high for women employed by the Bureau of Prisons. In 2017, the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation and found gross mismanagement of sexual harassment claims and rewards and promotions for staff accused of sexual harassment against female colleagues. While lawsuits have been filed and settled against the bureau, the culture and practices have not changed, and the EEOC has no power to force these changes. Some examples of the abusive workplace environment that women working in prisons must endure include the following:

  • Inmates grope, threaten, and expose themselves.
  • Male colleagues undermine the authority of female officers by encouraging male inmates to harass them.
  • Some male colleagues join in the harassment themselves.
  • While women who file harassment claims face retaliation, the careers of many harassers and those who protect them flourish.
  • In one instance, a female case manager was raped by an inmate, then she was criminally charged with raping him when she complained.
  • High ranking officers accused of sexual harassment, and their supervisors who protect them, are often transferred to other prisons with promotions while the women who were abused by them are shunned and blackballed from promotion opportunities.
These working conditions for female employees in federal prisons are outrageous. Clearly there is no motivation or will in the leadership of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to change this culture. Perhaps the wave of women newly elected to Congress will decide to put focus and pressure on the bureau to finally change the culture and treat women fairly and respectfully. Let’s all raise this issue with our new congresswomen and see if something can be done to change this situation.   Photo courtesy of VisualHunt (CC0 1.0)]]>

Trouble for Women in “Manly” Jobs: Sexual Harassment and Discrimination

Women have always wanted access to blue-collar jobs but have not always been able to get it. As Susan Chira, writing for the New York Times, notes, blue-collar jobs generally pay higher wages and have been a pathway to the middle class. Women have wanted those higher-paying jobs for the same reasons that men want them—they have families to support, often as single parents. Chira reminds us that women only got access to higher-paying jobs after 1964, when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forced open certain industries previously closed to women, including work in factories, shipyards, mines, and construction sites. Unfortunately, the sexual harassment that women encountered when they entered these fields still endures today. In a different article, Chira reports that sexual harassment remains endemic in many blue-collar professions because it was woven into the manufacturing sector as it evolved during the industrial revolution. For example, as women came from farms into the textile mills, “men reserved the highest-status, highest-paying jobs” for themselves. Chira explains that sexual harassment reflects male hostility to women who try to take “men’s jobs” because of this original sense of entitlement. Because society continues to see some jobs as for men only, many blue-collar professions remain male dominated, and studies show that “sexual harassment is more regular and severe in traditionally male occupations.” The sexual harassment that women still endure remains dangerous. For example:

  • A woman on a repair crew was deliberately stranded on top of a two-hundred-foot wind turbine by her male coworkers after enduring months of lewd taunts.
  • Men dropped tools on female coworkers or deliberately turned on electrical power when women began working on power lines.
  • One gold miner, Hanna Hurst, described her harassment at work as rougher than any she endured serving in the military in Iraq.
  • Women in construction are blacklisted and become unemployable if they report sexual harassment.
In May, 2018, Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times reported that two high-ranking women in the northern Virginia Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department filed federal civil rights charges. When they opposed a long pattern of sexual discrimination and harassment in the department, one was denied jobs and a promotion and the other was asked to leave the department. Tavernise reports that “women have sued [this] department six times for sex discrimination since 2005, and in most of those cases either settled or won.” But nothing changed because of a lack of support for change from senior leadership, so the two senior women decided to take their case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at the federal level, so “they can’t ignore us anymore.” Chira writes that, not surprisingly, an analysis of employment from 2000 to 2016 shows female representation in blue-collar industries has shrunk by as much as 10 percent. Tavernise reports that the percentage of female firefighters has dropped from 5.3 percent in 2007 to 3.5 percent in 2017. Tavernise quotes Marc Bendick, an economic researcher who conducted a national study of female firefighters, as saying, “It wasn’t that the women couldn’t do the jobs, or didn’t want the jobs. It was what the departments were doing to them” that pushed them out of the profession. What will finally bring change? Chira cites several scholars who argue that only a fundamental reconstruction of organizations to be less hierarchical and a reexamination of pay scales for men’s and women’s work will result in lasting change. Some small successes among firefighters in Kansas City, Missouri, and female miners in Wyoming occurred when the jobs were redefined away from the traditional hyperbolic masculine image to a more collaborative one, giving hope that we will figure this out one day, if the will is there to do so.   Photo courtesy of Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>