685: Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Strategy Skills classics)

0:27Welcome to The Super Bowl.

0:30June Carbone: Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

0:44June Carbone: Hello, this is Krista Parova. Welcome to another episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used and well-managed strategy studies. It is a free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are currently updating your resume, if you're looking for another position, you will benefit from downloading McKinsey and BCG winning resume. Also free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. And today we have a very special episode.

1:21June Carbone: We have not one, but three guests, three authors of a book, Fair Shake. We have with us Naomi Khan, who is a distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. We also have June Carbon, who is the Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. And we have Nancy Levitt, who is Associate Dean for Faculty and holds a Curator's Professorship at the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law. So I'm looking forward to this. Welcome, everyone. Thank you. We're delighted to be here. Yes. So let's start from how did you even decided to write this book?

2:03June Carbone: Because you're all located in different parts of the country. How did you get together and decided we need to address this very important topic? And I guess let's also establish what the topic is for the context.

2:15Naomi Cahn: We've been working together for many years. June and Naomi have written several books together, Red Families vs. Blue Families and Marriage Markets, and the three of us have written law review articles together. So we talk quite a bit about the areas in which we teach, which are family law, employment discrimination law, gender theory. And in several of those discussions, we began to discuss the gender-based wage gap. And we were shocked to realize that in an era of supposed gender equality, women were losing ground in the workplace. And when we started our research more than six years ago, the overall figure showed that women were gaining, although slowly, on men and the wage gap was narrowing.

3:11Naomi Cahn: While this seemed like promising news, after the mid-1990s, the only reason women appeared to be gaining ground on men was almost entirely due to the fact that wages for blue-collar men were falling dramatically during that period. Then when we looked at the numbers for college graduates, we found that the gender gap in wages was increasing. And in 2019, a Goldman Sachs study showed that if present trends continued, women wouldn't catch up with men in terms of wages for another hundred years or so. we also noted that the advancement of women college graduates stalled just as CEO salaries skyrocketed and we discovered the two phenomena are linked and what we call the winner-take-all era which June or Naomi can pick up and run with the winner-take-all era starts with the increases in CEO compensation.

4:15Naomi Cahn: 1950s, 1960s, the ratio of CEO to average worker pay was about 20 to one. Today, it's a mind-blowing 399 to one.

4:27June Carbone: And then I also was taken aback when I was reading the book. So you mentioned the study called NSAC study, which makes sense. But then you wrote that in writing this book, you discovered that if current trends continue, women will never catch up. And And in fact, the gender wage gap increased between 2019 and 2022.

4:48Nancy Levit: Yes. So I'm just going to pick up on Nancy's comment on the winner-take-all economy. So there were two things that we had started before we wrote the book. One was Naomi and I did a book called Marriage Markets, How Inequality is Remaking the American Family. one of the things we discovered is the only group in American society whose marriage rates have increased are the top 10 % of women by income. And when we looked at why the ratio, take people under the age of 35, the ratio of men who make more than$100 ,000 a year to women, it's like two to one. For Blacks and Latinos, that's not true. But for whites and Asians, it is, And that's increased.

5:36Nancy Levit: And so we started to wonder what's going on and found out this winner take all idea. When you look, we found out in addition to Nancy's, what Nancy mentioned, which is that, you know, that CEO salaries skyrocketed. 57 % of all increases in income between the mid 80s and the financial crisis went to finance. When you look at tech, what we found is, oh, men and women's increase in computer science rose and fell together until the mid 80s. When you look at the boom in the 90s, it was almost impossible to get into computer science at Berkeley. And the men started to edge out the women. And we saw a pattern, boom-bust cycle.

6:32Nancy Levit: men flooded in during the booms and women disproportionately left during the downturns but what you had was a very different economy and so this summarized or really what our book is trying to do is to link the fate of women why women are losing ground to the creation of an economy that creates only a relative few at the top and we call that winner take all in this sense. When you look at companies, Nancy and I wrote a piece called Death of the Firm. What did we mean by that? We meant what's the importance of a company? And I like to explain it by looking at the difference between Mitt Romney and George Romney.

7:17Nancy Levit: George Romney was the dad. He was governor of Michigan. He ran for president, touting his success as a businessman. Mitt Romney, the son, governor of Massachusetts, ran for president touting his success as a businessman in 2012. For George Romney, success meant the health of American motors. The bragging rights in that era where my company is bigger than your company. My company is sounder than your company. My company is Bell Labs. It's more innovative than your company. For Mitt Romney in 2012, the bragging rights were, I have$200 million in the Cayman Islands, with the Wall Street Journal editorial pages saying, and if you were really a good businessman, Mitt, you'd have more than$200 million in the Cayman Islands.

8:08That's the point.

8:10Nancy Levit: What we describe as winner take all is a new system, a system that allocates, that takes institutions and says, who cares about the institution? The only reason Bain Capital exists is as an extraction device to make money for its owners. If it doesn't exist in 10 years, I don't think anyone, including Mitt Romney, would care. Um, and so institutions become tools to extract money for the people who call the shots and everybody else is left worse off. That's what we mean by winner take all. And we think women are the canaries in the coal mine when they don't do well in a company. Something wrong is happening.

8:56June Carbone: Just to add to that, it's not just, as June said, it's when women are not doing well, that there's something wrong, but it's of course not just women. If there's something wrong, it affects everybody in the company. And so this idea that women are the canaries in the coal mine, if there is gas in the coal mine, it affects everybody. And the point is to get out as quickly as you can because it affects everybody there. And then to go back to the question that you were asking about the gender wage gap, one of the things, just to echo Nancy, that we found was that women at the top, women with college degrees or advanced degrees, were farther behind in this new economy.

9:48June Carbone: The gender wage gap, women are paid less than men at every education level, but that gender gap increases at the higher education levels. And so just in our own profession, just in the law, the impact of the winner-take-all economy has been that in 2005, 8 % of the highest paid earners at law firms were women. Instead of increasing, today it's gone down. So it's only 2 % of the top earners at law firms are women. And in this era of increasing gender equality, allegedly, that's what we think the winner-take-all economy explains, why this is happening.

10:39Nancy Levit: And I would add to that, the reason women will never catch up is women have been gaining because of the loss in wages in blue-collar men. In relative terms, blue-collar white men have been the biggest losers in this economy. But those losses have pretty much come to an end. They're not a whole lot. This is the decline in high-paid manufacturing jobs and the switch and the demise of unionization in the private sector. And those gains are pretty much at an end. The entire bottom of the economy, male and female, is being squeezed. You're not going to see changes in the gender gap in wages, which is relatively small in the bottom half of the economy.

11:23It's the top half of the economy, which is growing and at current rates will increase the

11:30Nancy Levit: gender gap, not diminish it.

11:32June Carbone: At this point, I think it is very important for us to address why male leaders listening right now should really pay attention to this and should see it as something that they need to have on their agenda in terms of how do we do things differently? One way to respond to that is to say that in 2020, the stock exchange NASDAQ reported findings that having more women on boards correlates with less securities fraud, fewer accounting errors requiring correction and greater general transparency. So the health of a company is correlated with having more women on boards. And there's another study that banks that have more women on their boards commit less fraud.

12:30June Carbone: So if you care about a workplace in which there is less fraud and more transparency, as well as other studies have shown that having more women on boards or having more women in leadership means better bottom lines. I mean, it's win-win all the way around to care about what's happening to women in companies.

12:57Naomi Cahn: In addition to the great points that Naomi made, what we describe as winner-take-all workplaces are a particular kind of workplace that, as she said, affect both men and women. The way the WTA economy works, the way that corporations become, as June said, these extraction devices for the top leaders, is that successful CEOs began to reward their top managers, their top employees with bonuses and stock options that could make those who succeeded very wealthy. Those bonuses have typically been tied to short-term reductionist metrics such as sales or earnings or the production of Teslas. That was the beginning of the profound change in corporate culture.

13:57Naomi Cahn: Workplaces where there are increased rewards for people at the top are the same workplaces that pit employees against each other. One example we cite in the book is the CEO, Elon Musk. He is brilliant, driven. He is unforgiving. He boasts of working 120-hour weeks. There was a report, it might have been in a Wired magazine article, in which he fired a young engineer on the spot simply because he asked the wrong question. And the article's title on this Tesla plant was entitled Dr. Elon and Mr. Musk inside Tesla's production hell. Practices like these are not only linked to increasing gender disparities, but they keep everyone insecure.

14:51Naomi Cahn: It's a zero-sum game with very negative-sum consequences in which people are competing for dominance at work and engaging in cutthroat competition. These are unhappy workplaces. And studies have shown that inside these organizations, both female and male employees experience higher rates of burnout and turnover and illness and depression.

15:20June Carbone: That makes a lot of sense. I agree with that. And I think that as we were discussing earlier today, that the end is very ugly if the trend continues, if the same culture continues. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why, I mean, in the book, the book diagnoses the problem. But then, and hopefully by the end of our time together, we'll have more of a chance to talk about this. But we do talk about what can be done to make some changes. in order to stop this from happening. I can't even call it a cycle, right? In order to stop this escalation from happening. So that is part of what we address in the book.

16:03June Carbone: But I mean, before we get there, there's a lot of territory to talk about in addition to what can be done in terms of talking about just what happens to workers in this economy. I think this is a good time to bring up the term in your book, triple bind. And it has three legs. So let's talk about what are those three legs of the triple bind. We can start with looking at how women lose at each step of the triple bind. And specifically start with when women don't compete on the same terms as men, they lose. And then we can maybe do each leg.

16:37Naomi Cahn: Sure. Sure. As you said, if women don't compete on the same terms as men, they lose because they're not in the game. The second leg of the triple bind is that women, if women do compete on the same terms as men, they are punished more harshly for what might be perceived as sharp elbows or ethical misdeeds. So if women are trying to compete on the same terms, they're also losing because when scandals need scapegoats, women are convenient ones. There's a terrific study by a Harvard economist whom we interviewed, Mark Egan, and his paper is entitled When Harry Fired Sally. He demonstrated that women who committed misconduct in finance were more likely to be fired and less likely to be rehired than men who commit even greater offenses.

17:38Naomi Cahn: Men who are perceived to be narcissists by their subordinates are rated as more effective bosses, while women who are narcissists are rated as less effective bosses. They just can't get away with those traits. And the third leg of the triple bind is that when women see that they can't win on the same terms as men, some of them will take themselves out of the game if they haven't been pushed out already.

18:11June Carbone: So let's talk about the first leg. Let's expand on it. Sure.

18:16Nancy Levit: I like to talk about Betty Dukes. So Walmart versus Dukes, Dukes versus Walmart, the largest sex discrimination class action in U.S. history. Stunning statistical disparities between men and women goes to the U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision by Justice Scalia, rewriting sex discrimination law to eliminate class actions based on statistical disparities. But what's really going on? So we like to tell the story of Betty Dukes. A dramatic character, you know, the seventh of 12 children living in Pittsburgh, California, also a steel town where the steel mills have closed. You know, she hits rock bottom, has a problem with alcohol, two failed marriages, never graduated from high school.

19:05Nancy Levit: And then she finds God. She's an ordained Baptist minister. She wages community activities, get rid of penthouse on the lower shelves at the local store. And she needs a job. She gets hired at Walmart and she buys in. Sam Walton had a whole set of mantras for his hourly employees. Roots in the community, concern for customers. She rises through the ranks. She becomes a customer service manager, the highest job she could get without becoming a manager. And she thinks next step is managerial training. She thinks Walmart, which makes a point of its Christian roots, is her kind of company, her values, and they won't hire her.

19:53Nancy Levit: And she doesn't know why. This is a classic glass ceiling. And what she ultimately finds out, It's all a ruse. When you look at who Walmart hires, it doesn't advertise, it doesn't have announced positions. You get hired by a tap on the shoulder from the existing managers. It has a store, you know, nationwide rule. You cannot become a manager in a store where you have been an hourly employee. You must be willing in that era to move on short notice, maybe 300 miles away. Community routes are disfavored. And how are Walmart managers compensated? Total sales divided by labor costs and only labor costs.

20:44Nancy Levit: And something like two-thirds of the salary is on the basis of bonuses, and the bottom 10 % of store managers are fired every year. What does this produce? Walmart is number one in the country in wage theft. That is, wages and hours violations. It never pays overtime. It exploits its employees. The managers have testified you can't really meet the goals without cheating. You have a company that is not based on Christian values, that is based on breaking the rules and getting away with it. But does it announce this? Of course not. These are the hidden rules. And Betty Dukes discovered that what she prided herself on is what was disfavored in the managerial ranks at Walmart.

21:35Nancy Levit: She lost.

21:37June Carbone: And I remember in the book, you mentioned that she was actually told she's never going to be promoted. Yes, but not why. That is something to hear, especially if you don't know why.

21:49Nancy Levit: Yes. She assumed it was race initially. She's black. And, you know, and then discovered the class action and thought maybe it's sex. But it never occurred to her that she wasn't being promoted because her roots in the community were too deep. Her concern for her fellow employees too great. That didn't occur to her.

22:10June Carbone: In her particular situation, why did she not decide to join another employer?

22:17Nancy Levit: Well, you know, if you look at many of the women in our book, there's several things. I mean, with Walmart, Walmart, Sam Walton was brilliant in locating his stores in communities where the workers had few other options. I mean, Betty Dukes had a criminal arrest record for low-level things like DUIs and having a gun while intoxicated. and she hadn't graduated from high school, though she eventually got a GED. She had a limited number of other options and Walmart was willing to hire her, but not promote her. But what we found for women more generally is women do better by rising through the ranks of a single company than by jumping ship.

23:01Nancy Levit: Even when we look at nurses, male nurses get paid more in the current era, partly because they're more willing to switch jobs to get higher pay. Nurses, partly for family reasons, but partly because the network, the support network at a company is more important to them and more critical to their advancement, either are less willing to move or don't do as well when they do move as men do. It depends on the field.

23:29June Carbone: So in her particular case, she was not willing to basically treat people unfairly. And because of that, she did not have the value system that would be required to be promoted. Yes.

23:44Nancy Levit: We describe it as she didn't really understand what the unwritten rules were. And Walmart did not go out of its way to make clear what those rules were. In finance, this is typically called plausible deniability. Management incentivizes wage theft, but doesn't have its fingerprints on the wage theft. So when they need to crack down because the federal government is leaning on them. They just fire convenient people and say, gambling? Gambling is going on in Casablanca? Who knew?

24:19June Carbone: We should also say that although we did interview some of the people that we profile in the book, Betty Dukes tragically passed away before we could actually speak with her to get her full story. And so we have constructed what we've learned about her based on reading through lawsuits, based on talking with her former lawyers, and then also looking at various reports on what's happened at Walmart with respect to how it treats its employees and lost wages and wage theft that actually happens there. So this is our story, of course, of what happened with Betty Dukes based on having done extensive research.

25:14Nancy Levit: But on the Walmart practices, there are volumes, and I have read at least a half dozen. I will give you one example. What Walmart does in the way of compliance is when it fires the bottom 10 % of store managers every year, statistic out of this record, it audits them. And if they're engaged in wage theft, it fires them and may report what they were doing. But if they're successful, there are no questions asked. And so when you see how it treats its store managers in a way that facilitates wage theft, this is one of the best documented parts of the wall art story. And it's not part of the sex discrimination class action.

26:04Nancy Levit: And there's no reason to believe Betty Dukes ever realized that wage theft was the name of the game.

26:09June Carbone: And just to contextualize what we mean by wage theft, there was a 2018 report by an organization called Good Jobs, and it found that from 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4 billion in fines over wage theft violations. So clearly, Walmart has been found liable with respect to this over a billion dollars in fines and settlements for this wage gap, for this history. The third thing about this, as we were talking about Betty's situation and many, many other women across the country and men, but we're talking about women today, there are so many other companies, especially specifically, I'm thinking about smaller companies that would value Betty and would be so glad she's part of the company and she would have a way up.

27:06June Carbone: But because we don't have a good way to connect companies that need great employees and great employees who need employment, we have this heartbreak. And someone who's so talented and wanted to put in everything she had into her job and she had good values and she was not able to have a path forward. Absolutely right. Go ahead, June.

27:28Nancy Levit: One of the striking statistics from a recent study by one of my colleagues in the Minnesota Business School is that women who are passed over for promotion are substantially less likely to leave than men.

27:41June Carbone: That is very, very interesting. And I guess that comes down to also a lot of obligations, family obligations. You have so many other things that you have to keep together. And so it becomes much harder for you to move to another organization. And then also probably something that is also going on here is many women feel that they are not good enough. It just confirms what I thought about myself already. So let's move on to the next leg. If they try to compete on the same terms, they are disproportionately punished for sharp elbows and perceived misdeeds. And they said, if they, but they're a woman too.

28:16June Carbone: So I guess it's if we try to compete on the same terms.

28:20Naomi Cahn: We tell a story in the book that is reflective of the second leg of the triple bind. And it's the story of Ellen Powell, who worked for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Ellen Powell was a wizard. I believe it was an electrical engineering, undergraduate degree, law degree, and business degree from Harvard. She was recruited by the firm Kleiner Perkins and worked well, was promoted to partner, began to notice that it wasn't a level playing field. and that even though the firm claimed to prize initiative and drive, her performance reviews dinged her for pushing too hard to establish herself instead of being collaborative or for being too territorial, not being a team player.

29:29Naomi Cahn: She was told that she had sharp elbows, but this was an epithet that was only hurled at women. The double standard was reflected in her pay. She made a base salary of, I think it was$400 ,000 up to maybe$150 ,000 more than that with bonuses. But the male peers who started when she did and were promoted ahead of her made five times that amount. She pointed out the unfairness of the pay structure. She also had an affair with a male who worked at this VC firm. she was the only one punished for it, even though she wasn't having the affair alone by herself. It's the point of giving women less pay, treating women differently as they move along in the pipeline and essentially having two standards that mean that even when women are trying to play by the rules that have been set and conveyed, women are going to be treated differently and worse.

31:05June Carbone: Why do you think it is happening? Why do we have this double standard?

31:10Nancy Levit: Oh, I want to talk about that. If you don't mind, Naomi, unless you want to jump in. Go ahead. So one of the things that is important to recognize about these environments is the need to break the rules and get away with it. You know, I could summarize the entire book about what happened to Boeing. And when I do, it starts with the story of shareholder primacy. Jack Welch was the legendary CEO at General Electric. And what he did, and one of the things he was famous for is he wanted to get rid of the bureaucracy. And he liked to brag. He would reach down into the ranks and hire not the next in line, but somebody no one else had discovered yet.

32:07Nancy Levit: And reward them with these huge bonuses. And he would emphasize, I would let them do whatever they thought right. Long pause. so long as they met their numbers. What are the numbers? The numbers are reported earnings, reported earnings boosted share price, increases in share price reflected back into CEO bonuses are what made people rich. Now, management study comes along and said, what was Jack Welch really doing besides gaming the numbers? The answer, he prized finding people who had confidence. He used to talk about it as confidence to spare. And this management study found across the globe, the one characteristic that most distinguishes men from women in the lower executive ranks is hubris, highly associated with narcissism.

33:09Nancy Levit: And it doesn't correlate with better performance. but it does correlate with a willingness to break the rules and often an ability to get away with it. So if that's what you're doing, if you're looking for somebody, the larger-than-life figure, personalized authority instead of institutionalized authority, the willingness to run fast and break things, as Mark Zuckerberg bragged, then you're looking for people with confidence hubris they are more likely to be men and one reason they are is that's the exact trait that tends to be intensely disliked in women but it most pays off in environments where you can break the rules and get away with or at least some people can.

34:01Nancy Levit: In an environment where that gets you, as Wells Fargo found out, with the FDIC cracking down on you. Or as Boeing is about to find out, where planes crash, it doesn't pay off.

34:15June Carbone: So as women, if we were more confident, but it still would not work.

34:22Nancy Levit: No, because we don't like those women. I mean, our examples in the book, Carly Fiorina, had the same qualities as Jack Welch, was successful at Lucent because she also rigged the numbers. She went to Hewlett Packard. She was less successful for reasons that are probably not her fault, but she was hated for what she did at Hewlett Packard, which is to destroy their engineering culture. The people, the Jack Welch acolytes who went to Boeing were disliked for destroying the engineering culture there that took into account the safety of the airplanes. But they weren't hated in the way Carly Fiorina was hated.

35:04We also make the point in the book that we think that it isn't that women should change.

35:13Naomi Cahn: It is that the system should change. And so when we talk about companies' inability to recruit or retain women, we think of that as a tell because abusive workplaces will drive women out. And workplaces with practices like we've been describing, workplaces that pit employees against each other, they are bad for women and they are bad for men. And those are workplaces that care very little about supporting families, about supporting employee well-being. It's both women and men, employees who are experiencing burnout and high rates of turnover. And so when we're trying to connect the dots between abuse of power and the treatment of women, we're saying that it's a winner-take-all economy that is breeding the abuse of power for those who can break the rules, the law, ethical norms, common decency, and get away with it.

36:18Naomi Cahn: And so our suggestion isn't that women should get the confidence code or lean in or lean out. Those aren't the things that matter. And those are actually kind of risky behaviors.

36:33June Carbone: Instead, our recommendation is change the culture. I mean, there was a wonderful Harvard Business Review article a few years ago that was titled, What's Really Holding Women Back? It's Not What Most People Think. And a global consulting firm had asked two researchers to figure out why the firm had so few women partners. And the researchers did in-depth interviews. And what they found was it was the firm's general culture of overwork. It was not women's greater commitment to taking care of children, et cetera. It was a culture of overwork in which overwork was overly prized, overly rewarded, and in which women were penalized even if they didn't take any time out for any other reason.

37:29June Carbone: So we say change the culture. It's going to help all of us. It's going to help the women in those firms. It's going to help the men in those firms. It's going to help with overwork. It's going to help with managing work life, family. There are solutions, but there are solutions on both the individual and on the corporate, as well as actually three levels, individual, firm level, and then government level. What are specific key things that need to change in terms of culture?

38:00Nancy Levit: You have to be, if you change the culture, so you can't break the rules with impunity, then you see a very different kind of marketplace. I mean, it's interesting. Both Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio in 2016, when they were both running for president, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, we all know Hillary Clinton, both gave talks that nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to on quarterly capitalism and what's wrong with it. You had a recognition by 2016 that having a system where if you manipulate the numbers to show short-term gains, which, by the way, has also made Elon Musk the richest man in the world for a period.

38:47How did Tesla climb

38:49Nancy Levit: to the top? By beating production estimates, by sacrificing quality, you know, product quality controls. Okay. So you gain the numbers, you announce numbers, you win big, and then you're company goes to hell. And you've got both, you've got not just politicians recognizing, hey, maybe this isn't such a good thing. And maybe this is a rigging of the system. You have BlackRock, the trillion dollar investment firm, looking at some ESG figures, environmental, social, and governance factors. Why? Because if you're investing in the market as a whole, and the market is cooking the books, it's going to drive companies off a cliff in ways that are harder to predict.

39:42Nancy Levit: So what we talk about is rule of law matters. Rule of law means having ways to identify who's flouting ethical norms, as Milton Friedman used to say, because he didn't believe in law? Who is committing securities fraud? Elon Musk, but all he got was a slap on the risk. Who is engaging in the kind of safety violations that has gotten Boeing in trouble? That's going to get you in trouble. It's going to destroy the wealth of your company. and it may put you out of a job in the long run. If you have law enforcement, then you are able to reward those who are playing by the rules. But if you can get away with it, but not everyone can get away with it, then you're looking.

40:39Nancy Levit: You're looking for the Elon Musks. You're looking for the Donald Trumps. You're looking for the people who can flout the rules for years without consequences. We think that's the single most important point.

40:52June Carbone: I always admire how lawyers think. It's very logical, going right into the core of the problem. Do you think that that is something that can happen in our lifetime? One of the things that happened while we were writing the book, Nancy mentioned that we started this over six years ago, was the Me Too movement. and we saw the power of the Me Too movement as we were writing the book. And it was a combination of raising voices, of transparency, and then of changing laws to get rid of some of the laws, some of the practices that prevented people from speaking up and from speaking out. So we believe that we certainly believe that change is possible and we have seen it.

41:48So, yeah. June, Nancy?

41:54Naomi Cahn: One of the things that we think is so important is the absence of silence. Silence has never helped women. I mean, the Me Too movement, as Naomi says, demonstrates that. But we see a broader use of collective action and of sunlight. Women fight back most effectively when they expose the ugliness. We, for example, interviewed Deborah Katz, whose clients have included Christine Blasey Ford, the Stanford research psychologist who testified that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. And one of the things Katz said to us was that being effective means being willing to shed light on issues to ensure accountability.

43:03Naomi Cahn: And we think that holds promise.

43:08Nancy Levit: And I will say the reason I'm optimistic and the reason I'm not. So I was recently reading about a reporter who drove across rural Montana, Idaho, you know, very much what we think of as the conservative hinterlands and found that people there were just as concerned as people in urban areas with growing inequality and what they saw as the corruption associated with it. And as I said, in 2016, it was Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton talking about these things. We see, and we found this when we talked to lawyers as well, that one of the issues now, one of the reasons why I personally think that our emphasis on women has to be coupled with abusive power, is this isn't women being treated worse than men.

44:01Nancy Levit: Men are being treated badly, too. What this is are hierarchy, corrupt hierarchies in which the abusive power is pervasive. Now, we found wonderful statistical studies that show that the mindset, the places that promote men based on overconfidence bias, one could say narcissism, amorality, the willingness to break the rules and the ability to get away with it, are also environments with higher levels of sexual harassment and bullying. Sexual harassment then becomes a tell for these workplaces. Uber is a perfect example. Uber is famous for sexual harassment, but it was breaking the law too for reasons unrelated to sexual harassment.

44:54Nancy Levit: The CEO of McDonald's had to resign with a$100 million clawback not just for engaging in relatively minor sexual harassment allegations, but for lying about it to its board. And we now have a ruling by the Delaware Chancery Court talking about fiduciary duties and an obligation to investigate allegations of sexual harassment. But sexual harassment is hand in glove with abusive power. So where is the coalition to oppose that? In 2020, one of the most interesting groups were teachers. So teachers got squeezed. It's really an untold story of how teachers and the attack on teachers is part of a movement to cut taxes.

45:44Nancy Levit: Mitch McConnell, both in 2010 and in 2020 blocked aid to the states that would have prevented teacher layoffs. Teachers didn't recover from the great financial crisis until 2016, when the economy generally began to recover. And what they did was they were incredibly active in 2020 local elections in places like Arizona that had a significant impact. Almost all of this is invisible. But teachers are, again, one of the last representatives of a collective ethos. They really do care about their students. And the vilification in teachers' unions is part of a political strategy to destroy unions, to destroy collective organization against this economy.

46:40Nancy Levit: I fear it will take the next financial crisis before we get real traction.

46:45June Carbone: Any final words you would like to leave our listeners with? And also what can someone who is managing a team, managing a department can do to start nudging us towards the change we want?

46:58Naomi Cahn: We offer a number of suggestions on the individual level as well. As Naomi mentioned, there are a number of levels where change needs to occur. starting conversations, breaking the silence, having conversations at work, particularly if managers start the conversations about gender equality, educating people, knowledge is power, supporting inclusive policies. It could be anything from more flexible working hours to better parental leave policies, joining or forming, creating support networks because there is strength in numbers, and being a mentor. If someone is in a position like being a manager, mentoring younger colleagues can certainly help navigating challenging work environments.

47:59June Carbone: and there are for managers managers can help reward transparency managers can be open managers can i mean one of the things we talk about in the book is and june's already alluded to this in the 1950s the organization man he yes he's been parodied um and yes he was a man but what he cared about was his company. He cared about his fellow workers. He focused on them. He focused on cooperating with others, competition against different companies, but cooperation within cooperation and support. So we certainly within our history have managers, leaders, and even values associated with men that encourage this kind of cooperation and transparency in the workplace.

48:57Nancy Levit: Now, I'd add on that note, when we talk to economists, they say they don't study productivity, and therefore nobody can tell us why modern productivity seems not to be rising. But management studies do. And what they find, and Microsoft is the perfect example. Microsoft adopted Jack Welch's evaluation system, the evaluation system, the tube GE. And when you look at what happened at Microsoft, the headlines were Microsoft's lost decade. Turns out if you pit employees against each other in what is perceived to be zero sum and is actually negative sum competitions, innovation goes down the toilet, morale suffers.

49:42Nancy Levit: So there are very good management studies that say unless all you care about is quarterly sales figures cooperation is the way to go GE in the 50s bragged our employees cooperate better than their employees I remember

50:03June Carbone: reading in the book where you had that quote that in GE it was about you need to I think it was in GE that you said that you need to cooperate but you need to cooperate better the way I understood at the time when I was reading it that you need to cooperate better than the opposition.

50:19Nancy Levit: You see, women do quite well. You advertise, we are forming teams to cure cancer, and they're going to compete against each other. Women sign up. If you say you're going to compete against the person in the next cubicle for the higher bonus, women's applications plummet. Men's do too, but women's plummet dramatically more. There's nothing wrong with competition. By teams against your rival companies, not the person in the next cubicle.

50:48June Carbone: Yes, I totally agree. Thank you so much. You guys are amazing guests. I'm really enjoying our conversation. I think that we covered some very important ground, but there is also so much more that we could cover. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.

51:02Naomi Cahn: We really appreciate this conversation. It's been delightful chatting with you. Thank you for having us. And thank you.

51:09June Carbone: Your questions were absolutely terrific. Thanks for exploring all of this with us. Thank you very much. And thank you everyone for tuning in. Our guests today again has been Naomi Kan, June Carbon, and Nancy Levitt. Check out their book. It is called Fair Shake, Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It is a free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are currently updating your resume, even at senior levels, you need to have your resume in good shape.

51:52June Carbone: You can get McKinsey and BCG winning resume. It is also free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Thank you again, everyone for tuning in and I'm looking forward to connect with you all next time.

52:37Thank you.