Will Silicon Valley’s Gender-Bias Cases Look Different In A Post-Weinstein World?

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Publish Date:
November 3, 2017
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Quartz at Work
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Summary

Two years ago, Katherine Moussouris, an ex-Microsoft engineer, filed a lawsuit against her former employer, accusing the company of discriminating against women in technical jobs, and failing to sufficiently investigate systemic bias against women at the firm.

Now, according to Bloomberg, she and two others who joined the suit are hoping to bring an additional 8,630 peers, women who have worked in technical roles at Microsoft over the past five years, into the case, to argue that they collectively lost out on 500 promotions and at least $100 million in pay.

Deborah Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University, believes the Weinstein crisis will make a difference “both in terms of plaintiffs’ willingness to make a formal complaint and to litigate them, and also to use other methods, such as social media, to share chronic examples of workplace abuse and harassment.”

Whether this newly informed cultural conversation will mean more juries will be willing to vote in favor of plaintiffs over companies in bias cases is unclear, however. That’s extremely difficult to predict, Rhode says. There’s a chance it could, could this be “even though harassment and discrimination fall into completely discrete legal categories.

“One of the ways that women get screwed in the workplace—sometimes literally, but most often metaphorically— is when they resist implicit quid pro quos, or when they voluntarily exit situations that are hostile work environments,” Rhode explains. “Harassment is not unconnected to women’s unequal opportunities for salaries and promotions, but there are many other factors that contribute to a woman’s lack of advancement and pay equity in a workplace besides harassment.”

And, of course, the two behaviors require very different remedies, she notes.

Weinstein—and “the accumulative impact of seeing someone do it again and again, and get away with it, and feel entitled and empowered as a result of getting away with it,” as Rhode puts it—has made it impossible to argue that women aren’t at risk at work. The connection to unfair employment practices more generally may become clearer as the movement against the Weinsteins of the world progresses.

“One thing these cases have shown is that what seems to be a relatively minor incident is often part of a broad pattern in practice,” Rhode observes. “And that imposes serious cost on women in the workplace.”

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