Redefining Success: Women and the Fight for a Fair Economy
Episode 452 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: June Carbone
How do we build a better future than our current winner-takes-all economy?
We’re in unprecedented times here—I don’t need to tell you. We’re watching wage and wealth gaps expand to alarming new levels. The vast majority of the world’s wealth rests in the accounts of just a few billionaires, while meanwhile, more and more people struggle just to get by.
The upcoming book Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, which my guest June Carbone co-authored with Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit, explores the history, politics, and legality of how we got to our current winner-takes-all economy and the efforts being made to dig us out of it. Our conversation gets into the nitty gritty of our economic climate and pulls no punches; but there’s hope in there, too.
Jack Welch, GE, and the “Rank and Yank” system
When, in the 80s, Jack Welch took the helm at General Electric and introduced his “rank and yank” evaluation system, he altered more than one company’s approach to profits. For increasing share prices by over 4000% and beating earning expectations nearly every quarter for 20 years, he was heralded as the management guru of the time and kick-started a whole restructuring of corporate culture in North America.
“Rank and yank” dangled high-stakes bonuses in front of employees and transformed the company man of the 1950s—the one who was lauded for his loyalty, whose prestige was inextricably linked to his company’s long-term health and success—into a cut-throat ladder-climber whose success (and salary) depended not on collaboration and toeing the company line but on increasing profits at any cost.
If an employee managed to dodge and jab their way into the top 20% of earners, they received massive bonuses, stock options, and a whole new kind of prestige. If they fell into the bottom 10%, they were sacked—every quarter. They learned over time that managers didn’t necessarily care about the legality of how they increased profits, as long as those quarterly numbers maintained their upward trend. The result? Impressive share prices and a widespread culture of insecurity and questionable business practices ran rampant in the workplace.
Women fight a triple bind in the winner-takes-all world
It’s well known that women in business face a double bind: we’re expected to be both likable and lead, but what people find “likable” in women is vastly different than what has long been considered “leadership potential.”
In their new book, June and her co-authors posit that women actually face a triple bind as they navigate the Wild West that is today’s winner-takes-all or WTA economic culture.
The exception to the rule
If they don’t play by the same rules as the men, women run the risk of being fired. However, these “rules” are often kept under the hat, with bosses expecting their top earners to “do what needs to be done” without being asked. This includes tactics that violate the law (and perhaps explains why they’re rarely explicitly stated).
2. The punishment perspective
On the other hand, research shows that women who do go to the lengths surreptitiously expected of them are more likely than their male counterparts to be punished for their company-backed misdeeds. Wells Fargo, for instance, is #1 in documented gender disparities when it comes to firing people for misconduct.
A Harvard Business School study found that women are less likely to commit fraud, cost their companies less in consequences if they do, and yet, compared to men, are more likely to be fired and less likely to be rehired.
3. The misconception of competition
On the third hand, women’s perceived eligibility for jobs is jeopardized because they are widely considered to be more risk-averse and less willing to accept opportunities at highly competitive workplaces, even though the research suggests that the truth is much more nuanced.
In fact, women perform better in positions such as hedge fund management because, rather than being fearful, they are better able to manage their risk-taking—they don’t become intoxicated by it like so many of their male peers.
Further studies show that women aren’t averse to competition in general, either. While they do have a greater tendency to refuse job listings that tout competition between employees for zero-sum purposes, when a job listing outlines competition for the greater good, such as competition for grants to discover a medical cure, the discrepancy between male and female applicants disappears.
A brighter (possible) future
All this doom and gloom needs a bit of a silver lining, and June is happy to offer that up, too.
In 2020, Nasdaq reported findings that having more women on boards correlates with less securities fraud, fewer accounting errors requiring correction, and greater general transparency. June and her co-authors present other evidence, too, indicating that more women and more diversity is a “tell” for corporate health: an ability to manage diversity is linked to more honest business practices.
Add to this that startups with female founders outperform others because women are better at making the money go farther, in part by paying themselves less outrageous salaries than some Silicon Valley execs who shall not be named here.
The takeaway for investors looking to invest in a startup? “If you want somebody who will be honest,” June says, “if you want a person who will lose bigger by being dishonest,” women are a good bet.
True, that mindset might not be the end goal in our fight for economic and corporate equity, but it’s a pretty decent place to start.
What did you take away from my conversation with June? There’s a lot of concerning info around this topic, no doubt, but there’s also hope. Head on over to the Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your thoughts about the future of workplaces that value collectivism over individualism, and how we can be a part of cultivating this change.
Related Links from today’s episode:
Pre-order ‘Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy’
Banks with More Women on Their Boards Commit Less Fraud
The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC; Notice of Filing of Proposed Rule Change to Adopt
Listing Rules Related to Board Diversity
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
More of June’s writing and co-writing work
Episode 440: The Problem with Self-Help
Episode 444: Are Pay Transparency Laws Working?
Take action to advocate for gender equity:
-
[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 452. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up. Today I am so excited to share a conversation I just wrapped with author June Carbone,
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
all about women in the winner take all economy. If you're anything like me, you've long cared about gender equity and gender equality issues in the workplace. And maybe you also care about economic justice. Maybe it concerns you that we're living through unprecedented times when it comes to the not only wage gaps, but wealth gaps in our world. That we have billionaires that exist hoarding the vast majority of our wealth in this world, is always been something that kind of keeps me up at night, that has me clicking on articles trying to understand economic justice a little bit better. But what I never really saw until reading the book that our guest today just is releasing on May 7th this year, is the deep connections between gender equality in the workplace and economic justice, and how our business culture that has bred a winner take all economy that encourages people to elbow their way to the top, to prioritize short term financial numbers and performance over the long term health of a company, or to benefit you and your personal bonuses and take home pay at the cost of your colleagues. How those business environments have really become part of why we have such seemingly intractable numbers of women in the workplace in leadership positions.
So I'm excited to have June Carbone here joining us to dive into the history, the politics, the legality of how this has come to be, and how economic inequality is deeply connected to gender inequity. June Carbone is one of the co-authors of Fair Shake: Women And The Fight To Build A Just Economy. She co-authored it with Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit. And June is also the Robina Chair of Law, Science, and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. Previously, she served as the Edward A. Smith, Missouri Chair of law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and as the associate dean for professional development and presidential professor of ethics and the common good at Santa Clara University School of Law. She's written from Partners To Parents and co-written Red Families Versus Blue Families, Marriage Markets, and Family Law, and she's co-editor of the International Survey of Family Law. June Carbone, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
JUNE: Delighted to be here.
EMILIE: I guess it might make sense to start June by just laying the, laying the table here, setting the table about one of the key foundational pieces of this book, which is the winner take all economy. Can you take us there and explain what the winner take all economy is and how that's connected to gender?
JUNE: Yes. So when we started the book, you know, we saw this winner take all, all over the place in the press. We read some of the books on it. The journalistic accounts do not have a good definition. The academic accounts have a different definition. So, Bob Frank at Cornell, he's an economist, he wrote a book about winner take all. And what he said went something like this. In the middle of the 19th century, you're an opera singer. You can only reach the people in the room who can hear you. And so the top opera singer and the number two opera singer and the number 20th opera singer reach only slightly different audiences. Today the number one opera singer in the world is going to reach a global audience. And if that person is off the charts famous, the number two opera singer is well below, and the 20th opera singer isn't in the same universe. So that's true Winner Take All. That's the individual. We are making a different argument, and we are, and we're not really talking about antitrust violations that we could. What we're saying is what you have now is a system that the people who call the shots think Elon Musk, think Mark Zuckerberg, think Bill Gates. The people who are the CEO's of top companies recruit lieutenants, lieutenants who do their bidding. And what they do is to game institutions. So they get a disproportionate share of the rewards and everybody else loses. And when we talk about that, that winner take all, the idea of instead of being there used to be in the fifties, the days of the organization man who could have been a woman, there is this idea of stewardship. The institution is bigger than you are. You are, your job is to act for the good of the institution. Your prestige lies with the health of your institution. Today, your prestige is how much money you have. In the Cayman Islands a few decades.
EMILIE: Ago, the concept of just a few people holding such a disproportionate amount of wealth in our global economy was sort of unheard of. And your book really details how that short term thinking of quarterly profits, right? Making sure you're making your numbers, of elbowing your way to making your bonuses, and like, growing your personal wealth, has become kind of revered and has become the norm in so many business environments. And not that long ago, pre-GE, I love how you get into the details of how GE really set the stage on this. But like not that many decades ago, people were not focused on short term gains at the cost of long term stewardship. Is that right?
JUNE: Yes. And indeed, we wanted to start the book with how that happened, because it's, you know, go back to the Gilded Age and you have the same excesses we have now.
EMILIE: And it's a good reminder that this, for those of you who are millennials like me or younger, it wasn't always like this. This s*** is not normal. This is, like, not healthy. This vast amount of wealth inequality and this huge disproportionate distance between the top 1% and the rest of us, the shrinking nature of the middle class is not a healthy indicator of our world and is not how things have always been, right? My question becomes, what do women have to do with this?
JUNE: We almost started the book with the thirties and the growing cry for New Deal Democrats in Congress think southern populists was, we need to make the market safe for widows and orphans. And then you look at the fifties and the, you know, the screeds and the organization, man, he doesn't take risks. He's loyal. He's with a company for life. He cares about his coworkers. He could have been a woman. So let's talk about Jack Welch, because I think Jack Welch is the marriage of how to disrupt the system with a whole lot of academic thinking. So in the academy, this is the advent of shareholder primacy. And what I want to explain is how the change in corporate culture affects women.
So there are two pieces to Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of GE. He was CEO for 20 years. In those 20 years, earnings increased, oh, several hundred percent, but share price increased 4000%. And what he was famous for was beating earnings expectation every quarter, almost every quarter for 20 years. So how did he do it? Okay? He was heralded as the management guru, the most successful CEO of his era. But our focus is what happens inside the company. So his famous evaluation system is called “Rank-and-Yank”. And what he does is he introduces high stakes bonuses. A much higher percentage of executives not just get competitive bonuses, but they get stock options. So their fortunes are linked to GE share price, and it's competitive. Top 20% are identified for promotion and being trained. The bottom 10% are fired every year. And that's the part that's been discredited. But 96% of companies have incentive pay of some kind. University of Minnesota has incentive pay, but it's trivial. At GE is not trivial. And at Walmart, which I'll talk about later, something like two thirds or three quarters of a store manager's pay comes from the bonus. So this is huge. And in corporate America, the bonus has become huge. And Welch liked to talk about differentiating. When you differentiate, you compare people to each other, you rank them against each other. This is grading on a curve, and it's high stakes.
EMILIE: Does that encourage collaboration? Not so much. Right?
[LAUGHTER]
JUNE: So what does it do? It does. First, it makes everybody insecure. They're looking over their shoulder, what everybody else is doing. Secondly, and Welch, Welch bragged about cutting through the bureaucracy. The rap on the organization man is that he was bureaucrat. He cared about what others thought of him. They consulted broadly. John Kenneth Galbraith had an ode to the committee as the high point of technocratic management. Jack Welch thought it was bureaucratic. So he delighted reaching down into the ranks, picking somebody who was not next in line for promotion, but who had confidence. Some would say hubris, and then Welch would brag, “and I gave him a free reign. I let him do whatever he wanted so long as he met his numbers”. What are the numbers? The numbers? The numbers are quarterly earnings. The numbers are white goose share price[?]. And so you have a system. It is called plausible deniability. What it means, you dangle the carrots. You want results. Results are what count. And management looks the other way at how you get them. Earnings management is securities fraud. Who cares? As long as you don't get caught, you're golden. And you hope by the time GE gets caught and it does, you're gone.
EMILIE: Right. And so when the incentives are, we don't care how you get these results. But if you don't perform in that short term way that prioritizes shareholders, stockholders of the company, right? Not employees of the company, not clients. God forbid we should prioritize clients of our banking institutions above anyone else. And certainly not for the good of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, right? But prioritizing stockholder value at any cost, giving independence to managers for how they figure out how to get there, breeds fraud. It breeds ethically questionable decision making. And there's some interesting connections to. What does that mean for women? Do women want to be involved in that? You think about the eighties, the 1980s, culture and finance in New York City. The Wolf on Wall Street kind of era, and you're thinking to yourself, okay, there were a few women in the room. Were they able to succeed? Did they want to be in that room? Like, is that the culture that women even want to choose for themselves? And getting into that triple bind that you describe in the book really illustrates that clearly about how this rise in “bro culture”, for lack of a better word, but just like, really ethically questionable business practices to win at all costs, a la Walmart, a la GE, and break rules along the way. And who cares, as long as you're meeting shareholder expectations? Is, has some serious implications for gender in the workplace, doesn't it? Is that what we value in America? Is that the behavior that we should be applauding? Because that's not the world I want to live in, but it seems to be.
JUNE: Well, see, that's the thing. That's why we talk about women as the biggest constituency for the rule of law. Whether it's streetlights in cities and police forces or corporate America. If you have cops on the beat, women can be full citizens. And in corporate America, what we've done is defang, defang the SEC. The Supreme Court has almost never found a white collar crime case where it wasn't willing to let the perp off. Even Jeff Skilling of Enron. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction and then remanded. And they convicted and they reaffirmed on other grounds. So he did go to jail. But the Supreme Court thought, oh, Jeff Skilling, hey, there is this statute that being applied to send a white collar guy to jail. We've got to narrow the construction. It's the same line of legal reasoning that has led off. I mean, almost every corporate scandal I talk about, if it went to the top appellate courts, they narrowed the scope of the criminal laws. I have lots of stories about that.
EMILIE: It does feel like the wealthy in our country have a different experience of the judicial system. Completely. And it's very much apparent in the book.
JUNE: Yeah, and if you can get Jack Welch, it's just great. So let's talk about Jack Welch. So what happens? He leaves in 2000. Now, this is now the Enron downturn. He is the most influential CEO in corporate America. More than 50% of publicly traded companies have adopted “Rank-and-Yank”. And, um, the poster child for “Rank-and-Yank” is Enron. And the Enron scandals discredit “Rank-and-Yank”, because they're how Enron got plausible deniability and how it was able to commit fraud. And when you look at the women of Enron, many of them complained and were marginalized because they complained with Welch. There's an SEC investigation, and they find some of the more egregious instances of securities fraud. And Welch is gone. GE is fined $250 million. $250 million is nothing for GE. And Jack Welch personally keeps all, you know, there's no clawback of the bonuses. He keeps all of his wealth. And it's not until GE falls apart that his reputation is really tarnished, but that doesn't happen until close to his death. So, he gets away with it.
EMILIE: I really wanna have you define for us the triple bind that women face in navigating this kind of an environment. In the book, you get into the history of the rise of this kind of wild, wild west financial environment that is not just on Wall street, but it's really everywhere in the business culture, Silicon Valley, Walmart, et cetera. And in that kind of economy, women are up against more than just what we've heard of in the past. The double bind, the leadership, likability, double binding. What is the triple bind that women are faced with?
JUNE: Okay, so the first one is, if you don't play by the same rules as the men, you lose. And a fair number of our stories are women who really didn't get what the rules were until they were pushed out. They get hired, they're doing well. They get promotions, they get great evaluations until either they hit the glass ceiling and don't get why or complain that they're not being promoted and are fired. And what you see is they didn't see it coming because they didn't understand there was a secret system.
EMILIE: Yeah. One that management didn't really want to hear about or instruct people to take. But it's like, we want you to do whatever it takes, including break the rules, right?
JUNE: Yeah. And then you have bosses who are looking for the people who will do what needs to be done without being asked to do it, even if it violates the law.
EMILIE: Yeah, and those aren't usually women. Not never, but usually not women.
JUNE: We've got some good studies saying they're less likely to be women. But more critically, bosses don't think women will do it and certainly won't do it without being asked to do it. So the second part, if you do, because you can find women who will commit fraud, that's actually not so hard. Women are more likely to be punished for it. Who is number one in the country in documented gender disparities, in firing people for misconduct? Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo, the home of the fake account scandal and all kinds of other scandals. Mark Egan of the Harvard Business School and his colleagues have a wonderful study. Women are less likely to commit fraud, cause their employers lower dollar amounts in consequences when they do, are more likely to be fired and less likely to be rehired than the men. And the firm with the largest gender disparities in termination for misconduct in finance, Wells Fargo.
EMILIE: Yeah. So this is what you mean when you say in the book, women are kind of the canaries in the coal mine. When women are leaving in mass, or being fired in mass, you're like, oh, this could be a company that prizes people who are willing to commit fraud or just do whatever it takes. It's kind of an indicator that either women aren't willing to and therefore run up against the glass ceiling, or even when they do have sharp elbows and are willing to be hyper competitive and kind of toxically masculine if you want to go there, like, kind of embrace the patriarchal winner take all systems. They're seen as not conforming to gender stereotypes, right. And they're squeezed out anyway.
JUNE: Oh, there's a great study. So this study measures how narcissistic bosses are through a variety of measures of narcissism, and then asks the employees to evaluate the bosses. The men who rank high in narcissism are viewed as better bosses, more effective, competent, etcetera. The women who rank high in narcissism are viewed as worse bosses.
EMILIE: It is like a, you can't win. You're d***** if you do, you're d*****if you don't. So what's the third part of the triple bind?
JUNE: Yeah, so the third part is our contribution to this. So when we were looking at the literature, and it's interesting, so the initial literature was, women won't take risks. And then all the studies that come out indicating women hedge fund managers, what's the art of the hedge fund managing risk? Women do better. Why? Because they're not intoxicated by risk taking. They manage risk better. So that went by the wayside, and it was, well, women can manage risk, they just don't like competition. And then you look at the studies they used to see. Women don't like competition. And if you have an Ad that says, competitive environment, opportunity to really advance, you'll learn all kinds of skills, you'll get immediate responsibility, big bonuses, and you will be, uh, you know, highly competitive environment and some indication you're being evaluated against your coworkers. Applications for men and women both decline. Applications from women plummet, and there is a 50% increase in gender disparities in applications. Now, I want to emphasize, if you say highly competitive environment, teams competing to discover a cure for cancer, no decline in the number of women who apply. It is not competition in isolation. It's zero sum competition that becomes negative sum over time.
EMILIE: Which, to be really clear, is that zero sum is like when I personally win, you, peers, colleagues, coworkers, lose. That kind of zero sum thinking turns into a race to the bottom for employees, right?
JUNE: Yep. So we actually have an op-ed comparing what's happening in politics to what's happening, what happened in corporate America with the Jack Welch system. And it's keep everybody insecure, dangle high stakes rewards, look the other way at misconduct. And who thrives in such an environment? First, narcissists. Second, the amoral. And third, people who feel entitled. So one of the things you see is that sexual harassment and bullying are the winners. Who are inclined to think in these terms to begin with and then win, become more likely to engage in sexual harassment and bullying and feel entitled to do so and drive everybody else out.
EMILIE: And just speak up here in defense of men for a moment. That's a very specific kind of man, right, that you're describing.
JUNE: Yes.
EMILIE: And I suppose there could be a woman who fits that profile. But, like, you can imagine the kind of frat boy culture that I love how you describe it, running amok at Uber, like, where the CEO, the original CEO and founder, sent out company wide emails that were like, all caps, read this now or else. That was about sleeping around and getting wasted at the upcoming company conference, and you just want to pull your hair out. Like, how has our economy rewarded people like that? Who think that's okay? And that is not the man I married. That is not my brother and my brothers and my, like a lot of the wonderful men in my life, this is a specific culture that rewards. Like the Leo DiCaprio character in Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah, exactly. And what we're saying is that's bad for everybody. And it's particularly bad for women who are trying to make our way in the world. If that's what gets the most funding, that's what VC's are financing, that's what Silicon Valley's starting to look like. It's just. It's pretty enraging. I was p***** off reading your book, honestly, because you start to see those connections and you're like, what are women supposed to do in this environment?
JUNE: Look for allies. So who are my heroes in this?
EMILIE: Please, give me some hope.
JUNE: Yeah. Nasdaq, you know, Nasdaq is like, Dow Jones for, you know, the alternative set of tech stocks. So Nasdaq in 2020 has a report. Guess what, the number of women on boards, what does it correlate with? Less securities fraud, fewer accounting mistakes that require corrections, greater transparency, a variety of things like this. Why? It's uncertain. Again, I keep saying you want women who will cook the books and you go out of your way to find them. I mean, Elaine Chao, Mitch McConnell's wife was on the board of Wells Fargo during the height of this crisis, you know, and I don't know what she knew. I'm not saying anything about that. I'm saying you want women who will oversee a system. I mean, Carrie Tolstedt is the one who's going to get sent to jail at Wells Fargo. But you want women who are involved in this. You can find them, you can create an environment that creates the incentives and women will play, but it's really hard to maintain diversity and have a system rate to produce these results. And so Nasdaq is saying most of the women on boards are not coming from the same routes as the men. They get there through different pathways and they're not part of this whole, so we call it in the book, a new boys club, not an old boys club. The old boys are the ones where he, complacent, rose through the ranks, the company men. The new boys are, and they tend to be younger and hungrier and less ethical and more willing to do whatever it takes. It's the new boys club that wins, and they tend to drive women out. So Nasdaq recognizes this, BlackRock recognizes this. Again, ESG investing, environmental, social and governance factors says diversity is a tell. But we think diversity is a tell for corporate health in a society that values diversity, the ability to manage diversity says you're not a rigged company. That more reason to believe that the accounting numbers are honest, et cetera. So my PC friends tell me I'm not allowed to say nice things about the fifties. Racist and sexist. I remember the fifties. I'm old enough when I was a little kid, but I remember this is the period when I was being told girls couldn't, girls couldn't play football…
EMILIE: It wasn't without its flaws. Right?
JUNE: ..it wasn't without its flaws. But I think when you look at the period from the late thirties to the mid seventies, and you say, why was that time period different? The number one thing was the average marginal tax rate was over 80%.
EMILIE: Average marginal tax rate on the super wealthy?
JUNE: Well yeah, I mean, yes. So the tax bracket that, uh, you know, the top tax brackets were over 80%. And it was John F. Kennedy in 1963 who lowered those rates for the first time since the thirties. And they were high in part because of World War Two. This is not just the new deal intentionally raising tax rates. This is World War Two. But one of the effects of high marginal tax rates. And we can think about wealth taxes of various kinds. One of the key effects is when I was saying the bragging right of the organization man, is my company is bigger than your company. My company has Bell Labs, which is innovative. That's where scientific innovation took place. It wasn't in Silicon Valley, it was in Bell Labs, a major corporate laboratory. And, uh, what's the first thing Jack Welch did? He got rid of the plastics lab, which is where he had come of age in GE. GE had incredibly innovative, you know, fairly basic research not directly applied to quarterly profits. And Jack Welch got rid of those things. And what you see is that innovation now takes place in startups. It takes place in government finance labs. It, major companies…
EMILIE: And universities.
JUNE: …and major universities that get federal funding, with federal funding having been cut dramatically.
EMILIE: Well, because those labs don't contribute to quarterly earnings, to shareholder profit. It's not about, you know, if it's about wealth extraction, you're like, how little can we pay to make a profit this quarter, right? How little can we invest in our staff and in our team and in our R&D?
JUNE: So when you think of this mindset, when you had high marginal tax rates, this is not a revenue generation. I am not arguing for high marginal tax rates. So the government can have more money. Yeah, it might do that. And that might be a good thing. No, it changes the incentive structure. So when you have high marginal tax rates, that means you can't use companies and extraction device, keep the money and go put it in the Cayman Islands and rule the world. That's Elon Musk. It's quest for world domination. And you know, he wants to be the guy who calls the shots. And if he has $40 billion that he gets by manipulating stocks, it's the share price that made him rich. Whether or not Tesla is a good thing or bad thing is irrelevant. Share price depended on beating production quotas. That made him for a period, the richest man in the world. And that gave him immense power, including the power to defy the SEC, which he does routinely. So if you have high marginal tax rates, then the institution becomes bigger than the individual. I laugh. What's the last institution left in American society that still represents feminine values? Not feminist, feminine. My answer?
EMILIE: The libraries, maybe? Yeah.
JUNE: Yeah. Public school teachers and the military.
EMILIE: Yeah, the military. That surprises me. Okay.
JUNE: Loyalty, commitment to something that's bigger than you are. A belief we're all in this together. Camaraderie. You know, the person in the foxhole next to you is the person to whom you're most loyal. That's the values I'm talking about. Now, when it's the military, we don't code them feminine, but think of gender stereotypes. It's collectivism, loyalty, concern for something bigger than you are, a belief it's positive sum, not zero sum. The collective values are coded feminine today compared to toxic masculinity, but they apply in the military.
EMILIE: I want to get briefly to your kind of final chapter here is called, A Future Without WTA, Winner Take All, Excesses Escaping The Triple Bind. And you write, “the first step is making visible the injustices of the WTA economy”, which makes a lot of sense. I think we've done quite a bit of that here. The second step is showing the links between sex discrimination and WTA, practices that are counterproductive to all of society. And the third step is empowering women's voices, like we saw with the Me Too movement. Right. Like actually giving the mic over to women to say, you know, if we want to build a society that values collectivism that values looking out for one another, not elbowing your way to the top and throwing everyone around you under the bus to do so, that benefits women, it benefits gender equity in the workplace, but it also benefits a whole lot of men, and just maybe, perhaps, brings back the middle class along the way. How do we get there, June? How do we make that happen?
JUNE: So, let me talk about teachers unions, and I find this really fascinating. So, my father was a carpenter. Indeed I went to law school. The Urban Development Corporation in New York. Talk about collectivism. This is Robert Moses and public instruction, that's what paid for me to go to law school, is the best my father ever did. But he always distrusted unions because. And I did because, uh, they were about hourly wage instead of. He was an independent contractor. He made more money if he worked harder. That's what he believed. Okay? And you see this negative view of unions, which has been changing recently. We did a deep dive in teachers in New Jersey. Chris Christie became governor. We have the fiscal cliff engineered by Mitch McConnell, that throws state education budgets into a tailspin. No Republican can raise taxes. You've got a crisis in the states. What's the answer? Vilify teachers. And what we saw is, by the time Chris Christie left office, he was incredibly unpopular. The teachers unions were instrumental in electing the next governor. But there are a bunch of teachers, the Badass Teachers Union in New Jersey, and they trained the group out in Arizona. And what you saw with these unions was fighting back. The politicians are attacking our schools and the more radical teachers unions viewed it all as of a piece that Chris Christie represented Wall Street. And this, you know, we're out to gut anything public. We're out to gut taxes. All of Christie's proposals is, how do we protect wealthy communities so they can spend money on their schools and make sure we get rid of, literally get rid of the public schools in Newark and replace them with charters or with vouchers. And they did. I mean, they got rid of a lot of the public schools, which are the mainstay, by the way, particularly of the black middle class. Black middle class teachers are very important to their communities, and they're the ones who get squeezed most with the charter movement. They get replaced by, you know, anyway.
EMILIE: We have to talk more about unions in this podcast because I love how people hate on teachers’ unions, but we all love our kids teachers, right? No one will throw our teacher under the bus, but we say, oh, my god, teachers are, you know, fat cats in this unionized world. And it just, there's so much of a cognitive dissonance there.
JUNE: Yeah, but that's the product of a deliberate political strategy.
EMILIE: Yeah. What's one last thought? I mean, you and I could talk for 2 hours more, I'm sure, on this topic, but one parting thought you want to leave listeners with that you feel is important. Maybe we haven't had a chance to get to yet.
JUNE: So what changed corporate America in the middle of the 20th century? We linked to a single day in 1933. There were congressional hearings. Sunshine, Charlie Mitchell, who headed National City, has been, you know, City was at the epicenter of the financial crisis in 2008. It was at the epicenter of the Great Depression, and there were hearings in which the headlines, no man is worth a million dollars a year. The scandal in the hearings is that Charlie Mitchell at the height of the Great Depression, earned a million dollars a year, and he made sure his top executives got their bonuses while the depositors went broke on disreputable and immoral sales practices. That could be the summary of our times. There has been no scandal that crystallizes that and marshals the opposition to it. And that's the moment we've been waiting for. We thought it didn't happen in 2008, and it should have.
EMILIE: Yeah. And maybe it'll happen next. I mean, I know plenty of people who believe billionaires shouldn't exist. And that kind of reminds me of that line, no man is worth a million dollars a year. And, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I'll explain that. I'm a big fan of the free market here, but not without regulation, not without rules of the road, not without enforcement, which is kind of the wild west we've been in.
JUNE: So I do want to end on an optimistic note. So Fortune 500 companies, went from 6% women, 10% women CEO's, and the 10% outperform fairly dramatically since 2016. The other 90%, Silicon Valley. The amount of money going to women run startups is small, but women co founders of startups are now up to something like 22%. And when the downturn hit, and it was downturn, that hit, because venture capital funding became harder to come by with high interest rates, the startups, with women co-founders, you know, almost a quarter, they outperform everybody else because the women run firms don't run through money as quickly. Women CEO's don't pay themselves as much in Silicon Valley, and they are much more likely to be successful in either reaching an IPO, an initial public offering, or getting bought out by a larger company. The goal of every startup is exit. The women are more successful. Why? Because they're more prudent, and because they can't get away with what the men get away with. That's my takeaway. If you want somebody who will be honest, you want someone, a person who has lose bigger by being dishonest is a good bet.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I hope the world starts to value honesty and business again. I hope the world starts to value reasonable, risk taking, prudent fiduciary responsibility, because in that world, women would, rule that world. I think, frankly, yes.
JUNE: Well they do. Women hedge funds outperform the men, but something like 97% of private equity and hedge fund managers are white males.
EMILIE: Oh, my gosh. Well, June Carbone, it's a depressing world out there, but you give me hope. So, thank you for your work. Where can our listeners, June, pick up a copy of your book, which, again, you co-authored with Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit, which comes out on May 7th.
JUNE: And you can pre order today. Barnes and Noble is offering a discount, I think, this week, and it's available on Amazon, and that's the easy way to get it. And you can get Audiobooks or Kindle or hard copy.
EMILIE: Where else can folks keep up with you and your work if they want to get in touch?
JUNE: Well, I'm at the University of Minnesota. Think about being a professor. I mean, I have a website, I have my email. It's there. And, you know, let me know.
EMILIE: I will drop all of those links in today's show. Notes thank you for the triumph that is this book, and thanks so much for spending your time with me on the podcast.
JUNE: This was fun. I do it anytime.
EMILIE: For links to everything June and I just discussed, including the Barnes and Noble link. To get your hands on a copy of Fair Shake head to bossedup.org/episode452. That's bossedup.org/episode452. June and I just traversed a lot of politics, history and the law, economic justice, and gender justice. So I want to hear what you're taking away from this conversation. Hopefully you feel a little hopeful, not just as depressed as it can be to think about the history of how we got here, but also know that to change our institutions into places that actually value collectivism over individualism, that is the heavy work ahead of us here today. And, as you've heard in recent weeks and months here on the Bossed Up podcast, we've really been trying to go beyond personal and professional hacks that you can bring to make your way in this messed up world of ours. I'm trying to really unpack not only how we can navigate this wacky, winner take all economy and business culture, but how we can, as women, be part of changing it for the better. The Problem With Self Help, which was an episode that came out back in February, really gets into this individualist versus collectivist approach. The episode Are Pay Transparency Laws Working with Zoe Cullen, a scholar who's been studying gender gaps in the workforce, was a really key episode that talked about not only what we can do to close the wage gaps, but how we can advocate for systemic solutions for doing just that. That episode came out back in March, and I'm really looking for a great source who can come join me on this podcast to talk through the connection between unionization and the rise of unions that has started to occur in recent years with gender equity, because those connections are very interesting, and I'd love to dive into them further.
So, if you have any thoughts on who would make for a great guest on that, please email me emilie@bosseedup.org. Because I've been looking for some time now.
All of this to say that when I started Bossed Up back in 2013, it was the same month that Sheryl Sandberg came out with Lean In. And for so many years, we've been focused on how women can advocate for ourselves, how we can lean in, how we can, frankly, sharpen our elbows to be more like the men. And as I continue to get older, wiser perhaps, I don't know. In recent years, I've really started to question how sufficient a strategy that is. And so what you're hearing on this episode today is not simple s***. Like, this is complex stuff, but those are the complex solutions that we actually need to disentangle the complex problems that have led us here. It's not as simple as leaning in. It's not as simple as bossin’ up. It's never been. So when we think about the systemic ways that we need to dismantle the capitalist, winner take all society that we've built, that prizes shareholder value and short term financial rewards over the good of a company, over the good of the clients that we're serving, and certainly over the good of the employees and the working class people who make our world go round. That is part of how we solve for gender inequality. That's my soapbox for the day. I am excited to hear what you're taking away. What do you think about this approach? And how can we keep this conversation going? Chime in, as always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook, which is ironic, given what we've just said about Mark Zuckerberg today. But maybe I'll shut that Facebook group down if we don't want to use it anymore. I'm totally open to that. And we have the Bossed Up LinkedIn group as an alternative place to keep the conversation going as well.
[OUTRO MUSIC IN]
So I hope to see you in there. And my inbox is always open emilie@bossedup.org thanks, as always, for listening. Until next time, let's keep bossing. As I like to say, and as the original motto of America's first black women's clubs said, let's lift as we climb.
[OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]
