(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I've seen my facebook page blow up with people talking about the 'women in binders' remark, but nobody actually seems to be talking about what Romney said.

Recall, Obama led off by talking about the Ledbetter Act. He said look at that, we have a concrete legislative accomplishment that I promise you made women's lives in the workplace better by obligating pay equity.

And then Romney steps up with actual real experience with hiring people, and he says you're missing the point, Obama. It's easy for companies to meet the letter of the statute and still do better for men than women. It was so easy for my staffers to come to me with a list of people to hire and tell me with sincere conviction that the men on the list were there because they were the only qualified candidates. It was easy for them to tell me that the majority of the applicants were male. They weren't actively trying to be misogynistic, they weren't actively trying to break the law, they were just doing their job in the easiest way possible for them. If I had just followed the letter of the anti-discrimination laws I would have had no problem discriminating against women and making it look like I had made a good-faith effort to hire without consideration of gender, because I had. We simply hadn't thought about gender.

But, Romney said, that's not good enough! As soon as I actually reached out affirmatively and looked for women to hire, I found plenty. Binders full. There are competent and qualified women out there, but no statute is ever going to force companies to hire them. That requires leadership from the people doing the hiring. What we need isn't government enforcement. What we need is a culture change, so that people realize that doing that extra work will create a better workforce. And I'm standing on this stage in front of millions of viewers committing to taking a leadership role in changing the culture.



I have not always liked Romney, and I didn't always like him in this debate. But I thought this moment was a great contrast between Republican ideology and Democratic ideology, and it showed why I will always be more skeptical of Democratic ideology. Passing a regulation doesn't fix things automatically. Sometimes regulations make things more complicated and more expensive for business and they still don't fix things, because they can't. Some problems are not problems for government.

Comments

[zandperl]

Apparently, his anecdote is false - he never went out asking women's groups for applicants to add to the pool, they came to him before he was in office. However, this is not my main complaint about his "binders full of women," I'm willing to take the story as a parable and not as a recounting of factual events.

It seems like the meaning you got out of what Romney said was very different from what I got out of it. What I got out of it was "Women don't apply for high paying jobs, and the only way we can get women in those jobs is if people like me go out and get the women applicants." This is such an untrue, sexist, and paternalistic statement that it was one of many times I wanted to punch my computer screen, and it may be the one that made me close the window.

As you know, I am very adverse to anger. Romney makes me very angry, sometimes because of how what he says directly contradicts my experiences as a public employee in MA while he was governor (e.g., "I value education", "I balanced the budget"), and sometimes because of how privileged a life he has led and how little he understands about everyone who's not a rich white male.

[seekingferret]

What I got out of it was "Women don't apply for high paying jobs, and the only way we can get women in those jobs is if people like me go out and get the women applicants."

This can be true, though. If the announcement of a high paying job is written in a way that isn't designed to be inclusive, it can result in less women applying than men. If a job seeks out a person with a degree in a male-dominated field and doesn't leave the door open for people to apply who have comparable experience, it can result in less women applying than men. If a lot of the canvassing for a job is done through one's social network, which is male dominated, that can result in more male applicants than female. Equality doesn't come from wishing it so, it doesn't come from mandating it, it comes from people actually confronting the root causes of the problem and changing the things they're doing wrong.

And I don't believe you can legislatively fix problems like this without breaking bigger things. The apparatus for dealing with diversity in the American workplace is immense and expensive and it's completely broken. My father, who represents his company against such complaints as part of his job, told me about a conference with the head of New York's human rights commission where they spoke about the problem of declining complaints as if it were a problem of declining sales. She was brainstorming ways for them to drum up more business, because it's their livelihood, not a cause. And Obama's answer to the question was to acknowledge there was a problem and say "Don't worry, we passed another law!" To me he's the one who came off sounding like he had no comprehension of how the world works.

[hatman]

Sometimes the law is the only tool that will work. Without civil rights laws, we never would have had integrated schools or lunch counters or any number of other steps towards equality.

The Lily Ledbetter Act addresses a problem with the law. Lily was paid a fraction of what her male counterparts were being paid for doing the same job merely because she's a woman. She missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars due to discrimination. When she found out, she sued, only to have the case thrown out because the court ruled that it had been too long. The new law says that others like her can still sue.

It's not a complete solution, but it is a big step forward. And it's shocking that just about every Republican in Congress voted against it. Including Paul Ryan.

Will it get more women hired? No. But, to this day, women are, on average, making about 75 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same job. In just about every field of work. The law gives them a way to fight that.

As for Romney... It's like zandperl said. It's completely false. Here's what actually happened. In short:

He said that he came into office, saw that there weren't many women in top positions, and asked people to go looking for female applicants.

What really happened is that a women's advocacy group approached both candidates during the campaign, complained that there were only about 30% women in cabinet positions, gave them a stack of female applicants, urged the candidates to try to hire more women, and asked them to sign a pledge that they'd try.

Romney took office and did place women in about 42% of the higher positions. Except that most of them were in offices he explicitly didn't care about. In several cases, he put women into figurehead positions and told them that he didn't want their departments to do anything. And, by the time he left office, it was down to 25% women anyway.

Also, even if you accept the story as told, what he's saying is that with all his vaunted business experience and surrounded by professional advisers, he still had to actually go digging around to find qualified women? How is that in any way an endorsement of his ability or desire to address gender inequality?

sorry for the delay

[seekingferret]

I did some reading up on the Ledbetter case. I actually read Alito's ruling and passages from the bill. The court ruled that though the system Goodyear used to decide pay was not facially discriminatory, the performance reviews had been conducted with the intent of discriminating against her on the basis of her gender. It ruled, however, that the specific performance reviews that had been discriminatory had not only taken place years before, but that Ledbetter had not promptly filed her complaint even after learning of the pay disparity, but had instead waited until years later.

So yes, the law now explicitly authorizes the legal argument she made to the court, that every paycheck received is a fresh violation of the statute and makes the complaint ripe again. What I suppose this leads to is greater incentive toward pay equality, since employees now have greater power to sue if they detect pay imbalances, even if they don't act promptly . It certainly also increases the complexity of a performance review, since managers are now responsible not only for fairly evaluating the performance of their employee at the present moment, but for evaluating them in the past, possibly even before the manager was working there, to make sure a violation wasn't committed in past performance reviews.

But what's striking is how bizarre a solution this is. If the problem is that 180 days after a violation is too short a time to file, as even Alito concedes it seems to him to be in his decision in Ledbetter, extend the time! That too will add expense and complication for businesses, but it's at least logical and clear. The reason Congress didn't go for that approach is because Congress intended from the start to have a short statute of limitations in its EEOC law. The weird thing about the Ledbetter law is that it's tailored to engineer a weirdly specific solution to a problem that drew public attention for its apparently inappropriate resolution, without breaking the careful balance that exists in EEOC law between allowing employees to redress legitimate discrimination and requiring employers to expend undue effort to demonstrate compliance. See, all regulation is a compromise between adding extra cost to doing business and solving some problem the government believes it has an interest in. Congress did not want, and still does not want, to allow arbitrary EEOC complaints by employees. It doesn't want the situation where a person is discriminated against and ten or twenty years later they seek financial redress. If Lily Ledbetter had wanted to complain about her unfair performance reviews, she should have filed her complaint when she learned of the pay disparity. That's what the Supreme Court said explicitly. That's what Congress said implicitly.

Will it get more women hired? No. But, to this day, women are, on average, making about 75 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same job. In just about every field of work. The law gives them a way to fight that.

The 75 cents number is fiercely debated because the assumptions one makes when calculating it have a huge impact on the number. But I'm not prepared to litigate it with you. I'm willing to concede that women are paid less than men, overall. That notwithstanding, the law doesn't give them a new way to fight it. They already had a way, called the EEOC. What the law does is make the law governing the EEOC more friendly to plaintiffs and more hostile to defendants. And at a certain point in this argument I need to go back to my exegesis of Mitt. The bottom line is that these regulations don't actually work, no matter how friendly they are to the plaintiffs. They make things more expensive and they still don't make hiring directors hire more women.

I'm not really too invested in the literal truth of Romney's story. I'm prepared to accept it as a parable, because I've seen things like it happen. It is so easy to be the pillock who hires more men than women and doesn't realize they're doing anything wrong (And Mitt definitely casts himself as the pillock in this story, albeit the pillock who discovers his mistake). It is so easy to construct facially equitable job criteria or promotion criteria or salary criteria and then find that they favor men. It's not even obvious to me that in all cases, doing so is wrong*, though I will certainly concede that there are even cases where it is done unintentionally and is still wrong. I'm not prepared to hide behind ignorance and privilege as excuses for not working toward gender fairness in the workplace. And I think there are many cases where it is good that we have the EEOC as a resource when people are discriminated against in the workplace. But that's not the solution to the problem of pay disparity or hiring imbalance. It will never be the solution to the problem.

what he's saying is that with all his vaunted business experience and surrounded by professional advisers, he still had to actually go digging around to find qualified women?

I really don't understand the suggestion that Mitt should have somehow already had women on his list. Let's face facts. There are many more corporate executives who are male than female. There are many more non-profit executives who are male than female. There are many more state legislators, county legislators, city council members who are male than female. These are obvious pools to pull from when looking for cabinet members. It stands to reason that unless you put some effort in, the pool of candidates is going to skew male. Romney was saying that there are a great many qualified, talented women out there who would do great in these jobs, but you're not going to get them without, yes, digging, because they're not in the obvious places. If you just sit back and do the same apparently gender-neutral hiring procedure you've been doing for years, you will not get as many women as men for high powered jobs. And regulation from the EEOC will not change that.

This isn't news. Structural barriers to women occupying positions of power isn't something Romney discovered. But liberals have had the theory for years that those structural problems can be solved with government-imposed social engineering. And Romney's story, whatever its truth, is at minimum a clear parable about the problems of solving social problems through legislated social engineering. You can't force companies to hire women. It just doesn't work, and all the law does is let you be self-congratulatory, and beefs up our federal anti-discrimination apparatus.



*One of the cases Justice Alito cites in his Ledbetter decision is of a flight attendant fired in the seventies for getting pregnant. Upon being rehired some years later, her seniority was reset to zero. The Court in that case ruled that though the original act of firing was discriminatory (and outside the statute of limitations by the time she filed her complaint) , the act of treating her as a new hire with no seniority was a neutral application of the company's policies and was not discriminatory. Now, obviously decisions like this hurt pay equity, and you could advance an argument that if pay equity were really our goal, leaving work to give birth would never impact seniority. But I think this feels like one of those cases where we sacrifice gender pay equity to the goal of general fairness. If a rule is constructed with the intention of being fair to all genders, and it actually is in general fair to both genders but in one particular instance because of fluky bad luck it turns out to hurt women more than men, how far do we need to go to create loopholes in the generally fair rule? Is it fair to workers who maintain continual employment as the company desires and are rewarded for it that a person who moves in and out of the job, costing the company money in retraining and other HR expenses, gets treated the same? I'm not saying necessarily that the Court got the moral answer in that case, because obviously there was legitimate discrimination when she was fired for getting pregnant, but when I try working out the implications, I find I'm not happy with solving the problem by discarding a fair and neutral rule. I don't want a legal system where the court can say, "No, this rule was not discriminatory, but we claim the right to invalidate it anyway in order to redress a different, discriminatory rule." That's not a legal system, that's a house of cards.

[(Anonymous)]

But, for a cabinet position, being in a position to be noticed is one of the qualifications. Either Romney is blind enough that he does not pay attention to his female staff/colleagues/etc, or they were not qualified. It seems that the former is more likely, and while it is nice that he found that there was a problem, it sounded like he thought that it was *a* problem, rather than something that he, personally, did wrong. The alternative, of course, is that they were not qualified -- and, uh, I got to say, if I knew that my resume for a job came out of a "binder full of women", I would feel quite uncomfortable with the situation -- there is degrees of affirmative action, and I think that this goes way too far for me.

I think that my parents would agree with you -- it was decent behavior on his part nonetheless, and the rest of his answer about flexible working hours was also entirely reasonable -- flextime is a thing and an issue and important for high-level positions. The delivery was terrible, however, and made me very uncomfortable.

-- ekate,
who usually doesn't comment here, but has really strong opinions on this

[seekingferret]

But, for a cabinet position, being in a position to be noticed is one of the qualifications.

I'm not sure I fully understand this statement, so if my response seems to be responding to the wrong argument, please correct me.

However, my point was been underpinned by the thesis that designing the qualifications for a particular job is not a neutral act. You come up with a set of requirements that you believe are a reasonable proxy for the job that actually needs to be performed, you seek out the person who appears to most accurately matches your set of requirements, and you hire them. But both coming up with the requirements and determining if someone matches them are subject to the biases of the person responsible for the hiring. If I believe that a computer science degree is a good proxy for competence for a programming job, I'll make that a requirement of the job. That doesn't actually mean that the person best suited for the programming job has a computer science degree. It just means that the person best suited to pass my screening process has a computer science degree. And there are more men than women with computer science degrees.

I think 'being in a position to be noticed' is similar to 'having a computer science degree'. It's a credential that might make a better cabinet secretary and might not, but like 'having a computer science degree', it is probably in our current society skewed male, because of the structural imbalances in our society that skew positions with higher profiles and greater power toward men. There are more men than women as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. There are more men than women in Congress, in state legislatures, on city councils. Noah and Hatman have both said to me on this post "Romney as a businessman should have already known women he could hire." This doesn't make any sense to me. As a businessman he's well-placed to see the problem, but he's not well-placed to see lots of potential female candidates.

if I knew that my resume for a job came out of a "binder full of women", I would feel quite uncomfortable with the situation -- there is degrees of affirmative action, and I think that this goes way too far for me.

Well, think of it this way. Up until this point, he had been looking at a "binder full of men". Do you feel uncomfortable about that? Did the men benefit from an affirmative action of sorts in not being compared against qualified (though not necessarily credentialed) women? When you're trying to counteract your natural biases, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to do something that specifically calls attention to the people that your biases harm. (as a somewhat analogous case, when I did the challenge of trying to read 50 books by non-white authors, I wasn't forsaking good books by white authors for bad books by black ones. I was making a different choice between good books, trying to overcome the fact that the majority of the books that are advertised, discussed by friends, and most obvious in bookstores are by white authors, so that without making a conscious effort to read books by white authors, the majority of books I read were) Romney wasn't advocating hiring unqualified women, so I don't really understand your hesitation.

And the point is, we can keep adding anti-discrimination laws. We can keep making it easier to sue over pay disparities. In some cases it will probably help. But the root problem won't be fixed until the people who are actually making hiring choices start using selection criteria that don't favor men. And there's no fair way to do that legislatively, because it horrifies me that we might start building a society where you can't take into account legitimate qualifications like "has a computer science degree" or "being in a position to be noticed" because they skew male. I'm okay with affirmative action when it's a business decision, because I do believe it's not only reasonable but important to recognize that there are structural deficiencies that are keeping qualified women away from the jobs and salaries that properly recognize their talents. I'm not okay with legislated affirmative action.

There's a big difference between Mitt Romney as a person making hiring decisions saying "The criteria we've been using to select employees is biased against women, so we need to start seeking out criteria that do better at giving us competent people who are women" and the law telling Mitt Romney that he needs to hire more women. The latter privileges anti-discrimination over good sense.

[(Anonymous)]

The real question is: why did Romney need somebody to get him some binders? How is it possible that he has spent so long in the business world but didn't know any qualified women himself? That's what is truly bizarre about this to me.

-Noah

[seekingferret]

I'm still working on my rather lengthy answers to Kate and Hatman, because I think their comments are thoughtful and deserve a thoughtful response. But seriously, Noah? What magical powers do you think him being in business ought to have given him to fight structural discrimination? This is a section of my response to Hatman.

I really don't understand the suggestion that Mitt should have somehow already had women on his list. Let's face facts. There are many more corporate executives who are male than female. There are many more non-profit executives who are male than female. There are many more state legislators, county legislators, city council members who are male than female. These are obvious pools to pull from when looking for cabinet members. It stands to reason that unless you put some effort in, the pool of candidates is going to skew male. Romney was saying that there are a great many qualified, talented women out there who would do great in these jobs, but you're not going to get them without, yes, digging, because they're not in the obvious places. If you just sit back and do the same apparently gender-neutral hiring procedure you've been doing for years, you will not get as many women as men for high powered jobs. And regulation from the EEOC will not change that.

This isn't news. Structural barriers to women occupying positions of power isn't something Romney discovered. But liberals have had the theory for years that those structural problems can be solved with government-imposed social engineering. And Romney's story, whatever its truth, is at minimum a clear parable about the problems of solving social problems through legislated social engineering.