Lady Business: Royal pay equity, Wall Street wealth, and inspiring losers
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-first issue, published March 15, 2018.
Even the Queen
One of my favorite writers growing up was Connie Willis, a science fiction author who's written some delightful books and some even better short stories. She frequently plays with time travel, riffs on romantic comedy tropes, and sketches a mean dystopia; I think a lot these days about "The Last of the Winnebegos" and "Daisy, in the Sun," both about people enduring individual tragedies while the wider world burns into apocalypse. (Recently I’ve also been remembering "All My Darling Daughters," an outer-space-boarding-school dystopia about gaslighting and sexual abuse.)
But this week the Connie Willis story that came most to mind was "Even the Queen," a futuristic comedy about social pressures, PMS, and the biological imperatives of being female. Like menstruating! (I.e., “Even the Queen got her period.”)
Or, this week: Getting paid less than your male co-star, even when you’re the star of a TV series about, well, the Queen.
The actress Claire Foy, who charmed critics and fans as a young Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series “The Crown,” was paid less than her co-star Matt Smith, who played the queen’s husband, executive producers acknowledged on Tuesday at the INTV Conference in Jerusalem.
Oh, sigh. (Though this does help explain why, by the end of the first season, The Crown seemed to be less about the titular role and more about what it’s like to be the insecure whiner married to it. I mean, I get it! If you’re paying Smith more than Foy, you might as well get your money’s worth by giving him more to do.)
With decisions like this, it’s all too easy to see why women aren’t expecting equal pay for equal work anytime this century. That’s not a rhetorical flourish: “The World Economic Forum now estimates global pay parity is a century away, an increase from about 80 years in 2016,” Bloomberg reported last week. [Emphasis mine.]
That article mostly blames a lack of women in the most highly-paid executive roles, like CEO. But it’s obviously more than that, since even a Queen can’t get paid the most for the Hollywood equivalent of the CEO role.
And it’s not just the queens; pay disparity starts low and levels up. Even the women employed in lucrative mid-career jobs, at places like investment banks, can’t get paid as well as their male colleagues. Just ask Barclays, which last month admitted that its female investment bankers get paid, on average, 48 percent less than their male peers.
Finance is an interesting sector to consider, because it’s also one of those industries that’s been spared the worst of the #MeToo headlines in recent months. Various explanations have been put forward for this, including the industry’s rampant use of arbitration agreements (so any harassment victims are more likely to be barred from speaking out publicly, or from joining class-action lawsuits) and the argument that the industry has gotten smarter and more professional since the Wolf of Wall Street era. (“By [the early 1990s], at least in the more genteel parts of Wall Street, such as investment banking at large firms, the worst forms of sexual harassment from the roaring 80s had been toned down,” Bethany McLean wrote in a smart and thorough Vanity Fair piece last month.)
Which does not mean that Wall Street, or finance, is any more of a gender utopia than tech or law or Hollywood. I was particularly struck this week by the relatively high harassment rates in wealth management, according to a big survey package published by my former colleagues at American Banker.
“Wealth management” is often thought of as a slightly friendlier sector for women on Wall Street. The hours tend to be better than investment banking, and many of the most prominent women on Wall Street (JPMorgan’s Mary Erdoes, former Merrill Lynch CEO Sallie Krawcheck) run or ran wealth divisions. But American Banker’s survey found that “on the prevalence of sexual misconduct, the financial advisory industry fared the worst.”
Krawcheck, now CEO of financial advisory tech startup Ellevest, started her career in that Wolf of Wall Street era, and has the stories to prove it. She also left the industry, after holding two of the most powerful positions at two of the biggest banks--and getting pushed out of both.
Which is fundamentally why I disagree with many of the critiques of #MeToo, and with those who fear the backlash more than the movement. If a woman is just smart enough and good enough and lucky enough and chill enough, this argument goes, she’s better off now than if we all start talking about harassment and pay disparities. That’s such a drag, and makes men even more reluctant to hire and promote us.
Except that not talking about it hasn’t really worked. After all, without talking about it, even the Queen gets sexually harassed. Even the Queen gets paid less.
Awards and Inspirations
It's been an exciting week, work-wise: my profile of BlackLine founder Therese Tucker won a SABEW honorable mention for feature writing, and on Tuesday my colleagues and I attended the ASME awards luncheon, where Inc. was a finalist for General Excellence.
While we didn't win, it sincerely was an honor to be nominated--and to be in the company of some other amazing runners-up. Some of my favorite writing all year was Kathryn Schulz's beautifully-structured essay for the New Yorker on loss and grief (finalist in the Essay/Criticism category):
My father, in addition to being scatterbrained and mismatched and menschy and brilliant, is dead. I lost him, as we say, in the third week of September, just before the autumn equinox. Since then, the days have darkened, and I, too, have been lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that I have been at a loss—a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.
Another outstanding runner-up, a finalist in the Reporting Category, was Lizzie Presser’s thorough, enraging and sad story for California Sunday Magazine about what happens to the Filipinos who often wind up in indentured servitude—or worse--aboard cruise ships:
In the United States, seamen can file for damages on the basis of dangerous working conditions or shoddy medical care, for example. They can receive payments that cover any future loss of wages and ongoing medical expenses, which can span a lifetime. In the Philippines, on the other hand, seamen are offered payouts based on a predetermined compensation chart, in which each body part has a price tag. If there’s a spinal injury and the company-sponsored doctor says a seafarer’s back has lost a third of its mobility, it’s valued at $7,465. … If a worker dies: $50,000.
Lady Bits
--Latest plane movie recommendation: Atomic Blonde, which I totally expected to be a futuristic thriller instead of a “historical” spy movie about the Berlin Wall and all the great hair products available to secret agents crossing it. (It also took its fight scenes way too seriously for a movie that was basically a “Best of the 80s” music video montage.) But Atomic Blonde did make me want to go rewatch Aeon Flux, a not-good but far more interesting scifi spy thriller, which also stars Charlize Theron and some highly improbable spy shoes.
--Programming note: Lady Business will be off next week, returning on March 29.
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