True or False: Women Win When They Don't Sue
Amity Shlaes has written an interesting opinion piece of the benefits and drawbacks of litigation in business. Specifically she writes that litigation by women could be hurting other women in the long run by making companies in certain fields wary of hiring women. Litigation also hurts business, she says. She makes the point that there are "safe" companies that follow the rules and "wild" companies that don't, and in her opinion these "wild" companies are more creative. Litigation hurts these "wild" companies and reduces their creativity.
The very same countries that rank lower on the entrepreneurship charts star when it comes to gender equality. Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Ireland are top countries in the 2011 update of Unesco’s survey. Singapore, No. 1 for business opportunity, ranks 57th of 135 countries, below Jamaica, Namibia, Russia and Honduras on the gender-gap index. The U.S. ranks fourth when it comes to doing business, but only 17th when it comes to measuring the gender gap.
What are your thoughts? Does litigation by women hurt the chances of other women breaking in to certain fields?
Frankly I think the "safe" and "wild" part maybe hurt her main point of the article. I am honestly not sure what to think here. I believe that the negative effects of litigation could have a small effect on other women obtaining jobs in these industries. However, with equal opportunity employment laws and affirmative action I think that many companies will and should still hire women, even if they are concerned with possible future litigation. They will simply take greater steps to make sure their employees show little history of litigation as is written in the article.
FALSE
Amity is a political conservative...the same brand of woman that runs for office on the platform that the woman's place is at home alla Michelle 'doublespeak' Bachman. Some women have chosen to get ahead individually by selling women out collectively...that's what this is. If suing in the workplace was really working against women, there wouldn't be a female MD in my office, and the sleazy VP would be banging the single mother secretary in the ass as extortion to keep her job and paying her minimum wage...per his own admission.
Sorry kid, this is a fraud.
....thus making women the problem
...thus making the author a woman who gets ahead by selling out other women
...which is what conservatives do
The author also concocts some fictional notion of women being taken advantage of somehow transates into tech startups, or entrepeneurialism, or slow growth economies in some cases compared to high powered economies or something something something dark side blah blah blah. If her thesis is correct, why isn't Afgahnistan the center of innovation on earth right now? In fact, according to the author's rationalle, Mark Zuckerberg should be setting up tech R&D in the Sub-Sarahan regions that are really 'wild' and where women don't sue even when they get their naughty bits cut off.
I'm not so much a champion for women's rights as I flat out don't like or respect most conservative thought...if you could call it that.
So the issue is (1) screening out litigious people and (2) narrower hiring preferences based on comanies' past experiences with the legal system. THAT I get. So a revised thesis telling women not to sue for stupid reasons (re: the parket valet checked my ass out so I'll sue the company for all it's worth) will work to their advantage makes sense as opposed to saying that women should keep their yap shut in general (re: my boss tried to rape me). Also, this applies equally to both sexes, there is no need to single out women.
Clarifying one vs the other would make a significant difference, but in the meantime it is what it looks like: a chick making a buck selling out women.
This^^
Suing for legitimate reasons should not be discouraged.
But frivolous law suits or ones that could be and should be settled outside of court probably would hurt future employment of women
All I know is that if I'm ever a small business owner, no way in hell I'm hiring a woman unless the job is gender critical. Just easier not to have to worry about sexual harassment suits, accusations of discriminatory promotion policies/pay, etc., or maternity leave. Also, don't have to worry about replacing a great employee having a midlife crises and deciding to drop out of the workforce to be a mother. I don't think my position is sexist, in that I'm not making any statements about a woman's ability to perform a job. But why introduce the possibility of headaches when they are unnecessary?
If you treat your employees fairly you shouldn't worry about law suits... If you are treated unfairly definitely keep the law suit as part of your arsenal.
The dichotomy presented in the article is false. There aren't "square" companies that don't discriminate and "cool" companies that might discriminate.
If you are worried about hiring women because of potential law suits, then you should re-examine the way you do business. You're an amateur.
I think this is an issue that gets blown out of proportion by the media. The way it's often portrayed it's as if you have an office where everyone is checking out Playboy at their desks and slapping secretaries on the ass on the one hand, and men won't make eye contact with a woman for fear of a lawsuit on the other.
In reality, most men generally respect sexual boundries in the workplace and women are treated fairly. If any minor issues arise, women flag it and the offender stops doing it (example: one of my analyst buddies back in the day put a swimsuit calendar up in his cube, a female VP felt that was inappropriate and told him to take it down - problem solved). In other words, people are reasonable.
Aside from a few rare cases where there is some serious misconduct, harrassment lawsuits are usually initiated by lower level employees who are either on their way out and are trying to get back at their employer or just think they can make a quick buck. These cases usually drift through the EEOC channels for a year or two and then settle for something like $30 or $40K.
Bottom line, as others have said, unless you have a bunch of idiots at your firm women shouldn't have anything to worry about and you should be fine save a few nuisance law suits from the occasional laid-off AP clerk.
I don't think the problem is women filing sexual harassment lawsuits. I think the problem is America's infatuation with (frivolous) litigation in general (ie. McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit, intellectual property law, etc). Litigation does not add-value to any product, and the millions of dollars companies spend on settlements and court cases could have been used for further innovation.
Here is a quote from William J Baumol's paper, Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive.
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