A jury previously awarded Shannon Phillips $25.6 million.
Ditto here: I’ve actually seen “token” hires on gender (and only in one place), never on race.
Furthermore, that one place which had gender quotas and which at least in the departmemt I was working with clearly had hired some people for their gender, not their competence, had massive corporate culture and even profitability problems (think bankrupt bank with strong political connections that got unconditionally rescued with taxpayer money after the 2008 Crash and just kept losing billions and getting even more disfunctional).
It makes zero business sense to care about anything but competence when hiring somebody, and I say this as somebody who has actually been part of hiring decisions in a few places.
Old lady here - I was the first woman in my role in a couple of jobs back in the 80s and was accused of being a token plenty of times. Had to slog my way uphill through a mountain of sexist shit every single day while seeing men cruise along because they played golf with someone high up.
The “old boys network” is still alive and well, though its “membership” criteria are usually on things other than gender specifically: for example in the UK “membership” is often having gone to the right exclusive private schools and as those are often gender-segregated (i.e. “all boys schools” and “all girls schools”), you end up with discrimination in both the gender and social class one was born in axes.
Personally I find the whole “being buddies with the boss” type career progression extremelly unprofessional and any manager who is taking decisions in a professional capacity based on who his or her mates are, is working against the best interests of the company and needs to be replaced.
Then again, my professional training during my core professional learning years was mostly done in The Netherlands so I’m very strict on such things in the context of the management cultures in other countries I worked in such as the UK and Portugal were cronyism is rife in management, often linked to the kind of pre-existing relationships formed in non-gender-neutral situations.
PS: And the place were I saw “token” women openly had quotas and the incompetent but somehow working here thing only affected permanent employees in management positions. The interesting part is that of the 3 female low level managers in my department one was clearly very competent, one was clearly very incompetent and one was unclear. Further, this was the single most sexist (as in, very machist) place I ever worked (and my career now spans two and a half decades and 4 countries).
I get the feeling that the very competent manager there who happenned to be a woman lost from there being quotas for female managers rather than gained from it (she constantly had to prove her competence and was often not take seriously), whilst clearly the incompetent one was only there because of quotas and in meetings acted as an “attractive female provider of adoration” for her manager.
None of this justifies the unjust treatment you suffered, by the way.
There were two women that were rumored to have been hired/promoted into a VP position and a Director position only for their gender about 6 years ago. I didn’t work with either of them closely. They both left the company a year later. I’m not sure whether that was vindication of the rumors, or just a turn of circumstance, but worst case their gender bought them only a temporary position.
Just to be clear - plenty more women in both leadership and technical positions, and have been for years. Just those two were the only ones where I ever got a hint of that sort of thing.
Yeah, this one time was also the only time I saw any such thing and my career spans over 25 years and 4 countries.
I think we’re overall in agreement, just putting a finer point on it - On this and the related racial topic, I’m of the opinion that far more people think these policies result in unqualified people getting jobs they don’t deserve than ever actually happens. No business has payroll to spare that they can just shovel onto worthless bodies to satisfy diversity goals, and I refuse to believe that there’s more than a vanishingly small percentage of folks who remain in such a position longer than the time it takes for management to realize they are worthless.
