Morgan Stanley is one of the biggest and most respected names on Wall Street, but they suffer from a peculiar syndrome, an ailment that seems to affect government agencies, small companies and huge corporations alike. If you have the wrong set of chromosomes, be prepared to be paid less well and promoted less often than your male counterparts.
This week, Morgan Stanley settled a gender discrimination suit filed by a former employee, Allison Schieffelin, for $54 million. Schieffelin will receive $12 million herself; the remaining amount will be distributed among other female employees who have been discriminated against by the broking giant. Morgan Stanley chose to settle rather than let the case go to trial for very good reasons. About 24 other women were willing to testify that the Wall Street firm failed to promote women to senior positions and endorsed a boy’s-own culture that deemed it was okay to feel up younger women, and it was just fine for male employees to entertain their clients at strip clubs.
Wal-Mart, the US mall chain, is likely to feel the heat next. A sex discrimination suit filed by six women employees in California has received class action status. News reports said that Wal-Mart may face a billion-dollar payout — in back pay alone — between 1998 and the present date. The women who filed the suit say that Wal-Mart discriminates heavily between male and female employees. Women get from 5 to 15 per cent less than their male counterparts, and a mere 10 per cent of women make it as store manager.
Wal-Mart and Morgan Stanley might derive a shred of bleak comfort from the knowledge that they are not alone in their practices. Women who work for the US government under the Bush administration are paid 78 per cent of the salaries earned by male employees, said columnist Susan Estrich. And America’s only leading the way. This January, British finance unions Amicus and Unifi announced that the pay gap between men and women working in financial services was as high as 43 per cent.
The only reason that pay discrimination hasn’t become a huge issue in India is because women are still struggling for more basic rights — including in many cases, the right to step out of the home and work in the first place. In some companies, the disparity is actually justified on the grounds that women will get married, need more time for household work, have children, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. It’s interesting that this argument is made by men who refuse to recognise that the time they spend away from running their homes or bringing up their children is time some woman or the other — wives, mothers, domestic help — have to spend in order to do that particular job.
One way in which to force change would be to remove the veil of secrecy that surrounds the question of pay. If women knew that the man in the next cubicle was out-earning them for doing the same job, they might get more active about the issue. The other way, of course, is for companies to recognise that you need to pay men and women the same, to maintain a workplace where women aren’t second-class citizens, and to restore some dignity to labour. But that’s asking for the moon. Unless you’re backed by a decent jury and an active legal system.
