Last week Laura Zubulake, a 44-year-old former Wall Street banker, won £15.6m in a sex discrimination case. A jury in New York decided her former employer UBS AG, Europe’s largest bank, had mistreated her because of her gender, and got rid of her when she complained.
“The message for all senior women on Wall Street is not to be afraid to stand up and speak out when they feel they are being treated differently,” a triumphant Zubulake said afterwards.
Leaving aside the faintly troubling question of why women should be considered “senior”, as in “ancient”, at the age of 44, I wonder how much cases such as these — London has an ongoing spate of them, too, though the amounts awarded so far have been smaller — really help women.
Obviously, abuses of power need curbing and equally obviously sexist bullying in the workplace is reprehensible. But £15.6m is a huge amount of money. You’d really have to be called an awful lot of names.
I wouldn’t begrudge the amount if it went to the hard-working immigrant who gets daily physical abuse and dog mess shoved through his letter box for years on end. I’d also quite like it if some poor put-upon drudge snuck it off her rich, philandering husband.
Needless to say, I’d be delighted to see victims of child abuse and rape, for instance, get even a fraction of this amount as compensation for their suffering. But a woman who earns £350,000 a year and gets the hump because some bloke is mean to her at work? Oh, please.
Can you imagine men suing for vast amounts of money because their boss didn’t ask them to the pub last Friday night, called them a dickhead or laughed at their tie? Can you imagine what would happen if schoolchildren sued every time someone teased them? If every woman had a fit when someone made an off-colour joke? There is no doubt that financial centres such as Wall Street, or the City of London, are not what you’d call wildly women-friendly environments in which to work. Equally, there is no doubt that any woman who finds herself in such a traditionally male bastion as the City or the law courts — from memory, the newspaper newsroom used to be pretty terrifying too — will cotton on swiftly to the fact that the sensitive-little-flower schtick isn’t really going to be much of a winner.
In order not to keel over with shock or horror every two seconds, you quickly need to develop the hide of an especially robust rhinoceros. And you do. Certainly, Zubulake must have done so for the years leading up to her sacking. How else to explain her position at UBS as one of its best-paid executives? Yet central to Zubulake’s case, which has taken three years to resolve, was the mimsy complaint that Matthew Chapin, her immediate boss, had said about her: “She’s too old and ugly and she can’t do the job.” Which, admittedly, isn’t very nice.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t necessarily have one weeping into one’s lace hanky before scurrying sobbing to the loo, either. Nor would an offer to join colleagues and clients at a strip joint (which left Zubulake “appalled”).
She also said she was regularly patronised in front of colleagues, denied lucrative accounts, discriminated against by not being asked to a couple of baseball and golf games where clients would be present and — weirdly — discriminated against by not being asked to another strip club.
Oh, and she didn’t like the position of her desk, which was placed — eew! — among the lowly PAs. No matter how I look at this, for every complaint that sounds vaguely justified there are two that just sound pathetic.
The bank’s defence, unusually enough, had the ring of truth about it. It was that Zubulake’s boss was horrible to everyone, not just her. His male colleagues had also complained about him, but interestingly none of them had gone so far as to take legal action. This is what is so madly irritating about cases like these. Women claim they want nothing more than to be treated equally and then, the second they’re teased and bullied as equals, they run screaming to the courts.
It just looks so wet, apart from anything else. Either don’t bother with the pretence of equality — there’s nothing wrong with saying “I want to be treated very nicely at all times, please, because I am a girl” — or continue clamouring for equality but deal with it like a grown-up when it comes, warts and all.
In this case, dealing with it “like a grown-up” means dealing with it like a man, because women don’t seem to be very good at confronting the realities of equality. When push comes to shove, they seem to be, for want of a better expression, all mouth and no trousers.
This is not to say there is no such thing as sexual discrimination in the City, because clearly there is an awful lot of it. Apart from anything else, men who work there are often mad, sad and greedy. They wouldn’t be one’s companions of choice, let’s say.
Everyone knows this. But it is also true that stupid men are everywhere, and making inappropriate jokes about someone’s chest or speculating about their sex life happens quite often in office environments.
In the City, such admittedly tiresome banter cost Merrill Lynch £1m last year after Elizabeth Weston complained. In the real world it happens every two seconds. And no, of course you don’t have to like it, but you don’t have to be a total feeble sap about it either.
Some might say that Zubulake has had the last laugh, and I suppose financially she may have. She can be as jubilant as she likes about her heaps of cash (though UBS is planning to appeal), but she should pipe down about the great service she has done sisterhood.
For all her triumphant rhetoric, cases such as this one set women back decades. Put very basically, Zubulake won £15.6m because she didn’t much care for being called plain.
Try as I might, I can’t for the life of me see in what possible way this constitutes any kind of victory.
- According to recent research, cash is now the gift of choice for newlyweds. Can’t anything be done to curb this repulsive trend? I understand that people who have lived together for years don’t need toasters or fish kettles (actually, nobody needs fish kettles). They’re all set up and need nothing.
Why, then, ask anything of their guests? Or if they’re so intent on said people forking out, what’s wrong with a donation to charity? Asking for wads of money is just trashy beyond words.
From now on I’ll be boycotting any wedding that suggests cash as an appropriate present. It isn’t.
