Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy

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To our families.

NRC, JRC, NEL

Introduction

A. J. Vandermeyden had every reason to believe she would succeed at Tesla. She was passionate about Tesla’s mission: the effort to disrupt the automobile industry by producing an emission-free electric car that could be sold on a mass-market basis to the world. She was so inspired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s transformative vision that, in 2013, the then 30-year-old Vandermeyden parked herself on a bench outside Tesla’s main headquarters in Palo Alto, California—and waited. When she saw someone sporting a Tesla T-shirt, she introduced herself and delivered her please hire me speech to him. Against all odds, it worked. She started at Tesla a few weeks later as a Headquarters Product Specialist in the Inside Sales department.

Once at Tesla, she earned her promotions the way the men did—by hustling. She had an undergraduate degree from UCLA in the biological sciences, experience in pharmaceutical sales, and no background whatsoever in automobile production. She got steady promotions, and when the head of an automotive manufacturing unit learned she had worked for twenty-six hours straight on a project, he wanted her commitment and drive on his team. She had landed a dream job as a manufacturing engineer.

The General Assembly Department that Vandermeyden joined produced Tesla’s world-changing cars. The atmosphere was intense. Tesla is one of the most innovative companies in the world, one employee wrote in a blogpost, but that same employee also explained that it is often like working for a company of the future under working conditions of the past. Not only was the pressure unrelenting, but Vandermeyden also maintained that she was subject to pervasive harassment. It wasn’t unusual for her to be the only woman in meetings with forty to fifty men. When Vandermeyden became a manufacturing engineer and was on the factory floor, the men greeted her with catcalls, whistling, and inappropriate name-calling.

But in the end it took more than sexism to do her in. It was her commitment to the mission. She discovered inadequacies in Tesla’s quality testing of cars that others had missed. She even suggested a way to fix the problem. That’s when her career appears to have collided with the unspoken rules of the winner take all (WTA) economy. In the complaint she subsequently filed against Tesla, she charged that the automaker had retaliated against her for complaints about discrimination and the company’s quality-testing flaws.

The WTA economy reserves a disproportionate share of institutional power and rewards for those at the top. Elon Musk could be the poster child for this new economy. The not-so-secret key to his success, after all, has been the audaciousness of his goals and his drive to do whatever is necessary to achieve them. The WTA economy rewards Musk’s outsized ambitions—and his ability to impose them on his workers. Under Musk, Tesla reached a trillion-dollar valuation (that for a time made Musk the richest man in the world) not just by designing an innovative car but also by setting seemingly impossible production goals and ultimately producing more cars in a shorter period than industry analysts thought possible. Musk admitted that the company was able to do so by allowing quality issues to remain during the production ramp-up. A profile of Musk and his methods noted that [t]hose who do not wish to toil under such conditions know where to find the door. In the WTA economy, Musk, who like Vandermeyden had no previous experience with automobiles, could create a new company; channel his personal ambitions through it; run roughshod over workers, labor laws, and securities regulations; and emerge victorious so long as he delivered what Wall Street valued.

After three years at Tesla, Vandermeyden decided that she had had enough and she sued Tesla in the fall of 2016, claiming sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation for her whistle-blowing about the car-testing inadequacies. According to Tesla, the company investigated Vandermeyden’s claims. A spokesperson said, After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms. Vandermeyden’s claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla. Ultimately, after Tesla insisted on arbitration—ensuring that Vandermeyden would never have a chance to present her case in court or to the public—the parties dismissed the case, reportedly because of a confidential settlement.

This book started with a question: Why, in an era of supposed gender equality, have women stalled in the American workplace? The more we dug into the issue, the more we discovered stories about women like Vandermeyden: talented, driven women who compete on the same terms as men but still do not succeed on the same terms as men.

The three of us are law professors. If you combine all our efforts, we have been studying women, employment, and the family for over a hundred years. Among us, we have written more than twenty books. And yet, while working in our respective positions at universities across the country, we discovered something we did not expect to find. Despite the tremendous gains of the women’s movement over the past half-century, the gap between men’s and women’s economic performance in the United States is not closing.

The statistics that shocked us most—and that persuaded us to write this book—involved the gap between male and female wages.

When we started our research more than six years ago, the overall figures showed that women were, ever so slowly, gaining on men and the wage gap was narrowing. This seemed like promising news, except that after the mid-1990s the only reason women appeared to be gaining ground on men had nothing to do with women’s progress; it was almost entirely due to the fact that wages for blue-collar men were falling dramatically during that same period. Then when we looked at the numbers for college graduates, we found that the gender gap in wages was increasing. At first, we struggled to believe our own findings. We were so used to hearing that women had become the better-educated sex and that education was the key to advancement. And that used to be true; in the 1970s and ’80s, women’s wages were gaining on men’s, and those gains were associated with more education. By 2000, women had become the better-educated sex, earning more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men, and since 2006, more doctorate degrees. Yet, it was in these groups—the ranks of college graduates as a group and the highest earners among college graduates, in particular—where gender disparities had grown at the fastest rate. In 2019, a Goldman Sachs study received a lot of press for its claim that if present trends continued, women would not catch up with men in terms of wages for another hundred or so years. By the time we finished the book, we realized that if present trends continue, women would never catch up; indeed, the most recent reports bear out those predictions: they show the gender wage gap, as a whole between men and women, increased between 2019 and 2022.

We considered the conventional explanations for women’s lack of progress—explanations we have written about for our entire careers. The time-honored answer to why gender inequality exists is women’s family responsibilities. That the reason for women’s dropout rates during the COVID-19 pandemic or women’s failure to achieve pay parity with men is that women succumb to their natural instincts to stay home with their babies. This conventional answer explains today’s disparities in the same terms as those of yore: women, by nature, simply make different choices than men. They care more about being home with their children than men do. They turn down opportunities for overtime because childcare costs more than any gains in pay. And when couples realize that fathers and mothers cannot both work sixty-hour weeks, women are still the more likely parent to call it quits on the partnership track.

The role of family responsibilities has always explained a significant part of the wage gap, and it continues to do so today. The gender pay gap for women ages 25 to 34 is smaller than for women from 35 to 54—the peak childrearing years, when mothers make different career choices than fathers to accommodate their family responsibilities. Women make up 87 percent of registered nurses, but while they earn the same base pay as male nurses, they still earn less overall than the men, particularly the male nurses who are willing to work shifts with irregular hours that pay more or who take advantage of tighter job markets by switching jobs or bargaining for higher pay. The only hope for progress, in accordance with this analysis, would involve persuading women to be greedier. Women’s futures would depend on their ability to lean in and to find the right househusbands to care for their children—or (as many successful professional women are doing) choose not to have children at all.

The problem with this line of thinking—of focusing on women’s choices to assume family responsibilities and not to lean in—is that these factors have always held women back; they don’t explain why the gendered pay gap for college graduates—the group with the greatest access to quality childcare—increased after the early nineties or why Black women, who have long managed to a greater degree than white women to juggle work and family obligations, remain among one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. The United States has lagged behind much of the rest of the developed world in its provision for childcare, paid family leave, and universal pre-K education ever since President Richard Nixon vetoed a comprehensive early childhood bill in 1971. The lack of childcare did not get distinctively worse after the nineties, particularly for the upper-middle-class women whose incomes have most lagged behind those of comparably educated men. Indeed, the gender wage gap, which did not change during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many women left the job market as schools closed and childcare became harder to find, increased with the recovery. And it increased despite the facts that college graduate women led the movement back into the post-pandemic labor market and that many low-income jobs disproportionately staffed by women were back up to pre-pandemic levels. Yes, childcare explains a large part of the wage gap, but it explains very little of what changed after 1990. And it cannot explain what happened to Vandermeyden, a woman without children, who was known for her willingness to put in long hours.

The second conventional explanation for women’s lack of progress is women’s occupational choices. This account states that women are drawn to careers that simply don’t pay well: creative fields like publishing, passion jobs like teaching, and those in the nonprofit sector or care work like nursing. Here, the answers are closer to the mark. For most people, men and women alike, wages had been stagnating since the 1970s. But for the top 1 percent, they had been increasing steadily, and during the 1990s, annual wages for the top 1 percent grew nine times more than for the bottom 90 percent. Wage growth in selected parts of the economy occurred along with the increases at the top; tech, finance, the C-suite, and the top ranks of many professions enjoyed staggering wage gains while the mid-level ranks of most occupations, even well-paying ones, did not.

All the highest-paying sectors are male dominated, and the fact that women are more likely to be schoolteachers than computer scientists does explain a substantial part of the gender gap. Still, women’s greater inclination to enroll in nursing school rather than in engineering, which has long been true, is not the whole story. Instead, it’s helpful to consider why the disparities between men’s and women’s occupational choices increased just as the wage disparities skyrocketed. For example, we were surprised to learn that the percentage of female teachers has been increasing since the 1980s and reached 77 percent in 2018 (the same percentage as a century ago). In the early nineties, teachers’ salaries started to fall behind those of other workers with comparable education and skills. It didn’t take long before the men left the field. We were also surprised to discover that the percentage of women in computer science peaked in the early eighties, then fell during tech’s incredible boom years. In finance, women won hard-fought gains through the nineties and increased their percentage of MBAs up to a quarter of the total by 2000, only to see their representation on Wall Street fall just as Wall Street salaries began to soar. And for those women who stuck it out, the gender gaps in wages stayed high; six of the top seven categories with the largest disparities in what men and women are paid involve finance, and the largest entry-level pay gaps are in tech. It turns out that the parts of the economy that most pride themselves on being a meritocracy have starker differences between men and women than anywhere else.

We came to realize that something more than women’s initial choices are at play. After all, women’s representation in the high-powered Fortune 500 CEO positions remains at a miniscule number—just over 10 percent—despite the fact that women’s numbers have risen steadily to 48 percent of entry-level management candidates. In our field, where women often constitute half our law school classes, and where they start out getting paid only slightly less than men, they are vastly underrepresented in the most highly paid law firm positions. In 2005, 8 percent of law firms reported that their highest-paid attorney was a woman. In 2023, that number fell: only 2 percent of law firms said that their highest-paid attorney was a woman. While the percentage of women in such positions grew over the last fifteen years (16 percent in 2006, up to 22 percent in 2020), the larger percentage of women making it into the top legal ranks did nothing to offset the increasing gap in salaries. Since the recovery from the financial crisis, women have been making modest gains, but that’s not the point. In male-dominated occupations where men earn the most, women are at a disadvantage. The female-dominated occupations have lost ground to the male-dominated occupations. And many are being forced out altogether: women like Vandermeyden who enter tech are twice as likely to leave as their male counterparts. The different occupational choices theory does not explain why.

That led to a third explanation: women’s failure to lean in, to take risks, to do what it takes to succeed. Almost everywhere we looked, however, and in almost every story we will tell in this book, we saw stories like Vandermeyden’s. Women who did lean in—by working long hours, questioning their bosses, insisting on raises, or objecting to sexual harassment—found that leaning in might mean getting booted out. The more prosaic stories involve the women who found they did not get the same raises as the men and complained; retaliation often followed. The more striking examples come from industries like finance, where the ability to break legal or ethical rules and get away with it can be handsomely rewarded. Women are substantially less likely than men to engage in financial misconduct, and they cause their employers smaller dollar losses when they do. Yet, they are also substantially more likely to be fired for misconduct and substantially less likely to be rehired. Leaning in takes a number of different forms, and many prove disastrous for women workers.

The lean in thesis also overlooks some of the women who are most likely to stand up for themselves. Today, the biggest beneficiaries of the union movement are women, especially women of color and those from other underrepresented groups. Unions have leaned in, standing up for their workers’ rights, producing smaller gender disparities than other workplaces, and winning benefits such as health insurance; 72 percent of Black women union members have health insurance in contrast with less than 50 percent of nonunion Black women workers. Women in nonunion workplaces, on the other hand, not only earn less than union members but also have less control over their working conditions. Yet, the war against unions has taken its toll, and there are fewer union jobs available than there once were, despite the renewed energy that has gone into organizing teachers, Walmart employees, and other workers stuck in low-wage jobs that remain disproportionately female. Throughout the economy, those who lean in, especially on behalf of marginalized workers, become targets. The story of unions is a prime example of the threats, intimidation, and legal changes that suppress collective activities.

All this suggests that the most conventional explanations of all—misogyny, discrimination, and sexual harassment—do provide part of the explanation. Feminist scholars document the catcalls, mansplaining, insults, and harassment (sexual and otherwise) that continue to demean many working women. Outright misogyny has increased online and in the political sphere. Still, we found virtually no evidence that these factors explain the changing employment picture since the nineties. Indeed, women are no longer excluded from workplaces on a wholesale basis. Some CEOs have lost their jobs because of inappropriate sexual behavior, and courts are holding companies themselves liable for failing to investigate claims of sexual harassment. These successes, no matter how scattered, are positive signs.

Ultimately, what we learned in considering cases like Vandermeyden’s is that something quite different was going on from the conventional explanations. Instead, we discovered that the new winner take all (WTA) approach to business—rooted in the Reagan-era tax breaks and deregulation of the 1980s that gained ground in the 1990s—is to blame for undermining women’s prospects for achieving equality in our lifetimes.

What do we mean by WTA? The classic economic meaning of the term winner take all is a system that provides a disproportionately high payoff for a single dominant player. Michael Jordan in his prime, for example, could single-handedly determine the outcome of a game to a greater degree than the number two basketball player of his era. It should not therefore be surprising he was also the first NBA player to sign a contract for more than $20 million. In business, winning may similarly mean dominating an entire economic sector. When Microsoft, for example, beat out Apple, making Windows the dominant desktop operating system of its time, the payoff for the company in 2000 was a market valuation of $500 billion, compared to $4.8 billion for Apple.

We are using the term WTA economy in a somewhat different way. We see the critical shift in the new economy as the ability of those at the top to take a much larger share of institutional resources for themselves. This new economy crosses job sectors, and it explains the patterns that had stumped us.

A little history is helpful here. Looking back, we found, to our surprise, that the company man of the fifties could have been a woman. That is, the traits that characterized the best of corporate America in that era—an emphasis on cooperation, loyalty, and consensus-based decision-making—are traits traditionally coded as feminine. Collective action, in the form of employer-union compacts, reached its height in the 1950s. Even the Black–white wage gap started to decrease, and the 1950s set the stage for the civil rights activism and reforms of the 1960s. Relative economic equality characterized the period, with CEO salaries pegged at roughly twenty times ordinary worker salaries.

In contrast, the winner-take-all era starts with the increase in CEO compensation, which rose a whopping 514 percent from 1990 to 2020. Successful CEOs in turn began to reward their top lieutenants, managers, and key employees with bonuses and stock options that could make those who succeeded very wealthy—and substantially better paid than other company employees. These bonuses, which are typically tied to short-term reductionist metrics, such as sales or earnings, or the production of Teslas, profoundly changed corporate cultures. The transformation in executive compensation brought back the late nineteenth-century robber baron mindset of no-holds-barred competition, individualism at the expense of institutions and community, and a zero-sum worldview in which those who win by any means necessary become the toast of the town, while those who lose, perhaps because they are too ethical to do what it takes, are relegated to a back office cubicle—if they keep their jobs at all.

This means that workplaces where there are increased rewards for those at the top are the same workplaces that pit employees against each other, allowing those calling the shots to engineer results that may not be in the collective interests of the workers themselves, the long-term health of the company, or the social order. Tesla, for example, is distinctive in the way that CEO Elon Musk—a brilliant, driven, and unforgiving boss who boasts of working 120 hours a week—demands the impossible and expects to get it. Around the time of Vandermeyden’s lawsuit, another employee wrote a blogpost noting that, at one point, six of the eight people on the anonymous employee’s team were on medical leave because of work-related injuries, and the writer knew of others who were scared to report they were hurting. Musk has been termed a savior and a despot. In one case, he fired a young engineer on the spot, simply because he asked the wrong question. Wired magazine’s article on the Tesla plant was titled, Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Inside Tesla’s Production Hell. Musk’s personality and business practices aren’t incidental to his success; they are essential to it.

Practices like these are linked to increasing gender disparities. CEOs like Musk, who dangle the promise of outsized rewards for those who meet the announced targets and dismiss those who question his methods, keep everyone insecure. Gender theorists describe the resulting workplaces as masculinity contest cultures. This is a zero-sum game, the scholars explain, in which men compete at work for dominance by showing no weakness, demonstrating a single-minded focus on professional success, displaying physical endurance and strength, and engaging in cut-throat competition. Amping up production schedules becomes what a real leader does: ignore product quality issues or employee well-being and become the subordinate managers’ version of showing no weakness in the dedication to the competition. Masculinity contest cultures tend to have toxic leaders who abuse and bully others to protect their own egos. The resulting work environments are associated with little work or family support from the leaders; the very idea of a work–life balance is inconsistent with a workplace that makes winning the competition to be top dog in the next bonus cycle the primary source of status. Such environments have also been shown to produce sexist climates where women experience either hostility or patronizing behavior and much higher incidences of sexual harassment, racial harassment, social humiliation and physical intimidation. Inside such organizations, both female and male employees experience higher rates of burnout and turnover; and higher rates of illness and depression." While these workplaces offer opportunity—Vandermeyden became a Tesla engineer with no engineering training and no experience in the auto industry—they can also be perilous. If you fail to outshine the employee next to you or, worse, you point out quality issues that could slow down production, you may find yourself out of a job.

One would think that, if everyone is worse off, including the long-term health of many companies, such a system would self-destruct. But that’s not what is happening. These environments allow those at the top to insist on objectives that will benefit them at the expense of best practices, simple morality, and often the rule of law itself. They face little legal accountability because there are fewer external constraints than a generation ago. Musk and Tesla, for example, have repeatedly faced new allegations: of sexual harassment and racial discrimination, of securities violations, of worker safety issues, of repeated labor violations, and of efforts to cover up the violations. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk himself with securities fraud—charges that were settled when he agreed, without admitting wrongdoing, to step down as Tesla’s chair and to pay a $20 million penalty (with Tesla paying another $20 million). The settlement appears to have simply empowered Musk, who retained control of Tesla, to move on to a new round of ventures and SEC charges. When Musk took over Twitter in late 2022, the New York Times summarized the situation as Two Weeks of Chaos. But Musk is still winning, at least against the state: in February 2023, a jury deliberated for just two hours before clearing Musk of securities fraud charges. While the primary limit on companies like Tesla is its stock performance, that metric too often rewards these tactics.

Competition in the business world used to be about one company showing up another company. Today, corporate competition has become about what Walmart’s founder Sam Walton used to call beating yesterday, which means meeting short-term targets, such as Tesla’s efforts to boost production. The stock market rewards making these numbers—and modern executives’ longevity and bonuses—depend on it. This incentive has changed the terms of competition, shifting the competition from outside the company to within the company. Winning now means besting the worker in the next cubicle and winning the bigger bonus. Yes, some women like Vandermeyden make the teams when they outperform the men around them. But in a Game of Thrones–like environment, outsiders such as Vandermeyden who are without powerful protectors are also the most expendable. To make matters worse, the production of predominantly male winners validates the conclusion that women don’t have what it takes to make it into the most exclusive bros’ clubs, and that men deserve the power, wealth, and glory that come with the intensely competitive territory.

Putting these pieces together helps explain why women have lost ground, but the explanation only deepens the mystery. In this competition, zero sum (if one person wins another must inevitably lose) becomes negative sum (we are all worse off), as workers see each other as the enemy and form tactical alliances to outflank their rivals. By the end of the early chapters in this book, the picture of why women lose in such environments comes into focus; but it takes until the end of the book to understand why the system has endured for so long and what can be done about it.

In Fair Shake, we meet women working in lower-level retail jobs and in the various echelons of banking and Silicon Valley. We’ll meet engineers, office assistants, clerks, and gig workers from all backgrounds, from all walks of life, and with all pay grades. Although these women might appear to have little in common on the surface, their stories play out along familiar lines. In our efforts to capture what today’s workplaces are like for women, we turned first to the legal complaints brought by women against their companies. The complaints, which are generally a matter of public record, provide information (like pay scales) that are not otherwise available, and they detail the stories of women who feel wronged by their workplaces and choose to fight back. The complaints, of course, provide only one side of the case, and they are often greeted by blanket denials. Defendants may also introduce additional facts, attack the plaintiffs, or dispute the legal conclusions. In most of the cases we discuss, there have not been any findings of fact by a court or jury. Cases often end in settlements, which at the very least means that the company was willing to pay the plaintiff to go away. In these cases, companies typically insist on nondisclosure agreements, which prevent plaintiffs from talking about cases and which prevent further inquiry. If cases instead result in dismissal, the outcomes are more likely to be based on the legal insufficiency of the claims rather than a finding that the facts are not true (our discussion of the Betty Dukes case in Chapter 1 is a prime example).

The women do not necessarily win, but in our experience as litigators, the specific facts in complaints are typically true and represent the experiences of other women who do not sue. We have generally confirmed that the nature of allegations in the complaints is consistent with public reports about the individual workplaces and their environments. And perhaps the most important evidence we have found are the statistical studies that show that the allegations in these complaints correspond to the experiences documented in the numbers. We are satisfied that the claims discussed illustrate the nature of modern discriminatory workplaces and the patterns we identify, which help explain why women are losing so much ground in today’s workforce.

The key to understanding the importance of these stories is to recognize that women are trapped in what we call a reinforcing Triple Bind. Their stories show the mechanics of how this Triple Bind works, and how it’s the result of a WTA system that disregards the well-being of the many in favor of enrichment of the few.

In the first leg of the Triple Bind, we show how if women don’t compete on the same terms as the men in the WTA workplace, they lose. Vandermeyden may have thought the job was about making cars, but the real terms for advancement were more about outflanking those around her to get the next promotion. In the first three chapters, we tell similar stories that explain why Walmart became the subject of the largest sex discrimination suit in the country, principally because of policies that disadvantaged women and suppressed wages. We also show how Jack Welch—CEO of General Electric—remade corporate America and how, even after the financial crisis of 2009, the clash between ethics and profit on Wall Street is a game women disproportionately lose.

In the second leg of the Triple Bind, if women do try to compete on the same terms as the men, they lose because they are disproportionately punished for their sharp elbows or perceived misdeeds. In this section, we tell the stories of Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist who electrified Silicon Valley by demonstrating the double standard women face, and Misha Patel Terrazas, who tried to thread the ethical needle at Wells Fargo, only to find that when a bank caught up in scandal needed a scapegoat, she was a more convenient one.

In the third leg of the Triple Bind, when women see that they can’t win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game—if they haven’t been pushed out already. Vandermeyden, who fought so hard to land her dream job, reported violations and was pushed out. Here, we also look at how the failure to develop a childcare infrastructure is as much a product of the WTA economy as are Wall Street bonuses. We also show how the gig economy draws on women in need of part-time employment—often to compensate for a substandard childcare system—while sometimes risking their physical safety and almost always ensuring their economic marginalization.

We end the book by highlighting recent challenges to the WTA economy. We look at teachers who marshaled public support against the financial assault on public schools, and the heroes of the #MeToo movement who have summoned the courage to spotlight sexual harassment. We look at lawyers bringing cases on behalf of women who might have lost in the past because they were not perfect and unblemished plaintiffs. We analyze how masculinity contests, which involve mismanaging risks, are starting to face limits both from regulators and from internal pressures. The women who we profile prove that the solution to the destructive WTA culture that dominates our country is to create a powerful countermovement in which we come together to call out those in power and hold them to account. We argue that precisely because women can’t win the winner-take-all game that has emerged over the last half-century, they are in a unique position to showcase the bankrupt values of that system—and lead the fight for a different set of values.

Elon Musk, after all, prevails in part because the glorification of his successes as a billionaire and a visionary emboldens him to act. Recognizing the bankruptcy of this system—and the threat it poses to all of us—creates a foundation for a new set of values that prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and productivity, rather than negative-sum competitions. Management gurus stress that such approaches are associated with better results, greater long-term stability, and rewards for the many, not just the favored few. In this future, the celebration of rule-breaking will be replaced with ethics and the rule of law.

Despite the grim statistics, the women leading the fight give us hope that change is possible and that a more equitable future awaits. Getting there requires challenging the entire WTA economy and creating a new system—one that gives every worker a fair shake.

PART 1

When Women Don’t Compete on the Same Terms as Men, They Lose

In the first part of this book, we look at how women lose at the first step of the Triple Bind. While these women work hard, they often don’t recognize the unwritten rules that lead to success in the hyper-competitive WTA workplace.

Chapter 1 starts with a story about a company that could be said to have written the rules of the new WTA economy: Walmart, a company whose management ethos actually predated the new economy. Sam Walton created an organizational structure that turned out to prize the traits associated with competition, amorality, and self-interest, and he used them to suppress labor costs. He then carefully cultivated an hourly labor force that exemplified the traits associated with warmth, community pride, and neighborliness, and he persuaded those workers that company identification was an adequate substitute for decent pay and benefits.

In the sixties, when Sam Walton founded his first Walmart stores, these qualities were thought to reflect intrinsic differences between men and women. By the time the sex discrimination case against Walmart profiled in Chapter 1, the largest sex discrimination class action in history, made it to the Supreme Court in 2011, the qualities Sam Walton had identified with men in the sixties—competition, amorality, and self-interest—had the traits that corporate America celebrated. These qualities became the distinguishing characteristics of success in the new economy and the key to magnification of gender disparities in both the managerial and the hourly employees’ ranks. Walmart, acclaimed for its management success and vilified for its labor abuses, demonstrates the links between the growing disparities at the top and bottom of the economy and the little studied ways in which gender characteristics explain both.

Chapter 2 looks at a different sector—women in executive positions—and finds the same story. Chapter 2 focuses on an executive who worked for Jack Welch, the legendary CEO