“Good morning. Please, have a seat. Thanks for taking time to meet with us today; we’re sure you are very busy, what with running kids to soccer practices and piano recitals and nail appointments. We’ll keep this very brief.
“Our company has been dealing with a bit of a kerfuffle. It turns out every single executive on our team happens to be a man, even though, as my wife endlessly points out, a substantial majority of our customers are that other gender. And, well, if you’ve read the news lately, they can make a heck of a fuss about things when they get it in their heads.
“So in a bold public relations move, we’ve committed to interview one woman for every top position, and that’s why you’re here today. So, are there any questions you have for us, Ms. Token? Oh, sorry. Ms. Jones.
“Excuse me. Hey, sweetie, can you run and fetch my glasses?”
---
It’s mind-boggling what, at the end of 2017, can be packaged as progress.
It doesn’t seem that the idea of women holding top corporate positions should be that groundbreaking, and the notion of at least interviewing women for prestigious positions should be a no-brainer.
But more than two dozen Utah companies — and 61 corporations nationwide — have signed on to the “ParityPledge,” a commitment by those companies to interview at least one female candidate for top-level management positions, those at the vice president level or higher.
First, the problem that is obvious on its face: “Parity” is defined as “the state or condition of being equal, especially regarding status or pay.”
That’s not what any of these companies are pledging to reach — not even close.
They’re not pledging to have women equally represented on their management teams. They’re not even committed to having women equally represented in the interview pool. All they’re committing to is saving a spot for a woman in the group of however many candidates they interview.
It would literally be impossible to do anything less.
Yet these guys are patting themselves on their hairy backs with their Neanderthal knuckles for letting a skirt in the front door for an interview.
The idea that this kind of public pronouncement is even needed could be seen as an admission by these companies that there is something fundamentally wrong with their hiring processes — that the focus is on hiring the top talents, as long as they’re men.
And just imagine the signals that sends to a woman who gets called in for an interview. Is she there because she has worked hard and has the skills to help lead this workforce? Or is she the token interviewee, checking the box and wasting everyone’s time?
Utah absolutely has a problem with equality in the workplace, especially in the upper echelons of the workforce. As my colleague Taylor Stevens noted in first reporting on the pledge, a 2013 study by the Center For American Progress rated Utah the third worst in the nation when it came to women holding managerial positions.
There are cultural issues that keep many women from working, and we should be talking about that. We should be talking about a lack of access to child care and a gaping wage disparity that nobody seems willing to address.
I tend to believe these 28 Utah companies that have signed on to the ParityPledge are sincere in their desire to diversify.
Overstock.com, for example, doesn’t have any women in its top executive team, but it does have a chairwoman of the board and several in the vice-president ranks. On top of that, it had a woman as president.
Stormy Simon started at Overstock as a temp in 2001, then busted her butt climbing her way up in the company, succeeding at every rung. In 2007, she became senior vice president. In 2009, the company actually became profitable. In 2014, she became president. Then, in 2016, she quit and has been working in the cannabis movement since.
There are talented women everywhere in Utah. It shouldn’t take a pledge to recognize that those women — and more than just one of them — deserve a shot at helping businesses thrive.
“Mad Men” was a fictional TV show, not a instructional video on how to run a business. So don’t tell us you’ve suddenly found religion when it comes to women in the workplace, Don Draper. Show us you mean it by actually letting qualified women do the job.
And if every spring your company has to recruit spouses and girlfriends so you can fill out your coed softball team, you need to address that problem instead of turning to a publicity stunt to convince the public you’re not something your hiring practices show you probably really are.
