Gender bias one canary in WeWork’s coal mine
Exactly zero people should be surprised by the recent filing of a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit against WeWork. Bad management and gender bias tend to go together like poison ivy and a rash.
Medina Bardhi, former chief of staff to Adam Neumann, the former chief executive of We Co. — WeWork’s parent — filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that We demoted her twice — once after each of her pregnancies. A spokesperson for We has said the company doesn’t tolerate discrimination of any kind.
As Bardhi tells it in her complaint, before becoming pregnant, she had been one of only five employees to receive an award for outstanding performance. But after her first pregnancy, Bardhi was told that instead of reporting directly to Neumann, she’d have a new boss — who, coincidentally, would have her old title. Moreover, her new (male) boss would be offered $400,000 with a signing bonus of $175,000; she’d been paid $150,000.
Her complaint documents not only how Neumann and other executives began treating her with disdain after she announced her pregnancies — referring to her parental leave as a “retirement,” a “vacation” and a “problem” — but also how they retaliated against her and other female employees when they pointed out company management problems. The impression isn’t of a particularly sexist company, but a sort of normallevel-sexist company with incompetent management.
For instance, Bardhi alleges she tried for months after returning from her second parental leave to get clarity on her new role by seeking meetings with her bosses and other leaders at the firm. From her return to work in early March through June of this year, these conversations went nowhere. On June 5, Neumann referred to her as having “come out of retirement this week.” Finally, in late June or early July, she complained to Chris Hill, the head of product and Neumann’s brotherin-law. “Well, at least you’re still getting a paycheck,” she says he replied.
“Despite a lack of clarity about her role and responsibilities,” her complaint reads, “in August 2019 Ms. Bardhi received positive marks across all categories” in her performance assessment. Neumann then allegedly asked for Bardhi’s help with We’s initial public offering, telling a colleague he needed “a woman’s touch” and bringing her out to his house in the Hamptons for a meeting — where Bardhi reminded Neumann she’d been ready since March to step up. A few weeks later, she was fired.
Similarly, in a separate lawsuit, Lisa Bridges, a former senior vice president at the company, alleges gender discrimination, retaliation and a “glaring” gender pay gap, which Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Berrent allegedly said was justified because “men take risks and women don’t.” Shortly after
Bridges raised these concerns, she was put on leave and fired. A third executive, Ruby Anaya, has alleged she was sexually assaulted on two occasions at company events and fired after reporting these assaults to human resources. We Co. has denied Anaya’s claims of assault and said she was terminated because of poor performance.
The overall picture these lawsuits conjure shows not only frat-house antics on company time but also managerial nincompoopery.
Sure, good management is rarer than it should be, but it exists and it’s not rocket science. It also has an impact on the bottom line: Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun and her colleagues have studied more than 12,000 companies and found that organizations that do the basic, boring work of managing — documenting processes, setting clear goals, retaining employees, tracking key performance indicators — score significantly higher on productivity, profitability and growth, and stick around longer.
Start-up founders like to say that they’re moving too fast for this “bureaucratic” stuff, that it would slow their growth. In fact, the opposite is true: Start-ups that adopt formal management structures are the ones that end up scaling successfully. The ones that don’t collapse under the weight of their own chaos.
Because you know what’s really time-consuming? Incompetence.
Companies that are good at managing tend to be not only more profitable but also good places for women to work — because companies that are good at managing tend to have fairer hiring and promotion practices. So think of sexual harassment, pay gaps and pregnancy discrimination as your canaries in the coal mine: If these things can run rampant, then the company is probably missing essential management tools. Like maybe a viable business model.