Goldman Sachs’s settlement of a long-running class action that claimed the company discriminated based on gender in pay, performance evaluations, and promotions, shows how the world has changed in recent years. And it points to how good general counsel are responding to those changes.
First, it starts with building an organization’s leadership team, and the basic proposition that we’re all different. We are the product of different cultures and backgrounds, we see and value things differently, and—here’s the important part—we frequently have an unconscious bias toward people who are similar to ourselves.
It’s normal. But it’s dangerous in the workplace unless we have the self awareness to recognize the potential for such bias to creep into our thinking, and take steps to mitigate it.
An entrepreneur pitched me for funding on a business recently, and when I pointed out that his founding team wasn’t very diverse, he proudly said he just wanted to get the very best people. When I asked him who got to define who was the “very best,” he got quiet. And when I suggested that data showed how diverse teams solved problems faster and performed better, it got quieter still.
Diverse teams are less likely to fall prey to the pitfalls of gender bias—that’s why I made it a point to build teams that were evenly split along gender lines, and that had diverse backgrounds.
Rooms full of people who look like the boss, have background like the boss, and tend to agree with the boss, might be...
The 11th Circuit has upheld the constitutionality of the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions, joining other federal appeals courts that have decided the question and reversing a ruling that had ...