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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.

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***** TABLE OF CONTENTS *****

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: When Women Don't Compete on the Same Terms as Men, They Lose

1. The Hidden Rules

2. How to Rig the Game

3. Counting on Wall Street

PART 2: When Women Play by the Same Rules as Men, They Lose

4. Sharp Elbows

5. Women Make the Best Scapegoats

PART 3: When Women See What the New Rules Are, They Refuse to Play

the Game

6. Tech Pushes Women Out

7. Home Alone

8. Platform World

9. Fighting Back

10. #MeToo

Conclusion

Escaping the Triple Bind