Hewlett is hard-hitting and concise, concluding with practical steps to shut down sexual misconduct in the workforce.
A veteran economist and corporate leader makes a significant contribution to the continuing shameful story of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Hewlett (The Sponsor Effect: How To Be a Better Leader by Investing in Others, 2019, etc.), CEO of an eponymous consulting firm, knows her subject well. In her early 20s, she was hounded out of a job with a “blue-chip” London consulting firm by a lascivious boss who had enormous power and would not take no for an answer. After discussing how the long-overdue pushback against sexual harassment gained steam with the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and others—including Donald Trump, who assumed the presidency “even after the media had revealed a long-running pattern of sexual harassment, including a recording in which he boasted of groping unwilling women”—Hewlett delivers a powerful assessment of “what the numbers tell us.” The facts and numbers are staggering: More than one-third of women report having been harassed in the workplace at some point in their careers; Latina women and black women are the most frequently targeted groups; most predators are top-level executives; and the two industries in which harassment is most prevalent are media and technology. The author then takes on a relatively little discussed pool of data around the harassment of men, especially gay men, and executive women who have been guilty of sexual predation. Finally, Hewlett notes, the bonds of “stigma and silence” are being broken—e.g., in the military and on Wall Street. The author emphasizes that sexual harassment is all about power, and when it occurs at work, the entire workforce can suffer demoralization. Moreover, the legal expenses and enormous corporate settlements—for example, at Fox News, Google, and Goldman Sachs—along with the loss of key leaders and even bankruptcy are slamming the corporate world’s bottom line, forcing a change in culture.
Hewlett is hard-hitting and concise, concluding with practical steps to shut down sexual misconduct in the workforce.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289919-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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