The time of secrets is upon us. Today, I’ll share one of mine.
People often underestimate me. Mostly, I think, because I try to get along. Unless I implicitly trust the individuals I’m with, I listen more than I talk. I also watch how they treat others, fully aware from experience that if they treat others poorly, I or someone I value could be next. I am generally conflict-averse but not above it.
That dichotomy confuses some and leads them into thinking I am weak or an easy target. In reality, I am just choosing my moment and method to strike if necessary. Mostly, I just hope any issue goes away. Because when I choose to act, it’s game on.
As readers may remember from Switching Sides, the engineering setting I worked in was often confrontational and contentious. Toxic is a better word. Years after the events laid out in that essay, I found myself at a crossroads. By then I’d set down a financial plan that eventually led me to where I am today. That plan was still years away from fruition, four to five to be exact. But I am patient and goal-oriented. Once I set one in my mind, I am likely to see it through. At least when the time is right. Life doesn’t always cooperate.
At that time, I was still unhappy with my day-to-day. Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be a defense contractor anymore. For a number of reasons and unique circumstances, I didn’t feel I had much choice, not at that exact moment. I had a mortgage. I would soon have a spouse. I wanted to move but she didn’t. Her career was bound up with our current location.
By this point, the toxicity of team rivalry in my workplace had morphed into a new kind of tribalism. Bias and prejudice against women and minorities in my workplace were patently obvious to anyone with eyes. There were inappropriate jokes and nicknames, and slights meant to cast individuals’ race or gender or religion into stark relief. Often to their face. Often in a distinct power play. Often within management’s hearing. A distinct old boy’s network was very much in evidence.
To give you an example, one of my coworkers, one of the sharpest, most talented, most intelligent engineers I worked with, was dinged on her annual review for the way she dressed (which wasn’t provocative even at the time). Not only dinged but called into her supervisor’s office to specifically address the situation with interim reviews. Her middle-aged, white, male supervisor who had enough contacts and seniority to be considered untouchable. All the women I listened to considered this outrageous. I don’t think this man understood that corporate culture had begun to change.
Around this time, the system my project was designing was in the middle of demonstration and certification. Which meant extended fieldwork all around. Unlike the previous rounds of fieldwork that I’d been involved in, this time our workforce, specifically our software department which heavily figured into the design, was more gender-integrated, or at least had more than minor female representation.
Management had no experience in dealing with that. Which showed when they laid down a set of unique rules that only applied to women who went to the field. One of these was that they had to observe a strict buddy system. So, unless two women’s schedules and expertise aligned, neither could be assigned to a field site. Management viewed this as a safety issue, although clearly it did not apply to all travel. Women traveled to our client’s site alone all the time. Another rule was that women couldn’t be assigned to a support a ship even if that ship was in port. They would only be allowed aboard if there was no other option, read no other male was capable of performing their job. This was seen as necessary so as not antagonize the Navy or its commanders. There were a host of other minor guidelines, all of which amounted to making it difficult for women to get field assignments whether they wanted them or not.
Fieldwork in engineering is often a make-or-break opportunity for career development and advancement. Especially in defense contracting. If you keep a site up and running smoothly under adverse conditions, you can find yourself in the spotlight. If you are the individual who solves a critical problem holding up a test or demonstration, you are suddenly a hero. Upper management remembers your name. Promotions are in the offing. As are team lead positions required to advance.
As well, the field is not a design review. It’s not even like the lab. The problems you encounter under real-world conditions provide insight into future designs and inform the way you debug problems. The field is a practical, not theoretical, experience for any design or systems engineer. It’s also a moment to shine as you highlight your understanding of the overall system, not just your tiny segment, along with any interpersonal or technical skills you bring along.
In other words, unless you are the best ivory tower designer or system architect, your career may depend on how you perform in the field.
Which requires being there.
This was well understood the day those field rules for women were announced. As I remember it, they were only announced to the women themselves, not to all members of the team. Perhaps I missed the meeting. But I distinctly remember the information came down to me secondhand. By this time, I was slated for significant fieldwork. Volunteered for it, in fact. I knew from my previous stints of extended fieldwork how critical it could be.
The women who discussed the rules with me were generally offended. They had maybe one advocate in the lowest level of the management chain. When they complained to her, she had stated their case and was overruled by upper management. Vehemently and with alacrity. They considered the gender rules settled divisional law. Case closed. Protest at your peril.
That attitude didn’t ameliorate the situation or the undercurrent of dissent. This was not a happy sailor is a bitching sailor scenario. Mostly these women were junior engineers who had come up in a time that promised them equal treatment, much more than women just five years their senior. But they had no agency and knew it, other than voting with their feet. I got the sense many were growing used to this level of bias and discrimination, and had begun to accept it as a given.
As a warning shot or a distress flare, a couple years earlier my company had gotten caught up in a pay scandal which was pretty unusual for a defense contractor, the resolution not the act. In their annual reviews and raises that year, a number of employees found their base pay raised significantly, in some cases by double digits. The official explanation was that the company was transitioning to a new employee evaluation system that placed people in quartiles based on current and previous review scores, each with a minimum salary they should receive within their job title.
The unofficial reason for these startling but selective raises was far more troubling. For whatever reason (likely under government duress, or from due diligence by an ever-present buyout suitor), the company had reviewed the salaries of women and minorities and found both to be significantly underpaid compared to their generally white, male counterparts with equivalent experience and education. To the point where certain female and minority employees were earning below even the minimum salaries for their job titles by 10-20%.
These pay deficits were large enough that it sometimes took two years of what amounted to unheard of raises for certain individuals to catch up because of corporate policies that limited any employee’s annual raise to a maximum of 10%. In at least one case I have direct knowledge of, an individual (whose voluntarily disclosed ethnicity marked them as a minority) received first a 10% raise one year, followed by nearly 10% raise the next. This in a time when a 3% raise was considered good.
Of course, the true explanation was veiled in secrecy although rumors of what had happened abounded. It wasn’t hard to sort out who got good raises and what they might have in common. In the way of all management, they discouraged employees from comparing salaries for just this reason. But in the way of all employees, they often did if only informally and circling the edges. Rumors were abundant about who made what and where they fell on the department’s informal totem pole for the ever-present next round of layoffs. I had the truth confirmed a few years after I’d left the company by a friend who sat in on some of the meetings where that pay disparity had been discussed.
Right after this, the company made a concerted effort to hire more women and minorities, many of whom were gone within five years. Some number directly because of the reception they received.
From my earlier experience, I was more outraged than jaded when my management announced those the gender-based fieldwork rules. I refused to accept them as the norm. I took the situation as a personal affront. Precisely because I knew how I’d benefited from fieldwork in the past and thought others deserved that same opportunity. I was sick of seeing petty egos who I never saw as that outstanding threatened by perceived competition. I’ve never seen diversity as a threat to my position or career. I’ve always seen it as my opportunity to work with, and learn from, the best. Period.
Discrimination always sets me off when I sniff it out, even if the people around me don’t always note it. I’ve brushed up against too much prejudice too many times concerning too many friends, black, female, and/or gay.
The problem was, I had no real agency then either. I wasn’t particularly senior, just a few years more senior than the women I’d heard from. I didn’t have any contacts higher up the chain that might give me a hearing. But I knew in my heart what I was seeing was discriminatory and unethical.
While I am goal-oriented, I am also a problem solver. People who know me understand that when I set my mind to something, I know how to get things done.
And yet there was a problem with tilting at ideological windmills in my environment. There was a very real threat of reprisals against anyone who pushed the issue. That I’d learned from a long line of experience. I had an idea of what my company’s management would and wouldn’t tolerate. I also knew how far they would go to reinforce their reputation and protect their prerogatives.
The example foremost in my mind involved our division’s annual savings bond drive. Our company had a reputation of universal voluntary employee participation in buying US Savings Bonds. Higher than a similar campaign to support the United Way. Our divisional vice president had more invested in the savings bond campaign than any charity. Our 100% participation rate resulted in him being flown out to corporate headquarters each year to be feted. A trip he relished and had come to expect as his due.
The thing is, that 100% participation was only on paper. But the division took it seriously enough to assign people, usually supervisors or people aspiring to promotion, to talk to everyone in their department who hadn’t already signed up. On company time. Their pitch was that you could have as little as a quarter a week ($0.25) deducted from your check and assign it to a bond with a face value as high as $500 ($250 purchase price). Which meant it would take nearly 20 years to get one issued. If you left the company before then, all that money would come back to you.
When I was first approached, I looked over the information including the rates of return (which at the time were locked in as long you owned the bond) and decided it was a good way to create an emergency savings fund that I might later use to buy a house. This was before George H. W. Bush changed the terms by fiat, directing that the interest rates float at a reduced market rate to save the government money. Which basically gutted the biggest benefit of the program.
Either way, it didn’t matter to me. It was still a convenient way to save money that was accessible outside retirement with a reasonable return.
It did matter to a friend of mine who had been hired a couple years later. He was a savvier investor. He looked over the terms then turned in his card, declining to participate. Which meant his savings bond representative, in this case his direct supervisor, came around to ask him to reconsider. Because this was a “voluntary” program, he politely declined. Which then resulted in him getting called first into his manager’s office, then a program manager’s office (the one who told people who complained they were lucky to have jobs), a director’s office (who once ripped the wallpaper off of a conference room wall while demanding the name of an engineer who had accidently damaged a piece of equipment so he could fire him on the spot) and finally into our divisional VP’s office (the one whose trip to Texas depended on my friend’s participation), each stop with an increasing amount of pressure and intimidation. A lot of attention for a junior engineer.
I very much remember my friend describing his final encounter with our divisional VP. When asked why he wouldn’t participate after hearing how good of an investment these bonds were, my friend simply answered, “I have better investments that make more money elsewhere” and laid out exactly what they were. After a brief stunned silence, that encounter quickly turned to veiled threats about him not being a team player with the unspoken understanding that his refusal would be remembered when raises and promotions came around.
My friend remained unphased. After seeing the way the division operated, he wasn’t planning to make a career out of our company anyway. In fact, he took a better paying job within a year. A very sharp design engineer who we should have been trying to retain. He’d recognized the strong undercurrent of good ole boy network tinged with sometimes very literal gun-toting conservatism (one of my former supervisors carried a handgun in his briefcase). Many of the people we worked with were former military which shaped their thinking in ways most civilians didn’t cotton to.
As it turned out, the US Navy was also in transition at this time, against its will, as was American society at large. Around this time, our recently elected President was considering repealing the prohibition against female military personnel serving on combatant ships, which he did several months later. After the debacle of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings under the previous Administration a few years before (rivaled only by the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh), his EEOC suddenly had some teeth. The times they were a-changing.
All of which I understood as I examined the board and plotted out my best, most productive move.
Because I had no agency, and because I knew the threat of reprisals was very real, I treated this as an asymmetric warfare situation. I listened as events unfolded as a way to gather intelligence but I kept my own counsel. I didn’t grumble to anyone, not even friends, or give a hint that I planned to act. But plan to act I did. From the moment I heard those gender-based fieldwork rules announced.
Because our company was a defense contractor, many of which had been caught up in various ethical scandals dating back to Reagan, we had mandatory ethics training every year. From that, I knew we had a corporate ethics department. I knew their contact information was in our employee handbook.
But I was not naïve. I knew that corporate ethics departments, much like modern HR departments, are more about preventing the company’s image from being tarnished than about what you might think their job description might be. They are servants of the corporation, looking out for its best interests, not the employees. In many ways, they are the foxes guarding the henhouse.
I also knew that while the EEOC had strong legal mandate regarding discrimination, it had limited reach and powerful political enemies even after it had been revitalized by the then current Administration. Finding their contact information was a bit trickier as I recall.
With that in mind, I chose an uncharacteristic path. I embraced my inner Niccolò Machiavelli’s and heeded his advice, from Discourses not The Prince.
People who know me know that I have a complex, ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent relationship with Machiavelli. On the one hand, his words have been used to propel any number of despots into power. On the other, he captures a great deal of truth in the way people interact politically. Having played enough of the Avalon Hill game that bears his name, as I’ve mentioned in other essays, I had an idea how to use his principles for good. I see them as a tool, not inherently good or evil.
My plan was simple. I would outline my ethical and legal concerns over our corporate policy in a professionally crafted letter, using all the communications skills I’d picked up to make the arguments for my case. I would send it to both relevant parties, our ethics office and the EEOC. Since I was dealing with two weak allies with suspect individual motivations, I opted for a strategy that would force an alliance between them, much like I’d seen used quite effectively in the Machiavelli game.
Not only would I send the letter to both parties, I would clearly mark each as having been cc’d to the other. Which meant it would be more difficult for either to bury the incident for fear the other would act and blame them for not acting, thus exploiting their mutual antagonism. At the time, any ethics complaint involving a federal contract was required to be forwarded to the government. That did not always happen. Or if it did, the issue was often buried.
The thing is, if I believe in something, I don’t mind signing my John Hancock, despite the potential consequences. I don’t mind making a stand and have made more than a few unpopular ones. I don’t mind going toe-to-toe when necessary. I understand there are times you have to die on that hill just to protest, just to make a statement. Because sometimes by losing now, you can win later. You don’t do it capriciously, but there can be a long-term strategy at play.
Winning and losing are only words that reflect personal investment. My only real goal was to get the policy changed and give these women the same opportunity I had, to rise or fall on their own abilities, not their gender. An equal opportunity you might say.
But I knew I was dealing with some petty, vindictive people in my chain of command. If they were willing to threaten reprisals at highest levels over a bond drive, I had a pretty good idea of what they might be willing to do here. Which meant my letters would go unsigned. That rubbed my personal ethics wrong, primarily because I believed in what I was doing.
There was an advantage in anonymity. If corporate could ID who had complained, they could attack the individual (with rumors or reprisals). Without knowing who it was, they could only attack the ideas. As well, if that anonymity held, they would be more likely to hesitate in the future because that whistleblower could still be lurking. Those advantages outweighed any reputation I had at that moment, which honestly wasn’t much. As squeamish as I was, and as dishonorable as it felt, I had to the let the ends justify the means.
You may remember from Leadership that I value actions over words. In the end, I value actions over credit though credit can be nice. Effort matters but results matter more. I won’t die on hills for glory or recognition. I will die for results. It doesn’t do anyone any good to be martyred. Any martyrdom complexes I may have harbored were long dead, killed by practical experience. I intended to continue fighting for what I saw as important. Like this.
The risk was that the blame might fall on the women themselves and make their lives more miserable. Were that to happen, I planned to come forward before they could take the fall. I had to trust my instincts that the culture had begun to change. And that I could engage in round two if round one didn’t result in a KO, mine. To keep fighting, you have to survive.
And I very much intended to survive.
So, I let my native paranoia take the wheel. I didn’t compose my letter on a work computer, or even the laptop I rarely took to work. I wrote it with a different style, different words and a different voice. I didn’t put a return address on the envelopes that I ensured were typed, not hand addressed. I mailed both through a company drop box that went through the mailroom to the post office rather than dropping them where they might get a defining postmark, like say in Seminole. I stopped short of wearing gloves.
I told no one what I was doing except my wife, then fiancée, who I swore to secrecy. I trusted her implicitly. She supported my decision. We both held clearances, which if nothing else teaches you how to keep a secret.
I buried those two letters in different corporate mail drops, each in stacks of other envelopes of interdepartmental, corporate and personal mail. That was a risk, but so is tampering with stamped and addressed US Mail. Not that they should have been able to ID exactly where either came from. When I was finished, I deleted the files from my home computer.
Once I released those letters, I treated them like fire-and-forget weapons. Don’t linger in the area. Fire and move.
I wasn’t certain my actions would do much more than serve as a protest to be honest. I figured in the way of the world, no one would take my complaint very seriously. Management was more likely to find a reason not to act than to change the course they’d chosen.
Imagine my surprise a week later when I arrived at work and found the building already abuzz. I asked one of my friends what was going on. One of my female friends. She said word had come down from on high revoking the gender-based fieldwork rules. The women were now on the exact same footing as the men.
I quickly dropped a stony poker face in place. The eyes that look right through you, as I’d been told. Oh, I said.
Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially and looked around. Her contact higher up said that someone had complained anonymously and everyone in management from our divisional VP down was livid. Another of her contacts said there were management meetings all over the building trying to ferret out who it was.
Huh, I replied, then headed to my cube. I just went about my day, pleased my plan had worked better than expected, trying not to let it show.
Another friend in a different department who was in some of those meetings later confirmed that management was actively hunting for the whistleblower. They desperately wanted a head to roll to serve as an example. They never claimed one.
No one ever asked me about the incident. No one ever leveled an accusation against me or anyone else, at least that I know of. If management suspected me, I never heard.
I don’t believe they did as a few years later, I received a divisional excellence award for Development (for a different “accomplishment”), about the time I was slated to lead two dozen engineers on three teams (predominately of our female engineers) with a multi-million-dollar budget. I RSVP’d that I wouldn’t be able to attend to the dinner ceremony where the award would be presented by that same divisional VP. Instead, I had to go to HR to pick it up the Monday after. They didn’t realize that by that point I was beyond caring. I’d seen enough. I was already on my way out the door.
Before today, I’ve only shared this incident with a handful of people. With the exception of my wife, that happened only once, twenty years later at a Kitten*Con as we were discussing gender bias after the wine and cognac had flowed. I am still not entirely sure why I chose to share it at that moment. Maybe it was after a lecture on feminism in science fiction. Maybe after a discussion of the Bechdel Test (wiki it). I guess I trusted the people I was with. Although I could see little harm coming of it by then, I’d just gotten used to keeping that secret to myself.
So why reveal it now? Why bring it up again?
Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about that incident a lot recently. It is one of the few clean victories I can claim in my life, even if unattributed. A small victory which gained more meaning as time went by and other conflicts in my life have drawn to more ambiguous closures.
Perhaps because I feel we’ve been slipping backwards, that hard won progress has been eroded in recent years as old attitudes not only have resurfaced but are now rewarded. And likely will be again in the near future. The authoritarian, Q-Anon, Proud Boy opposition isn’t playing at their goals. Or rather they’re playing for keeps. Social progress, unlike technological advances, are often cyclic. While it’s rare for society to set aside a new technology, that is by no means true for civil rights.
And perhaps because I feel I’m getting too old to fight. Or I feel I’ve spent too much time fighting. I am tired and don’t know how much practical fight I have left in me. Perhaps I just hope someone else will take up the torch, using all the tools they are given, and leverage them to get the job done. If my experience serves as a guide or an inspiration, all the better. Or perhaps I am just reminding myself that I once knew how to fight and will again if necessary.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
As we approach the day of deepest darkness, we may do well to reflect on the light we bring to this world. Sometimes you need place that lamp high on a pedestal for all to see. And sometimes concealing it beneath a bushel basket, or in a cellar to light a stop on an underground network, is much more effective.
Often you will never know how others perceive the path you light. If the right light guides you, you don’t need to. Even if, within the framework of the greater good, you sometimes compromise your personal code and allow more ethical ends to justify your means.
© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III
