Bias lawsuit recalls pain of ex-Boeing workers
Then 24, the Boeing secretary with a Sassoon haircut and an artistic flair had agreed to let a boss drive her to her car after an office party at Schumsky's Restaurant in Renton.
She was leery about it, though. At work, he was jolly and quick to laugh, a guy's guy who drove a red truck and probably spent his off time hunting or fishing. But she says his crude humor disturbed her. And his stares lingered a bit too long. Even if he weren't twice her age and married, he wasn't her type.
When they reached the Sheraton lot where her Karmann Ghia was parked, Arterburn grabbed the door handle. The boss leaned over and pressed down the lock, launching a battle of wills that would last five hours.
Arterburn's story is about sex: an older boss who tried to flex his power for sexual favors.
Kris Kelly's is about money: She earned dramatically less than her male co-workers doing the same job.
Carol Cottor's is about retaliation: After complaining about a lack of overtime for women, she was placed in line for a layoff.
Sue Brundage's is about a culture: She used her vacation days to avoid going to a hostile workplace.
A class-action, gender-bias lawsuit against Boeing has brought these and other stories to the surface. Some were part of the suit, which covers 28,000 women who worked for the company between 1997 and 2000.
Others came from readers such as Arterburn, who worked there long ago. And some came from the company's own personnel staff, who reluctantly testified to lawyers preparing the case that, yes, women have had a tough time at Boeing.
Boeing has denied steadfastly that its women workers are treated differently from men, a statement it repeated before and after partially settling the lawsuit, which focused on pay disparities but included allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation and racial discrimination. (The settlement's sum is undisclosed, but the two sides are expected to reach a final agreement this week. )
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Indeed, for many women Boeing is an ideal employer that provides above-average salaries, generous benefits, day-care facilities and opportunities to advance. In some departments, such as marketing and human resources, women dominate.
"Our direct boss is a woman," said one employee in marketing who asked not to be identified. "My indirect boss is a woman, and there are several women in leadership positions."
Yet others, who held jobs ranging from janitor to sales representative, from factory worker to engineer, describe a different Boeing.
The stories provide a glimpse inside a company where, in some pockets at least, women have long been paid less than men doing the same work, denied promotions because of their gender and retaliated against for being on the wrong end of an office flirtation.
Unequal pay, equal work
Nearly four decades after Ruth Arterburn was trapped inside a truck with her boss, Patti Anderson, a manufacturing engineer and third-generation Boeing worker, was being complimented on her breasts.
"If a woman complained to Boeing's EEO office or to its HR departments," Anderson told lawyers in a sworn statement, "she would be blacklisted and suffer future retaliation."
Besides dealing with crude comments and sexual innuendo from men co-workers, Anderson resented being paid significantly less than men doing the same job.
"My husband, brother and dad also performed the same job as me, and each was paid more than me and consistently received higher raises than I. I know this because I saw their pay stubs," she said in the statement.
Government audits and Boeing's own salary studies confirm such pay disparities. In documents the company fought to keep hidden, statistical analyses showed that before 2000, women typically earned $1,000 to $2,000 a year less than men in similar jobs.
This was largely because women started at lower salaries or were assigned lower pay grades. The wage gap widened over time, because Boeing's pay raises were computed as a percentage of the employee's salary. A man earning $40,000 a year, for example, would get a bigger raise than a woman earning $38,000.
Boeing was prepared to argue in court that those pay studies were flawed because they wrongly compared different jobs that had similar titles, and ignored similar jobs that had different titles.
Internally, however, the company knew women were treated unequally in all sorts of ways, from lower starting salaries to smaller raises to fewer job promotions. A panel of Boeing compensation experts who studied the disparities concluded as much, according to unsealed court documents.
In its 1998 report, the panel said "men are more likely to be hired into the higher paying positions" and "females and minorities are paid less."
Erika Lochow, who worked in Boeing's Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) office, recalled seeing those studies. She declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a deposition for the discrimination lawsuit said she and a female supervisor were shocked at the "magnitude and how pervasive" the pay disparities were.
Lochow also confirmed the company had a good-old-boy culture.
"There tends to be a culture of promoting people like you, which is predominantly like white male," she said in the deposition. "White males feel more comfortable with white males. And it tends to exclude women (and) minorities."
By 2000, Boeing had stopped giving percentage-based raises in favor of market-driven target salaries.
That year, it also put $22 million toward boosting the salaries of women and minorities.
Spokesman Ken Mercer said the company provides multiple outlets — management, human resources, an ethics department, the internal EEO office — for workers to report discrimination.
"If discrimination is found, the company does take swift and appropriate action to correct that up to and including termination of employment."
Corporate cultures
Boeing isn't the only large company to face complaints of gender bias 40 years after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made job-discrimination illegal.
Wal-Mart was recently hit with a discrimination lawsuit brought by 1.6 million current and former female employees. In 1997, Home Depot settled a gender-bias suit for $104 million.
Journalist Susan Antilla wrote about discrimination and sexual harassment against women working for Wall Street brokerages in the 1990s for her book, "Tales From the Boom-Boom Room."
Some corporate cultures, however, are more biased toward men than others, say social scientists. This is true despite corporate policies and programs aimed at preventing job discrimination.
"Where you have a heavy masculanized work environment, you may have a sort of macho ethic," says Joan Williams, director of WorkLife Law at American University's Washington College of Law. "And this is true from investment banking to engineering to many, many blue-collar jobs where there are very few women."
"The work culture tends to get very intertwined with masculine patterns of friendship, social bonding and masculinity in general," Williams adds.
Boeing's work force is about 75 percent men, many of whom were in the military.
One woman who asked not to be identified says she's the only woman in her office. She holds a technical job in Boeing's Phantom Works division.
"One guy said to me, 'You'll never get anywhere because you'll never go where any of the major decisions are made.' He was referring to the bathroom, of course."
Social bonding, whether over a urinal or a men's softball game, is one way gender bias continues to creep along in supposedly modern workplaces, says Barbara Reskin, a sociology professor at the University of Washington.
"I've been increasingly persuaded that a lot of it isn't intentional, it's that we automatically prefer others whom we see as being members of our group. And we prefer them in ways that are subtle. We extend them the benefit of the doubt."
That is certainly the case in parts of Boeing.
Jackie Roberts, a director of program planning for the commercial-airplane division before she worked in the EEO office, remembered how insidious such preferences were.
Like Lochow, Roberts declined to be interviewed for this article. In her deposition for the lawsuit, she recalled one meeting in which a supervisor was lobbying for more money for one of his workers, a determined, aggressive guy who got things done.
Roberts had a favorite employee, too, a small, tough woman who stood her ground.
"The positive attributes they gave to this one guy were the same kind of qualities that Verna had," Roberts told lawyers.
"But the adjectives and adverbs (describing her) were negative. And that's when I spoke up and said, 'Hey you guys, listen to this.' "
For five hours, the boss who held Arterburn in his truck pleaded, cajoled and ordered her to have sex with him in the hotel. She said every time she reached for the door handle, he stopped her. She was afraid to fight too hard, afraid she'd anger him. He might take it out on her father.
At the time, her father, Jack Arterburn, was a high-level Boeing manager with his own job to protect. He had uprooted his family a year earlier to move to Seattle from Boeing's Wichita, Kan., site, a decision his wife resented.
His daughter said she worried if he learned she had been held captive by a supervisor in a hotel parking lot, he might do something rash. Then he'd lose his job, which would cause more family tension.
By 3 a.m., the standoff finally ended. The boss needed to get home to his wife, and Arterburn needed to drive to her apartment on Capitol Hill to get ready for work.
When she arrived at work at 7:30 the next morning, her immediate boss, a woman who had also been to the party, took her aside. Arterburn would no longer be working in that office, the woman told her. She would be transferred down the hall, far enough away, Arterburn suspected, that she wouldn't run into the supervisor with the red truck.
For a time, Arterburn didn't tell a soul about that night. Not her co-workers, not her fiancée, not Boeing's personnel office, not the police and certainly not her father.
Less than a year later, she was married and quit Boeing.
When Arterburn, now 60, read that 28,000 women were suing Boeing for discrimination, she had a tiny twinge of satisfaction. The first in 36 years.
"Aha," she thought. "Now the truth is going to come out."
Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or sholt@seattletimes.com
Kris Kelly
In the 1980s, long after Ruth Arterburn fended off a boss and long before 28,000 Boeing women sued for discrimination, Kris Kelly was enduring her own private hell.
She was working in Boeing's computer services in Kent, then a job mostly done by men. Her male lead — a Boeing title for a position a notch below supervisor — was coming on to her. Sometimes he patted her fanny; sometimes he rubbed against her. She resented it, considered him a "Neanderthal," but wasn't surprised. Even in the post-feminism workplace, such behavior wasn't uncommon.
"The same guy who was harassing me said, 'Why don't you stay at home and take care of your kids and quit taking the jobs away from us men?' "
After she complained about him, he started giving her bad performance reviews, a signal it was time for Kelly to transfer to Renton.
Her harasser called her new boss to complain about her performance. She could have filed a formal charge with Boeing but instead she let the matter drop.
"I wouldn't have been able to get any other guys to work with me," says Kelly, now 44 and running her own computer business in Tacoma. "They would have totally shunned me, and I think I eventually would have lost my job."
Her work spoke for itself, and she began receiving positive performance reviews again. But she wasn't getting the salary upgrades she believed she deserved. "The guys I worked with were making three or four times more."
After being transferred three more times and watching her salary stagnate while her male co-workers rose through the organization, Kelly in 1988 decided she didn't want to work for Boeing anymore. She was earning $28,550 a year.
"I didn't even have a job when I quit. I just quit. It was that bad."
Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or sholt@seattletimes.com
Sue Brundage
Sue Brundage's job at the Renton seal-mix shop soured shortly after she arrived in 1996. She wanted — needed — overtime to help pay off some household debt, so she asked to be trained on the equipment.
She had always loved factory work — the noise, the grind, the grime. She figured the more machinery she could operate, the more hours she would pick up.
But her men co-workers found reasons not to help her. When she complained to her bosses, the men found reasons not to like her. And after she talked to Boeing's EEO office, the men found reasons not to speak to her except, perhaps, to criticize her work.
For a social woman, the ostracism was as bad as the lack of overtime or training.
"I felt alienated. I could feel the hate. I'd sit there at my area and I'd just feel like I was in a black hole. I would cry every day. I would be in such despair."
When two young men were hired and trained on the equipment Brundage had asked about, she fell into further despair. She used her vacation days to stay in bed, the covers over her head. She says she even contemplated suicide.
"I was getting to the planning stages. My family is what really saved me. My children, they were my life."
The EEOC investigated Brundage's complaints in 2000 and found she was denied training and overtime because she is a woman. She says Boeing offered her a settlement of $8,000, but she rejected it.
She may end up with an even smaller sum, depending on the terms of the class-action settlement. But Brundage, now 57, who now works at Boeing's Everett plant, takes some satisfaction in being part of the larger case.
"It's not the money, it's the idea. I want it to hurt Boeing. I know that sounds vicious, but I want Boeing to know what they did wrong."
Carol Cottor
Carol Cotter got her first lesson in Boeing's gender politics in 1992, a year after she was hired as a lab technician in Kent.
"I was told I didn't deserve a merit raise because my husband was a Boeing worker, too, and we didn't need the money."
She got her second lesson a few years later, after she transferred to the Auburn facility.
She asked management why, if she was doing the same job as the guy next to her, was he getting the overtime? Why could the men leave early without retribution while the women couldn't?
"The males that they brought in off the street were offered a higher starting salary than I had."
After she complained to her union, Boeing's ethics department and its EEO office, her job went from frustrating to miserable.
Her lead began demanding more work from her, she says. He scolded her in front of co-workers. He took her off jobs for one reason or another, putting her further behind. She missed crew meetings because no one told her when they'd been scheduled.
At first, her response was to work harder.
"I stepped up to the plate and gave them 150 percent. I worked through lunches and breaks."
When the retention ratings came out — a score that helps determine who stays and who goes in case of a layoff — Cottor's had dropped, and so did her spirit.
"My boss told me it was because I could not multi-task."
Like Brundage, she felt like an outcast, and the pressure weighed on her.
"I would sit in my car and cry and say, 'Lord, what did I do to deserve this?' "
She was laid off in August .
Although this came at the tail end of massive Boeing job cuts that would reach 36,000 around the Puget Sound region, Cottor believes she would still have a job if she were a man.
"I was more cross-trained than anyone in the lab. I had more skills."