We're nearly two decades into the 21st century. It's been 95 years since women won the right to vote, and millennials are not the first generation of females to have full-time jobs outside the home. That seems like progress, and yet, when we look back at the past year, we can't help but think, Wow, working women went through a lot of crap in 2015. Sure, there were some highlights — Hillary Clinton declaring her candidacy, or women getting the right to serve in combat roles in the U.S. Armed Forces. But those seem few and far between the many moments that showed the unequal state of the American workplace when it came to gender and race in 2015.
Yes, taking a look back at these lowlights might incite some outrage, but we thought the following moments were worth reliving. We can learn from these terrible experiences. And we’re talking about these issues more now because people are actually beginning to stand up against the status quo. Take a look through our list ahead, and here’s hoping 2016 gives us a little more to celebrate.
Ellen Pao Loses Her Discrimination Suit
In March, Ellen Pao lost her high-profile gender discrimination suit against her former employer, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Pao alleged that Kleiner Perkins failed to promote her to partner, in part, because she was a woman, and then fired her after she wrote a memo suggesting gender discrimination.
The case got many in the male-dominated fields of tech and venture capital talking about the very real gender imbalance faced in those industries — in 2014 just 6% of partners at VC firms were women.
Pao was hit with a double-whammy of bad moments this year, as she also stepped down as CEO of Reddit in July after a revolt by the site's dedicated users (redditors) when she tried to implement policies to help reduce online harassment.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
Google Doesn't Want To Talk About Salaries
This summer, Erica Baker's tweets went viral after the former Google employee shared the inside scoop on salary transparency at the tech behemoth. She wrote about creating an internal spreadsheet with some coworkers where fellow employees could voluntarily share their compensation packages. According to Baker, the experiment highlighted some disparities in pay and allowed employees to negotiate for more equitable deals. Unfortunately, Google management wasn't as thrilled about the internal spreadsheet, and Baker was called in to talk to a manager about her actions. She claimed her white male colleague who was also involved in creating the spreadsheet did not receive the same backlash. Baker has since left Google on her own accord.
Photo: Via @EricaJoy.
Marissa Mayer Takes Just Two Weeks Of Maternity Leave
As the first woman ever to give birth while running a Fortune 500 company, Marissa Mayer is often looked to as a model for working women in powerful corporate positions. So, when she announced in September that she was pregnant for the second time in her tenure (she gave birth to healthy twin girls on December 10), her decision to once again take just two weeks of maternity leave caused some controversy.
Many people argued that Mayer would have set a better example if she had taken advantage of Yahoo's full maternity leave policy (16 weeks for mothers), which could arguably have led to greater acceptance of gender equality in corporate America. At the very least she could have used the opportunity to speak out against the fact that most women in America have zero access to paid leave.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/ Getty Images.
The U.S. Women's National Team Gets A Paltry Payday
Even though the U.S. Women’s National Team earned the highest ever television ratings for a soccer game in the country when they took down Japan in the World Cup final this summer, they took home $33 million less than the German men’s national team won for their 2014 World Cup title. The U.S. women split the $2 million prize among all 23 players and coaches and staff, which was actually less than the U.S. men earned for losing in the knockout round. That’s one hell of a wage gap.
Photo: Matthew Lewis/ FIFA/ Getty Images.
Even J Lawr Isn't Immune To The Wage Gap
The hack into Sony emails and data happened in late 2014, but the info that was leaked exposing Hollywood’s serious gender discrimination stayed in the news cycle well into 2015. In October, Jennifer Lawrence publicly spoke her mind about earning less than her male co-stars in American Hustle — a fact revealed by the leaked emails — in an essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter.
“I didn't want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled,’" Lawrence wrote of not negotiating for more money. "At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn't worry about being ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’”
Photo: Gregory Pace/BEI/ Rex Shutterstock.
IBM Fails To Inspire Women Engineers
You know that pesky problem about the lack of diversity in tech? Well, this winter, IBM thought it found the way to get women, you know, interested in engineering. Earlier this month, the tech behemoth launched a campaign inviting women engineers to “HackAHairdryer,” to “reengineer what matters in science.” Women scientists who were busy working building satellites and rockets found the tactic patronizing.
The campaign isn't surprising when you look at all the various ways the tech industry perpetuates sexism, but it is disappointing coming from IBM. Its CEO, Ginni Rometty, started her career as an engineer and has been a fantastic spokesperson for women in tech. Maybe this idea didn't get her seal of approval? Either way, IBM has since discontinued this particular project as part of its larger effort to promote STEM careers.
Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images.
Female Sportscaster Faces Online Trolling
Jessica Mendoza, a former Olympic-gold-medal-winning softball player, shattered a thick glass ceiling this year when she became the first female in-game baseball analyst for ESPN. While most of her audience was thrilled with her work, Atlanta radio talk show host Mike Bell was none too impressed with a woman calling a baseball game. He tweeted a string of insults at Mendoza, including referring to her as “Tits McGee,” because, clearly, one’s gender negates one’s ability to analyze a sporting event.
Photo: Maxx Wolfson/Getty Images.
Megyn Kelly Vs. Donald Trump
At the first Republican presidential debate in August, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly posed some tough questions to the 10 (all male) candidates. She asked Donald Trump whether some of his past derogatory comments about women — and particularly women’s appearances — sounded “like the temperament of a man we should elect as president.”
The next day, Trump told CNN’s Don Lemon that he didn’t respect Kelly as a journalist and implied Kelly’s tough questioning was a result of her being on her period: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
The Ugly Truth Behind Your Cheap Manicure
In May, a pair of New York Times exposés by reporter Sarah Maslin Nir revealed that New York City nail salon workers are routinely paid less than minimum wage, and face exploitation, abuse, and exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Many of these workers are women — largely immigrants who speak limited English — trying to make it out of the cycle of poverty. The reporting resulted in emergency measures announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to investigate nail salons for labor abuses and roll out regulations to protect workers more thoroughly.
Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images.
The Gender Wage Gap Continues To Bug Us
The workplace issue most women in the U.S. are concerned about? According to a groundbreaking survey of working women in 19 of the G-20 countries, their number-one concern is the gender wage gap. And that's totally valid: The wage gap in the U.S. was unchanged this year, with women earning 78 cents on average for every dollar men pocketed — and the gap is even bigger for minority women. The millennial generation isn’t sheltered either. Another study this year revealed that millennial males are out-earning their female counterparts in 49 out of 50 states.
Photographed by Raven Ishak.
No Republicans Support Paid Family Leave
There are numerous benefits to paid family leave, including studies showing that countries with guaranteed paid leave have lower infant mortality rates. Yet the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world without a government-mandated paid maternity leave policy, despite the success of paid leave laws in California that have boosted businesses’ bottom lines and led women to stay in the workforce.
It's certain to be a hot topic in 2016, but even though polls show the majority of voters support paid family leave, the Republican presidential candidates — including the lone woman running for the GOP nomination, Carly Fiorina — have made it clear they don’t support a government-mandated paid maternity leave policy.
Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images.
Ralph Nader Mansplains Economics To Fed Chair Janet Yellen
In November, Ralph Nader (he of five failed presidential runs) wrote the federal reserve chair, Janet Yellen, an open letter criticizing her for not raising interest rates. (Keeping interest rates low has been a key component of the Fed’s economic recovery strategy since the Great Recession.) Then he offered her an unsolicited suggestion for how to do her job better: “Chairwoman Yellen, I think you should sit down with your Nobel-Prize-winning husband, economist George Akerlof, who is known to be consumer-sensitive.” Because apparently even when you’re the most powerful person in monetary policy, you’re not immune to mansplaining.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
ACLU Launches Investigation Into Hollywood's Gender Problem
The gender gap problem in Hollywood is so huge, in May, the American Civil Liberties Union requested a government investigation into hiring practices of female film and television directors. Only 1.9% of the 100 top-grossing films of 2013 and 2014 were directed by women. The ACLU cited systemic “overt sex stereotyping and implicit bias” in their letters to regulators.
In November, Lena Dunham, Leslye Headland, and Anjelica Huston were among several women to speak out about the problem in a lengthy New York Times story.
Photo: Picture Perfect/ REX Shutterstock.
The Problem With Asking Women To Smile Takes The National Stage
Apple’s iPhone 6s launch event in September featured a demo of a new facial recognition photo tool that allows a user to edit a smile onto a photograph of a person. Of course, the demo used a photo of a female model, essentially asking her to “give us a smile. ” Sure, it was just a demo, but asking/forcing a female model to smile reveals the total lack of awareness the tech industry has to issues of sexism faced by women. Don’t believe that asking a woman to smile is sexist? Just ask Serena Williams.
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