Antidiscrimination Efforts and the Repressive Weight of Culture

Abstract

In Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, sociologist Ashley Mears documented her experiences embedded in the ultra-rich global party circuit of the early 2010s. Herself a former model, Mears accompanied promoters, young women, and wealthy partiers as they went from restaurants to night clubs to after-parties in some of the most glamorous locations around the world. The roles of the individual players in this scene, as Mears describes them, were sharply circumscribed. Bar and restaurant owners would pay promoters to bring “girls”—young women between eighteen and twenty-five who were tall, thin, and preferably models—to various festivities in order to confer social status and desirability upon the particular venue. The other habitués of these types of gatherings were rich, powerful, and ostentatious: mostly men of great wealth or generous expense accounts who engaged in displays of competitive spending rituals. The book explains how the “girls” played a critical role in the elite party ecosystem and yet had little power within it. The young women in the circuit had unique importance, but their role was ornamental, rather than relational—functioning “as a form of capital.” Their presence may have served to generate important networking opportunities for bankers, lenders, hedge fund managers, financial advisors, and even cosmetic dentists, but the women themselves were not building future careers in these industries. And their roles in this tableau would end when they reached their late twenties. In the meantime, the clients—“mostly white and male elites”—retained “privileged access to a valuable global space” throughout their careers.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it an unlawful employment practice for an employer to discriminate against workers on the basis of sex or to limit, segregate, or classify workers because of their sex. This statute established the foundational antidiscrimination principle holding the promise of a more egalitarian society. But as Kerri Lynn Stone’s book Panes of the Glass Ceiling eloquently illustrates, the legal requirement to abstain from overt sex discrimination has left undisturbed many of the systemic barriers to sex and gender equality. These existing pockets of male privilege remain—despite significant strides towards legal equality—due to enduring reservoirs of money, power, and access still in male hands. Panes of the Glass Ceiling names the cultural frames that resist antidiscrimination protections and restrain movement towards equality.

The global party scene described in Very Important People is an extreme, exaggerated illustration of ways in which existing economic structures have been shaped to stifle efforts for equal opportunity. Such patterns of exclusionary cultures exist in many workplaces. Decades of male domination in fields like law, finance, sales, and management have driven these professions to revolve around the male perspective. Professor Stone’s set of “panes” expertly illustrates many of these workplace norms, policies, and expectations. In discussing beliefs, understandings, and expectations such as “we expect you to take (verbal) punches like a man” and “accept ‘locker room’ and sexist talk,” Stone describes how women must endure cultural milieus that are at best alien and at worst hostile to their identities. By minimizing the deleterious effects of these environments, courts have failed to make employment opportunities truly open to women. Similarly, ideas like “women are the downfall of men” and “just be grateful that you’re there” demonstrate the assumption of a male perspective and the othering of women who try to enter the space. Each of these assumptions, norms, and cultural expectations serves to reinforce the existing power structures and hinder meaningful change.

Keywords: gender discrimination, employment discrimination, sex discrimination, antidiscriminaton