My Contribution - a short comedy about a tech job interview

A few years ago I wrote "My Contribution," a short play about a tech job interview. It was given a staged reading at the 2017 Playwrights' Center of San Francisco's Playoff. I believe that it is not yet dated, although I hoped it would be by now.

The play reflects some ideas I had back when I wrote a series of posts on what I called, for lack of a better name, the Morris Number.  They begin here.

I also entered My Contribution in a play contest.  They were seeking slightly longer plays so I added some monologue rants for the main character to present after the play ended.  One rant is about landlines and one is about TWGLCMs (pronounced twiggle-kim), an acronym I had explained here. In the rant, however, I added a Y: TWGLYCM (twiggly-kim).  Why?  Read the play.

The Weighted Morris Number (Morris Number 06)

THE MORRIS NUMBER, WITH WEIGHTS

When I calculated the range of ordinary Morris Numbers (OMNs) for the five tech companies discussed in Julianne Pepitone's CNN Money article, I thought about adding weights. Weights help to discriminate (npi) between companies with the same OMN but a different ordering of females and males. Weights are a way to take account of the gender pattern above the fifth highest ranking woman.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Two companies have an ordinary Morris Number (OMN) of 5: there are 5 men above the 5th highest ranking women. In one company the top 10 positions alternate between M and F. In the other company the top five positions are held by men, the next five by women.

To distinguish between such situations, we can use weights. Counting down from the top, the more men above each successive woman, the higher (worse) the metric will be.

ADDING WEIGHTS

The Weighted Morris Number (WMN) is calculated by using different weighting factors for the number of men whose position at the company is higher than one or more of the top five woman. The weights go down as you go down the hierarchy. The number of men higher than the top woman is multiplied by the biggest factor. Let us set it at 15. If the CEO is a woman, the contribution to the Morris Number for Female #1 is 0. If the top woman is 6th in the company, the contribution is 75 (5 x 15).

The set of multipliers might be:
     15 for the number of men above Female #1
     10 for the number of men between Female #1 and Female #2
       6 for the number of men between Female #2 and Female #3
       3 for the number of men between Female #3 and Female #4
       1 for the number of men between Female #4 and Female #5
The size of the steps between weights are 5-4-3-2.

ALTERNATING MEN AND WOMEN AT THE TOP

If men and women alternate in the top 10 positions, the ordinary Morris Number is either 4, if a woman is at the top, or 5, if a man is at the top. The difference between the OMNs for those two situations is 1. The difference between the two WMNs is more dramatic. With a man in the number 1 position, the weighted Morris Number is
     1 x 15
     1 x 10
     1 x   6
     1 x   3
     1 x   1
for a total of 35. If a woman is in the top position, the weighted Morris Number is 20.

The bonus for a female CEO might make the weighted Morris Number a less desirable metric: it could encourage companies to rely on the Indira Phenomenon rather than ending discrimination.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

Company 1: There are 50 men before you reach any women. The next 5 positions are held by women. The OMN is 50.

Company 2: The CEO is a woman. Then there are 5 men between her and F2, 35 men between F2 and the next two women, F3 and F4, then 10 more men between F4 and F5. The OMN is 50.

In Company 1, the top 5 females are below the executive tier. (I say that because it is rare for an organization to have more than 50 people with substantial executive clout.) Company 2 has a female CEO and another female also within the top 10. So far so good, but the Indira Phenomenon may dominate after F2.

Now consider the WMNs for these two companies: Company 1:
     750 = 50 men above F1 x 15
         0 = No men between F1 and F5
     ------------------------------------------------
     750 = WMN

Company 2:
          0 = 15 x  0 men above F1
       50 = 10 x  5 men between F1 and F2
     210 =  6 x 35 men between F2 and F3
         0 =  3 x  0 men between F3 and F4
        10 = 1 x 10 men between F4 and F5
     ------------------------------------------------
     270 = WMN

Company 2's WMN is about a third of Company 1's. Imagine if that fact were publicized at job fairs and university career offices and in a tweet that went viral. Company 2 would attract more and better women job seekers and more and better women customers. It would be able to achieve a level of excellence that company 1 could only envy until its top management finally realized that quality women should replace mediocre men.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140331,0403

Calculating the Morris Number - Hypotheticals (Morris Number 04)

The ordinary Morris Number, described here, is the number of men you pass, starting at the top of an organizational chart, on your way to finding the fifth highest ranking woman. 

Here are some illustrative examples.  A note on notation:  Female #3 or F3 means the 3rd highest ranking female.

A.  WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS

In a nunnery, the Morris Number is probably 0. If the Mother Superior is not really the top person but reports to a male Priest, the Morris Number is 1.

Note:  I thought the Girl Scouts might have a Morris Number of 0 but then I found the senior leadership here and realized I was wrong.  There is one man on that page and six women: Is the Morris Number 0 or 1?  We can infer that it is 1. The man apparently ranks third overall. This is suggested by the fact that the various Chiefs below the CEO and Chief of Staff are not in alphabetical order by title nor last name.  Mr. Boockvar, Chief Customer Officer, is listed above Chief Officers for Development, Information, and Financial, and the General Counsel (named, respectively, Taft, Miller, Olden and Rochon). If we were to use weights in calculating Morris Numbers, we would need to know M1's rank vis-a-vis F1 through F5. See Part 06 of this series.

Is a female as highly placed in the Boy Scouts organization? No. Their leadership team consists of eight men: three holding positions called "National" and designated volunteer -- the President, Commissioner and President-Elect, then four Scout Executives of different ranks and last the Chief Financial Officer.

B.  SOME POWERFUL FEMALES

This hypothetical organization has
    - one CEO, a female (F1)
              Contribution to Morris Number =   0
    - a COO, CFO and CTO, all reporting to the CEO; the first two are male and the CTO is female (F2): 
              Contribution to Morris Number =   2
    - five Executive Vice Presidents (EVPs); one is female (F3):
              Contribution to Morris Number =   4
    - eleven Senior Vice Presidents (SVP); one is female (F4): 
               Contribution to Morris Number = 10
    - one Associate Senior Vice President, a female (F5, so we can stop looking)
               Contribution to Morris Number =   0
                               The Morris Number is 16

Note that in this example we do not have to know the standing of Female #3 or Female #4, the lone female EVP and SVP, respectively, relative to the men with the same title because all those males are above Female #5. 


C.  ALL-MALE TOP MANAGEMENT

In this hypothetical organization:
    - The highest ranked woman is an Account Representative (AR).  Above her, there are 100 positions, all filled by males. 
            Contribution to Morris Number = 100.
     - There are 420 ARs, 20 of whom are women.   Without reliable information to know about the rank of the 5th women among the 420 ARs, we can nevertheless make some educated guesses.

       1. We can estimate the Morris Number assuming that the women and men in this organization have the same range of abilities. 

This may not be the case, especially given the absence of women in the first 100 positions and the widely accepted belief that people who do not conform to homosocial reproduction, which in this hypothetical means women, have to be better than men to attain the same level. Here is one citation for that proposition from thirty years ago: "Neutralizing Sexism in Mixed-Sex Groups: Do Women Have to Be Better Than Men?" by M. D. Pugh and Ralph Wahrman, American Journal of Sociology, 88:746-782 (Jan. 1983), available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2779483, which references a study by the same authors from 1974 ("Sex, Noncomformity and Influence," Sociometry 37:137-47) in which they found that "[M]ale groups refused to be influenced by an obviously competent female despite the fact that without her they clearly failed at their task and lost money." Forty years later, how much has changed?

The 5th woman out of 20 is above 3/4 of the women.  She should therefore also rank above 3/4 of the men and therefore below 1/4 of them.
            Contribution to Morris Number:  1/4 of 400 = 100
            Morris Number assuming equal gender abilities:  200.
OR
        2. We can caculate the range of Morris Numbers, and the average within that range, obtained by calculating the lowest and highest possible numbers:
    - the Lowest Morris Number is obtained if the first five women are above all the men: 
            Contribution to Morris Number: 0 
            and
            the Morris Number is at least 100
    and
    - the Highest Morris Number:  all 400 men are above the first five women: 
            Contribution to Morris Number: 400
            and
            the Morris Number is at most 500

Morris Number Range: [100,400]. Average: 250

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0403

The Morris Number and Determining Rank (Morris Number 03; PhD Ideas 05)

 COUNTING HOW MANY MEN YOU PASS
ON THE WAY TO FEMALE #5:
WHEN THE ORG CHART IS NOT ENOUGH

To calculate the Morris Number of an organization, count the men above the fifth highest ranking female ("F5").  Sounds simple. But if several people have the same title as F5, and some of them are male, how many of those men should be counted?

One approach would be to assume that F5 is average:  half the men with the same title are above her, half below.  If F5 is not the only woman at that rank, we could guess that she is above the same percentage of men as she is above women. See this example. Or we might calculate the best and worst Morris Numbers, assuming that the woman is at the top or bottom of the rank, respectively.  That range may be useful for comparison to other companies or to the same company at a different time.

But maybe we can do better.  People with the same title, say, Senior Vice President, may not in fact have the same rank and they may not have the same power within the organization.   Assessments of relative power are likely to be subjective, but objective information may be available.  If the company website lists the management team, we may be able to guess who is above whom when the listing is not alphabetical.  (See the example here based on the Girl Scouts' public information.) If the job holders are high enough up in their organization, the company's Executive Leadership webpages or SEC filings may provide some answers as discussed here.

Other employees within the organization, or researchers granted limited access to employment data including title and gender (but no names, please), could use these proxies of true rank, alone or in combination:
       1st choice: compensation package, if available,
       2nd choice: median compensation of direct reports
       3rd choice: budget
       4th choice: seniority
       5th choice: number of direct and indirect reports. 
to calculate the Morris Number. Perhaps someone has already analyzed how accurately each of those predicts a manager's power within an organization.  If not, it seems like a good subject for some PhD research.

I choose direct/indirect reports last because a supervisor of lower-paid workers, compared to one who supervises higher-paid workers such as professionals (engineers, lawyers or accountants), may have
       - more people to supervise, and
       - the same or even a higher budget, but
       - less power or influence.
Seniority might indicate power within the organization, or it might be a sign of dead wood left in place because of strong social or family connections.  How many people you supervise may be less of a clue to your power than your own salary is.  The median salary of the people you supervise may be an even better clue.  Another PhD Idea there.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0403

The Morris Number - A Few Questions and Answers (Morris Number 02)

Here are answers to some questions that came up during early discussions of the Morris Number.

"IN A PERFECT WORLD"

Q. How do you define "in a perfect world"?

A. In a perfect world, we can assume that
        1.  men and women receive equal treatment in education and employment,
        2.  the pool of people qualified for top-ranking jobs is half men, half women, and
         3.  women and men are equally likely to hold the top position in any organization.


Q. Why would the average Morris Number in a perfect world be 4.5 rather than a whole number?

A. I state the average Morris Number as 4.5 rather than a whole number to highlight how the number changes depending on Assumption 3. Assume that men and women alternate. If the top person is a woman, the fifth highest ranking woman is at position 9 and the Morris Number is 4. If the top person is a man, then the fifth highest woman is at position 10 and the Morris Number is 5. The average of many companies in the perfect world would be 4.5.


Q. What if the applicant pool is not 50-50?

A. If the applicant pool for top-ranking positions has more men than women, then we would expect the average Morris Number for a group of perfectly non-discriminatory entities to be more than 5. But there is no reason for the applicant pool to be other than 50-50 because in a perfect world there is no sex discrimination: men and women have equal educational and employment opportunities.

The Morris Number was created as a way to measure
        (a) the imperfections of the world, or some subset of it, with regard to gender neutrality, and
        (b) the progress toward perfection as the years go by.

WHY 5: WHY FIFTH HIGHEST RANKING?

Q. Why look for the fifth highest woman, not the third, say, or the tenth?

A. I hope that the choice of five follows the Goldilocks principle: neither too few nor too many but just right. Using two or three might be affected by the Indira Phenomenon: there might be as many as three women at the power table in some organiations, but the rest of the women would be in the bottom ranks. A number like eight or ten might be a problem in smaller organizations. A metric based on five will, I hope, give useful information about almost all employers.

Q. What about employers with less than five women employees?

A. Employers with less than five women employees and more than ten total employees have a Morris Number of infinity. (Below ten total, we can skip that employer until there are a few more hires.)

WHERE ARE THE BEST (LOWEST) MORRIS NUMBERS

Q. Where do I expect to find lower Morris Numbers?

A. Not in Silicon Valley, I'm afraid. Some of the reasons for my low expectations for tech companies are here.

I recently came across the phrase 'homosocial reproduction.' It fits Silicon Valley to a T, or rather it fits Silicon Valley's HR practices to an HR.

My guess is that the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are to be found in companies whose products in the bad old days would have been featured on the women's pages of newspapers: cosmetics, fashion, food, things for children. For a century or more, women started their own companies in those industries. 
         Coco Chanel opened her first shop in 1910.
         Madame C J Walker began her own hair products business in Indiana in 1910.
         In 1945 Ruth Handler co-founded Mattel, a picture-frame company that became a maker of doll-house furniture a year later and then a toy company (and, yes, introduced Handler's invention, the Barbie doll, in 1959).
        Estee Lauder founded the company that bears her name in 1946.
   In the "women's pages" industries, as compared to "man's world" industries (finance, heavy industry, agribusiness) and regardless of the gender of the founder, women were hired more often and more readily, and that, in turn, improved the odds that a woman could rise to a higher position.

In 2013 there were 23 companies in the Fortune 500 that had female CEOs. See below. By my count, six of those companies are in women's pages industries (four in food, one in cosmetics and one in fashion). Five are in tech (software, hardware or both). In 2010, there were 15 companies in the Fortune 500 with female CEOs; by my count, four were in women's pages industries and two in tech. In 2000, the Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs numbered two, three or four, depending on when the count was made, and five different women were involved. Three of them headed companies that make products heavily marketed to women: Mattel (toys: Jill Barad), Avon (cosmetics: Andrea Jung) and Walmart (retail: Jeanne Jackson). The other two were Carly Fiorina at HP and Marion O. Sandler at Golden West Financial.

Second, among the "man's world" companies, the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are more likely to be in older, rust-belt industries rather than 21st century ones.  The older companies, after all, have spent the last half century with the threat of affirmative action lawsuits forcing them to discriminate a little less and a little less openly. Those companies also hire from top business and law schools, and those schools have graduated plenty of women by now. Tech companies may hire fewer lawyers and B-school grads. I have heard that the tech world excuses its failure to hire women on the grounds that women don't get degrees in computer science. Assuming they are correct that women haven't pursued computer science in large enough numbers to make a dent in the Boys' Club culture of Silicon Valley, I can think of some solutions that the biggest employers - Google, Apple, Facebook - could easily afford that would make a dramatic difference pretty quickly. Just ask.

BLAMING WOMEN? NO.

In the post that led to my developing the Morris Number I wrote:

We all know about Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman at HP, and Marissa Mayer formerly at Google now at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. What happens, though, if you look in those companies for the next highest ranking female? How many men do you pass on the way down?

Q. Do you mean that women who get to the top do not help other women?

A. No. That was not my point. The only reason I referred to those famous ladies is to illustrate that a female in the top position does not prove that the company is an equal opportunity employer.

Women do not have to hire and promote *only* women. And the fact is that any new leader has only limited opportunity to create new positions or to replace incumbents. It takes time to create an optimal management team. Sometimes, too, filling positions with outside candidates may not be an option for corporate-cultural reasons. If the company has not promoted women into positions within a few levels of the top, then the internal candidates will all be male.

The 23 Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs, see http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/09/women-ceos-fortune-500, last updated December 10, 2013, would be interesting to study with regard to the blame question. See number 13 of my PhD ideas. We do not know those companies' Morris Numbers but we can come up with a Morris-style Number that tells us something about the Fortune 500. If we consider the CEOs of the Fortune 500 as part of a single organization and give them their companies' Fortune 500 rankings, the Morris Number is 38: you pass 38 men on the way to finding the fifth highest company with a woman CEO, 43rd ranked Pepsico's CEO Indra K. Nooyi.

Maybe some women who get to the top are as blind as the men around them to the excellence of women. Maybe not. But until those female CEOs have had their titles for several years, and until the top women are at companies that in the past have consistently promoted women into upper management, the presence or absence of women in other important positions does not prove much about whether women help women.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0401; typos fixed 20150223