by Nicola Rowe

Created on: November 01, 2008

The dotcom crash was in full swing, and my cohort and I were like lambs: bright, cheery, and ripe for the slaughter. Investment banks and consultancies alike were shedding junior staff by the bucketload "not a layoff," the head of one firm's office memorably explained, "but a quality-based cleansing of the staff portfolio." But there was something a little odd about this cleansing. If you looked closely, you saw that a disproportionate amount of those with an X next to their name had a couple of X chromosomes, too. The layoff hit women much harder than it hit men.

It wasn't just the 2001 turndown. Liar's Poker Lewis' rip-roaring chronicle of his time as a bond salesman in the mid-80s, records the same phenomenon at Salomon Bros. when the market crashed there in 1987. And Harvard guru Sylvia Ann Hewlett was prescient enough back in February totell readers about her own career: "My first female boss warned me, 'When the going gets tough, women lose out.' This piece of conventional wisdom seems to be alive and well."
Why do women lose out? Watching the bloodbath back at my own firm at the turn of the century, I was absolutely certain that it wasn't explicit discrimination. The times when a female baby boomer could be told straight out that she was "taking a job away from a man" are gone, at least in northern Europe and the English diaspora.

Women partly lose out because, when all the chips are down and the boys in charge are negotiating the job-loss lists, they need someone to speak up for them. If they haven't networked well (and one commentator on this sitenoted on an earlier post women don't tend to network well), they won't have anyone to champion them. Partly, the reason is more atavistic: in tough times, people cleave instinctively to archetypes, and they have less tolerance for risk. Which is bad luck if the archetypal practitioner in your industry is a chap and the risky choice or the non-traditional choice, by definition is a woman. Let's be frank: throughout most of the private sector, the archetype, and hence the safe haven in a market storm, is a guy in a suit.

So, if you're a woman, how can you avoid falling prey to the gender scythe? You have to learn to network, but that's a mid-term strategy; it's much more important to leverage the network you have if you think you're in immediate danger. Ask the highest-ranking person you trust for a confidential conversation. Say you're concerned about your job, and ask frankly for an assessment of your situation. And don't be afraid to ask openly, "Will you back me?" There's a value in outright commitment, if you can bring yourself to ask for it.

It might not hurt, either, to wonder aloud whether men and women will be affected in equal proportion by the coming crisis. No one wants a discrimination lawsuit, after all, and it's worth while letting management know that you're keeping an eye on the numbers.

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