On Toxic Corporate Culture in Contemporary Fiction

It was 1994 and I was 23 years old, working at Goldman Sachs and attending yet another one of those boring, fancy group business dinners, when a British man named Ashley, who was our computer support person, looked across the table at me and said, “Everybody knows you’re the sex symbol of Equity Capital Markets.”

Excuse me? Suddenly, I was in the spotlight, and didn’t know what to say. And neither, perhaps, did anyone else, because no one came to my defense.

The next morning I went in to work wearing one of the pantsuits that only the year before I had risked censure to wear, professional women at Goldman having until then been required to wear skirts. But now, that pantsuit was my armor. I was determined to be tough and pretend that nothing had happened, yet as soon as I glimpsed Ashley, I cried in anger and shame.

I decided to seek advice from Robin, a thirtysomething who was the only other woman in my small group, which was called Special Investments. Sure, I could report Ashley, she said, but if he got fired, it would all be on me. And besides, Ashley was having a hard time lately, going through a rough divorce. In the face of this lack of support and implied blame, I decided to just let it go. Besides, I was already into year two of my three-year analyst program; I wasn’t going to stay at Goldman long-term.

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BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

The Glitch, Elisabeth Cohen (Doubleday, 2018) · The Golden State, Lydia Kiesling (FSG, 2018) · The New Me, Halle Butler (Penguin Books, March 2019)
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And neither, as it turned out, were any of my female co-workers, Robin included. Some left for saner hours, and others, for part-time work so that they could be more available to their children. Had Goldman bothered to accommodate these women, they might have remained, eventually helping to elevate other young women and effect real cultural change from within. But it was not to be.

This past winter, memories of my time at Goldman came flooding back when its newly anointed and allegedly “hip” CEO David Solomon announced some “aspirational goals,” including that half its new analyst and entry-level associate hires should be women. “We are trying new approaches,” Solomon and his fellow C-suiters wrote in a firm-wide email that received positive media coverage, though I couldn’t understand why, given that back in 2018, the percentage of women in Goldman’s analyst class was in the high 40s already. Wow. Talk about aspiring to revolutionary change!

Focusing on female entry-level hires is just a distraction, anyway; Goldman’s real woman problem is its lack of senior women. In 2018, only 23 percent of its executive-level employees in the U.S. were women, a fact which seems to beg an important question: while David Solomon is being “aspirational,” why not really go for it, and aim for 50 percent gender equity there?

Perhaps frustrated by the lack of this kind of progress, three recent novels by women ask a very different question entirely: is the corporate ladder even relevant?

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Elisabeth Cohen’s The Glitch shows how the male-dominated business world can push out even its most die-hard corporate women. The story of Shelley Stone, a supremely successful Bay Area tech CEO who has two kids and is hyper-efficient in all that she does, seems like it just might have been inspired by Sheryl Sandberg. But in comparison to Sandberg’s real-life travails, the fictional ones of the unflappable Stone, who hardly even drops her conference call when her young daughter temporarily disappears on a beach in France, seem quaint. Quaint, that is, until a young woman appears who looks just like Stone did when she was younger, and Stone’s wearable tech business encounters significant problems, corporate and ethical, both. (Among other issues, the device, which talks, is blamed for inspiring user suicide.)

When these problems reach a tipping point, Stone refuses to comply with the just-get-the-deal-done instructions of her good-old-boy board chairman and does that which she had never even dreamed of doing: she quits. “What was I going to do now?” she muses. “A question I was absolutely going to have to answer. I was always asking myself that question and I’d never been short of answers. But at that moment, I just wanted to do nothing.” In a world where so many women are incessantly torn between the competing demands of work and family, this even-just-momentary freedom to unabashedly desire nothing seems like progress.

More recent releases, The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling and The New Me by Halle Butler, take a very different approach to work and freedom. By page 10 of The Golden State, Daphne is already out the door of her office job and en route to the California high desert with her toddler daughter, Honey, in tow. She leaves behind a theoretically interesting and relatively high-paying job with great benefits in the “sparkling glass and chrome splendor” of an Islamic institute at the most prestigious public university in California. Daphne is distraught: distraught from frantically rushing back and forth to daycare; distraught from the months-long absence of her Turkish husband, Engin, who is marooned in Istanbul after having surrendered his green card to the Department of Homeland Security under false pretenses; and, just as significantly, she is distraught by the death of one student, and the serious injuries sustained by another, while the pair were on a Middle East research trip underwritten by funds Daphne helped procure.

It is only once Daphne has spent nearly every waking moment with the adorable and utterly terrorizing Honey—her new work, which she both loves and loathes—that Daphne realizes not only can she shed her capitalistic San Francisco environment, but that she must:

I open the laptop and I look at my Institute in-box and think about all the things I have to do and I open my Tasks spreadsheet and start to make a list and then I look at Honey who is tearing pages out of that [motel] Bible like a heathen and I think about Engin and the culture of my family and the brevity of life and how you could spend fifty years missing someone who is gone and never coming back and I close the spreadsheet. . . open WhatsApp on my phone and write ‘Askim sana geliyoruz’ which is ‘My love we are coming to you’. . . and like that it’s decided.

Butler’s The New Me is just as extreme in rejecting the corporate model of success. Its intelligent and quietly furious narrator, Millie, works as an office temp in a designer showroom. “I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes,” she notes dryly. “The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken and Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.” In what seems a kind of protest, Millie doesn’t even bother to try to look good for work, often skipping showers, too. “My pits are slick and my face smells like a bagel,” she notes with a perverse pride. Ultimately, Millie is fired, a devastating blow.

Fast-forward to a few years later, and though Millie has moved on from temp work to a full-time job as a “Junior Office Manager,” she is completely underutilized, disengaged and anodyne to the extent she seems drugged. She is no longer angry, but that is because she has simply given herself over to the idea that work is pointless. To the woman in the next cubicle, she is “a cautionary thing, a reminder not to stay in the same job for too long. . . Alyssa was going to grad school, for sure, probably in New York.” Yeah, right, Butler seems to be saying. Meanwhile, Millie’s boss, who has kids, pities the childless Millie with faux envy: “I wish I could have a relaxing weekend to myself!” The New Me is a warning that the “me” our corporate system is currently producing is not worthy of any woman’s desire.

As Virginia Woolf noted in a speech to the London/National Society for Women’s Service in 1931, “Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved.” Indeed—which is why the work of Cohen, Kiesling and Butler matters greatly.

In portraying a brutal corporate culture where neither the most die-hard working women who reinforce the status quo, nor the least die-hard women who renounce it, can succeed, what other choice for women is there than to reject this culture, and perhaps even the very nature of capitalistic work itself?

In a decade’s time my own daughter will be entering the workforce, a thought which chills me. While I, of course, hope that she will encounter a culture very different both from that which I experienced at Goldman Sachs over a quarter of a century ago, and also that which Cohen, Kiesling and Butler have portrayed in their novels today, Woolf’s speech from 88 years ago would seem to indicate otherwise. Maybe my daughter and her generation of protagonists, both real and imagined, won’t even bother wasting their time trying to change a system that powerful men like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon aren’t committed to meaningfully changing, anyway.

Maybe, instead, these girls, who will soon enough be women, will do what we have failed to.

Screw the current system. May they instead create a new one.