"The Price Waterhouse Revolution"
Ann Hopkins, who died seven years ago today, challenged the notion of gender-based stereotypes and changed workplaces forever.
I’ve been busy over the last few weeks. After a long spell of not really doing any major book talks, I was back on stage at two fantastic conferences this month—one in Georgia and one in Washington D.C.
I had the opportunity not only to talk about my writing, but also to spend time doing one of my favorite things: introducing people to the women who changed history; the mostly unknown trailblazers I shine a spotlight on in WOMEN MONEY POWER.
Frequently when I talk about the characters in my book, I spend time dwelling on individuals like Katharine Dexter McCormick (who I most recently wrote about here) and Pauli Murray (who I paid tribute to here). And that’s for good reason. These are women who led such remarkably unlikely lives. Women who radically transformed society, the law and culture. They’re individuals who I won’t stop mentioning anytime soon. But after one of my recent talks, a woman approached me who wanted to discuss someone else.
“Thank you so much for writing about Ann Hopkins,” she said. “She’s a personal hero and she doesn’t get enough credit.”
I was surprised. I write about Ann Hopkins’ experience in a chapter of my book in which I document the toxic culture that permeated corporate America in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter is called ‘A Bimbo or a Bitch’ (read it to find out why) and though Hopkins’ story is extremely important, it’s also not as nail-bitingly cinematic and fast-paced as some of the other stories of women that I tell. As such, I suppose it’s perhaps not surprising that I rarely get asked about Hopkins.
But when this woman approached me in D.C., it prompted me to go back and revisit what I’d written about this extraordinary woman and advocate—a person who didn’t just challenge gender discrimination of the obvious kind, but who took issue with being discriminated against because of gender-based stereotypes.
Rereading the chapter made me realize just how important Hopkins’ story is—not only to our understanding of women’s economic empowerment, but to our appreciation of how our civil rights have evolved. And as it happens, Ann Hopkins died exactly seven years ago today.
Careers and Compromises
Born in Galveston, Texas, in December 1943, Hopkins graduated from Hollins College in Virginia and then went on to do a master’s degree in mathematics at Indiana University. In the late 1960s, she was hired to work for IBM, where she developed mathematical models to simulate the motion of scientific and weather satellites under the influence of magnetic, gravitational, and radiation forces.
After several years at IBM, Hopkins was promoted from a role that was predominantly technical to one that involved project management. She eventually left IBM and worked for a series of smaller companies in the aerospace industry before accepting a job at Touche Ross & Co, at the time one of the Big Eight national accounting firms, as a management consultant.
When she started, Hopkins was the oldest of three women on the consulting staff in her office. She was assigned to projects for the mayor’s office in Chicago, the Federal Reserve, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and National Public Radio. But she most enjoyed her work for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). “I loved the work at Touche—the projects, the clients, the Touche teams I worked with, the travel, the way that Touche did business, the culture—all of it,” she recalled years later.
She worked in one of Touche’s offices in downtown Washington. The team was small and tight-knit, and she struck up a particular connection with a man named Tom Gallagher, a housing and real estate consultant who played the banjo and the guitar. Hopkins fell for his riotous sense of humor, his supreme intelligence, and his charm. After dinner dates on sixteen consecutive nights, the two decided to marry.
At Touche, their marriage represented a nepotism-policy violation, meaning that neither could be promoted to partner as long as they both worked there. After the wedding, Hopkins had given birth to their first daughter and not long after that became pregnant with a son. She decided to look for another job before her pregnancy started to show, and in December 1977 she joined a computer consulting company. Gallagher became a partner at Touche.
After years of working in a culture where she felt valued, Hopkins struggled with the transition. She found her new employer to be hierarchical and paternalistic. Decisions about almost all major matters, be they technical, administrative, or related to management, were made by a group of men she came to think of as the “founding fathers” of the company. She missed Touche but couldn’t go back, so in August 1978 she joined the consulting practice of Price Waterhouse, another Big Eight accounting firm.
Once again, Hopkins thrived. She was instrumental in the firm winning a huge contract from the U.S. Department of State, the biggest Price Waterhouse had ever clinched. Partners—the most senior managers at the firm—praised her effusively, and in August 1982, in a crowning endorsement of her achievements, Hopkins was proposed by two of the partners with whom she had worked as candidate for the partner class of 1983. She was the only woman among 88 candidates, and just 6 of the firm’s 667 partners at the time were women. A mere tenth of the partners were consultants, like Hopkins. Forty-seven individuals eventually made the cut. Hopkins was not one of them.
‘A Course in Charm School’
After the decision was announced, she remembers being “miserable, depressed, furious, disconsolate, and inconsolable in cycles.” Joseph Connor, a senior partner who would later serve as chairman of Price Waterhouse, invited Hopkins to New York to explain the decision and provide details. Sitting in his office, she listened intently as he read out some of the transcribed comments other partners had made when asked whether to admit her to the partnership. A handful remained imprinted in her memory in the decades that followed. “[She] needs a course in charm school,” was one of them. Another noted that she’d “matured from a tough-talking, somewhat masculine, hard-nosed manager to an authoritative, formidable, but much more appealing lady partner candidate.” One described her as “macho,” and another as “overly aggressive, unduly harsh, difficult to work with, and impatient with staff.” Someone said she “overcompensated for being a woman,” and, finally, one person said that she was simply “universally disliked.” Dismayed, Hopkins asked Connor what he recommended she should do. Keep up the good work, and avoid being disliked was his sage advice.
When she got back to Washington and still felt that she was owed a real answer, she asked some of her other bosses the same question. One told her to walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear makeup and jewelry, and have her hair styled. When the next partner promotion cycle came and went and nothing changed, Hopkins asked her husband to try to help her understand the logic behind what she could only see as an entirely irrational business decision. His suggestion was simple and ruthless. “Sue the bastards,” he said. And so she did.
In August 1983, Hopkins filed a sex discrimination claim with the EEOC alleging that Price Waterhouse had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She resigned from her job early in 1984 and worked as a consultant for the State Department and later as a budget officer at the World Bank. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court was considering Hishon v. King & Spalding.
Elizabeth Anderson Hishon, originally from Cortland, New York, had filed what would become a landmark discrimination suit against the law firm King & Spalding for having rejected her as a partner. Hishon had joined the Atlanta-based firm in 1972 after graduating from Columbia Law School and was, at the time, only the second woman ever to have been hired by the firm as an associate. She had filed her suit in December 1979 claiming that she’d been passed over for partnership because of her gender. Five and a half years later, in May 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed when it ruled unanimously, in reference to Hishon’s case, that law firms were not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin when deciding which lawyers to promote to partner.
A Catch-22
In September 1984, Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse entered the legal system as a federal case before the District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit. Specifically, Hopkins and her legal team alleged that Price Waterhouse had discriminated against her by failing to make her a partner “because of gender stereotyping in the partnership evaluation process.” In addition, she claimed that she had been subjected to constructive dismissal: that Price Waterhouse had, in effect, forced her to leave the firm. As a remedy, she wanted to be admitted to the partnership, to be offered back pay, and for the firm to cover her legal fees and court costs.
In September of the following year, the court held that Price Waterhouse had indeed discriminated against Hopkins but that she had not been forced to leave the firm against her will. The latter decision meant that she was not entitled to the partnership remedy she had been seeking. Price Waterhouse appealed the discrimination decision, and Hopkins appealed the constructive dismissal outcome. Two years later, the court upheld the lower court on the discrimination result, reversed it on the constructive discharge result, and remanded the matter to the lower court for trial on remedy. Price Waterhouse again appealed the discrimination issue, this time to the Supreme Court, and it was this appeal that became a historical benchmark for discrimination cases in the decades that followed.
In May 1989, the Supreme Court held Price Waterhouse liable for discriminating against Hopkins on the basis of sex under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. What made the case particularly remarkable was the technical question it posed in relation to the evidentiary standard and burden of proof required to succeed in a case brought under Title VII. In its defense, Price Waterhouse had suggested that the issue of stereotyping that Hopkins’s team had raised lacked “legal relevance” in a Title VII case. But Justice William Brennan, writing on behalf of the Supreme Court’s six-to-three majority, criticized this interpretation. “We are beyond the day when an employer,” he wrote, can “evaluate employees by assuming or insisting that they match the stereotype associated with their group.” He added that “an employer who objects to aggressiveness in women but whose positions require this trait places women in an intolerable and impermissible Catch-22: out of a job if they behave aggressively and out of a job if they don’t.”
In a 2007 article for the California Law Review, legal scholar Ilona Turner described the decision as “The Price Waterhouse Revolution.” It was, she wrote, “the first time the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to a theory of sex discrimination that includes discrimination based on an individual’s perceived failure to conform to gender stereotypes.”
A Crack in the Glass Ceiling
Early in 1991, Hopkins, now a mother of three, rejoined Price Waterhouse as a partner with compensation and benefits set at the average of the partner group admitted in July 1983, the month she would have made partner had she been admitted after her first nomination. She received checks for court-ordered back pay and compensation for attorneys’ fees that she had paid. Strictly speaking, in litigation terms, Hopkins’s case was a success. But in a personal account of the entire episode that she penned in the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal years later, she explains that it was not that cut-and-dried. After the decision, she explained, her life became a matter of public record. “Attorneys pored over my tax returns. People testified about expletives I used, people I chewed out, work I reviewed and criticized, and they did so with the most negative spin they could come up with. I’m no angel,” Hopkins conceded, “but I’m not as totally lacking in interpersonal skills as the firm’s attorneys made me out to be.”
At some point during the course of pushing her case through the courts, Hopkins had called Elizabeth Hishon in Atlanta. Hishon, whom Hopkins came to know as Betsy, regaled her with stories of her own battle with a former employer and her eventual high-profile victory. The two women stayed in touch, struck up a friendship, and regularly met for gin and tonics when they were in the same city at the same time.
When Hopkins and Hishon spoke, they referred to their respective cases as “landmark one” and “landmark two.” They frequently chuckled at the eerie coincidence that both their cases were heard on Halloween. When Hishon was diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s, Hopkins filled in for her as keynote speaker at a meeting of the South Carolina Women Lawyers Association. In 1999, Hishon passed away. Hopkins died in on June 23, 2018. In an interview for her obituary, her daughter, Tela, told the New York Times that, yes, her mother “could be prickly,” but she also “lived in accordance with her values, and one of her most firmly held beliefs was that diversity always, always, always makes something better.” She added that people “either loved her fiercely” or “couldn’t stand being in the same room with her.”
In a 1996 memoir, Hopkins described herself as a person who was profoundly committed to her career but also determined to always be herself. She smoked and drank beer unapologetically. When she was invited to her first job interview at Touche in 1974, she wore a suit and Ferragamo pumps and rolled up to the office on a Yamaha motorbike. And she never considered herself a civil rights hero. In an interview with the Boston Globe in 1990, reflecting on her Supreme Court victory, she claimed that the only thing making her remarkable was that she had “happened to stand up for a particular principle at a particular time.” As for the concept of the glass ceiling, she didn’t seem to think much of it, remarking somewhat apathetically: “Lord knows if I put a crack in it.”
She unequivocally did put a crack in it. Many cases that have wound their way through the courts since Hopkins’ case did have cited the outcome of hers as precedent.
But certainly discrimination endures when it comes to gender stereotypes. Just last week, I was reminded of this when I came across new research (which I wrote about for Forbes) showing that people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or asexual earn—on average—around 85% less every year than those who don’t. In other words, people who don’t comply with a stereotype are punished.
As ever, it is important for us to recognize the efforts and achievements of those who came before us and who fought for progress towards justice. It is equally important for us to recognize that more of these efforts and achievements are needed to ensure that this progress is not reversed. In the spirit of this, thank you to that woman in D.C. who reminded me that Ann Hopkins’ story can inspire us to remember just that.
The above is an adapted excerpt from my book WOMEN MONEY POWER published by Abrams in 2024.
That’s all from me for this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes June 23. If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter for free, I’d urge you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
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Josie
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