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Vote on Desiree Davidson's Story
Were they afraid we were planning a coup d'etat?
I spent my first summer during Columbia Law School at a firm in Philadelphia described as one of the best places in the city for black lawyers. I believed that if there was any place where I would have an equal chance at opportunities, be treated fairly and succeed, this would be it. There were three black female summer associates out of sixty that year but any time all three of us were in an office talking, one of the partners would knock on the door to see how we were doing. It happened too often to be a coincidence that sometimes we would purposely agree to meet in so-and-so's office to test our theory that we were being monitored. Like clock work, ten minutes after we would get together a partner would stop by.
Two pots of money.
- Workplace Unfairness
- Female
- Caucasian
- Computers, Software
- Left & is now Self-Employed
- Management Consulting
- Commitment of Leadership
- Compensation
- Disillusionment
- Ethics
- Meritocracy
I know the primary reason I left corporate America was because I wanted to have my own company, but thinking back I remember when I was so astonished by the behavior of some of the people in Corporate America. I worked at a hardware company in HR management and one of the biggest things was when I saw the executives' compensation. It was said that everyone had a pot of money and no one could make more than 5% above that. I really thought that was what we were doing. I would sign off on all of the salary ranges and I would be like, "Excuse me, this is not within the salary range." I thought there was one pot and we couldn't give some people a raise because we didn't have enough money. So some people were schlepping away for 12 years as a star performer while we were going to give other people 50,000 dollars, which is a 25% increase. It just didn't look right to me.