Hail Women Whistleblowers

Last week, the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” was released in movie theaters. A detailed account of one of the biggest business scandals, the documentary has its share of entertaining villains, including Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow. Yet, what caught my attention was its sole hero—whistleblower Sherron Watkins—who wrote the memo heard around the world, warning Lay that the company’s accounting practices were looking very shady.

Seeing Watkins’s movie character brought to mind the 2002 cover of Time Magazine, where Watkins was one of three whistleblowers featured on the front cover of the magazine’s “Persons of the Year.” The other two whistleblowers included Cynthia Cooper, an internal auditor at WorldCom and FBI agent Coleen Rowley. While Cooper mounted an investigation that revealed the largest known bookkeeping scam in corporate history, misstating earnings by at least $3.8 million, Rowley was the one who disclosed incompetence in counterterrorism efforts before the Sept. 11 attacks.

It could not just be a coincidence that these whistle-blowers, in the most significant examples of government incompetence and corporate wrongdoing in our time, were women.

It takes a particular type of courage—the courage to be unpopular—to become a whistle-blower. Initially, Watkins, Cooper, and Rowley were warned to keep quiet but they kept talking, like generations of female truth-tellers before them. Look at Rosa Parks, who refused to move to the back of the bus, galvanizing the country’s civil rights movement. Retired Army Lt. General Claudia J. Kennedy, the highest-ranking female officer, was the one to expose sexual harassment in the armed forces. And it was Erin Brockovich, a minor legal clerk who helped a town triumph over a multimillion-dollar corporate polluter.

The decision for these women to do what’s right over what’s convenient comes at a very high price. Whistle-blowers get fired, blacklisted, and branded as troublemakers, making it harder to find new employment. The cost can be sometimes even higher—women in the armed forces and police corps often dread filing sexual harassment claims in fear of backlash by their male colleagues for turning against one of their own.

In fact, the three whistle-blowers—Watkins, Cooper, and Rowley—each served as the chief breadwinners in their families, with husbands who were full-time, stay-at-home fathers. For each one of them, the decision to blow the whistle meant jeopardizing a paycheck their families depended on. While Rowley was granted whistle-blower protection, she still expressed concern for reprisals in her letters to FBI chief Robert Mueller. There are no guarantees whistleblowers do not receive some sort of professional punishment, however subtle.

Perhaps it’s because women simply act more ethically than men. A 2002 study by two business professors, James Davis at Notre Dame and Jack Ruhe at St. Mary’s College in Indiana, found that female business students value honesty and independence far more than do their male colleagues. What’s more, the Conference Board of Canada, an independent research group found that 94 percent of corporate boards with three or more women ensured that their companies had conflict-of-interest guidelines, compared with 68 percent of all-male boards. As for verifying audit information, the figures were 91 percent versus 74 percent.

Yet, at the same time, these whistle-blowers had more in common than just being women. Each of these whistle-blowers were outside the boundaries of real power—close enough to see inside, but far enough to have no say in stopping it. It is true that men can just be as angered by illegal behavior, but as an insider in that world performing that immoral activity, it is not as acceptable for a man to reveal ethical breaches. However, the situation is different for women, who are usually not insiders of that world.

According to a 2002 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, American women now represent close to 47 percent of the workforce but only 12 percent of all managerial positions. Moreover, only 5.2 percent of the highest-earning high-level executives at Fortune 500 companies were women. As a result, women in male-dominated industries feel like outsiders and thus are less likely to assume the posture of the three monkeys of evil innocence: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

Anita Hill, a different kind of whistleblower who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, believes that women who move up within male-dominated inside circles hold on to their “outside values.” In a 2002 op-ed for the New York Times, she noted that women often are not accepted by the top rung of the old boys’ network and never will be, so they risk less by speaking up.

Perhaps then it is more than a coincidence that the first brand-name whistle-blower was a woman. In Greek mythology, Cassandra had the gift of prophecy. She correctly predicted the outcome of many events, warning the Trojans, for example, in “The Aeneid,” against accepting a wooden horse as a “gift” from their Greek opponents. However, when Cassandra spurned the god Apollo as a lover, he retaliated by making anyone who heard her prophecies believe they were lies. It was mostly men who disbelieved her, leading inevitably to disaster and tragedy as it is written, “Cassandra cried, and curs’d th’ unhappy hour/Foretold our fate; but by the god’s decree,/All heard, and non believed the prophecy.”

But is it possible today things have changed? We’ll have to stay tuned for the sequel.

Anat Maytal ’05, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies concentrator in Leverett House.