Toshiba Gender Discrimination: Personal Networking to Reduce Turnover
This paper examines the $100 million gender discrimination class-action lawsuit filed against Toshiba America Inc. on behalf of approximately 8,000 female employees who alleged unequal pay, segregation into lower pay-grade positions, and barriers to promotion. The paper argues that Toshiba could have avoided this lawsuit and the resulting reputational damage by deploying a four-part personal networking framework: originating, dialoguing, exercising, and implementing. Drawing on commentary from a former Toshiba human resources executive and comparative data from the fast food industry, the paper proposes concrete retention strategies — including employee surveys and the integration of women's concerns into existing networking systems — to reduce high turnover and prevent similar legal and organizational failures.
- Introduction: The Toshiba Gender Discrimination Lawsuit: Overview of the $100M class-action lawsuit
- Personal Networking as a Preventive Strategy: Four-part framework: originating, dialoguing, exercising, implementing
- Proposed Solution to Toshiba's High-Turnover Problem: Retention surveys and integrating women into networking systems
- Lessons from the Fast Food Industry: Burger King and Pizza Hut turnover reduction benchmarks
- Conclusion: Networking strategies could have prevented the lawsuit
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors its argument in a concrete, real-world legal case, giving its theoretical framework immediate practical relevance.
- It applies a structured four-part personal networking model (originating, dialoguing, exercising, implementing) consistently throughout, making the argument easy to follow.
- The cross-industry comparison with fast food chains (Burger King, Pizza Hut) strengthens the retention argument by showing that similar problems have been solved elsewhere with measurable results.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied case analysis: it takes a documented organizational failure — a major discrimination lawsuit — and works backward to identify the management communication breakdowns that allowed it to occur. Rather than simply describing the lawsuit, it uses the four-step networking framework as a diagnostic tool, showing how each stage (originating, dialoguing, exercising, implementing) could have surfaced and resolved the underlying grievances before they escalated to litigation.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by presenting the Toshiba lawsuit in detail, then states its central hypothesis. The middle sections systematically apply each component of the personal networking framework to the Toshiba situation. The proposed solutions section draws on expert commentary from a former Toshiba HR executive and introduces employee retention survey methodology. A comparative section benchmarks Toshiba's situation against fast food industry turnover data and references Peter Drucker's management principles. The paper closes with a brief conclusion tying the strategies together.
Introduction: The Toshiba Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
Electronics giant Toshiba Corp.'s American business unit faced a class-action lawsuit over how it paid and promoted women. The law firm Sanford Wittels & Heisler brought a $100 million gender discrimination lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of a potential class of 8,000 women working for Toshiba in the United States.
Sanford Wittels & Heisler had earlier represented the class of litigants in a long-standing case against Novartis's U.S. unit brought by women in its sales force. That lawsuit settled for $175 million in July 2010, following a $253 million jury verdict.
The lawsuit against Toshiba alleges that Toshiba America Inc. regularly failed to pay women equal salaries and bonuses, intentionally segregated women into lower pay-grade positions, and showed favoritism toward men for promotion. A human resources manager in Toshiba's U.S. nuclear power business served as the lead plaintiff, and was on a leave of absence at the time of filing. A Toshiba spokesman declined to comment.
The complaint came just months before the U.S. Supreme Court was expected to hear argument in a 2001 discrimination case on behalf of as many as 1.5 million female employees at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
My hypothesis is that Toshiba could have avoided this lawsuit and the attendant bad publicity if it had engaged in personal networking communications with its employees — specifically: (a) originating; (b) dialoguing; (c) exercising; and (d) implementing.
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