Joe Job

How could a person rise to the level of Vice President for Governmental Affairs of a Fortune 100 company without knowing about about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the US federal law prohibiting discrimination by gender (among other things) in hiring?

My partner Debbie Notkin thinks that one simply can't. That's why she thinks that the email from Viacom VP Gail MacKinnon to Republican members of Congress announcing a lobbyist position open to men only is a Joe job – a forgery sent out by a malicious third party who is seeking to make MacKinnon and maybe Viacom look bad.

Why would MacKinnon want that junior lobbyist position to be male-only in the first place? One reason might be that she doesn't feel effective in taking congressmen to titty bars and that a male subordinate could do that part of the job better. But if that were to be the case, everyone knows how to hire a man for the job: you list the position, keeping your illegal hiring agenda to yourself, and simply pick a man from the top applicants. (You might want to include some of the top women candidates in the interviewing stage, simply to avoid the appearance of impropriety.)

It's illegal; everyone knows it's illegal; it's trivially easy to make an end run around the law; there's no need to draw unwanted attention to yourself or your company by openly flouting the law. Occam's Razor says the MacKinnon email is a Joe job.