INTRODUCTION

A. J. Vandermeyden had every reason to believe she would succeed at Tesla. She was passionate about Tesla's mission: the effort to disrupt the automobile industry by producing an emission-free electric car that could be sold on a mass-market basis to the world. She was so inspired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk's transformative vision that, in 2013, the then 30-year-old Vandermeyden parked herself on a bench outside Tesla's main headquarters in Palo Alto, California— and waited. When she saw someone sporting a Tesla T-shirt, she introduced herself and delivered her "please hire me" speech to him. Against all odds, it worked. She started at Tesla a few weeks later as a Headquarters Product Specialist in the Inside Sales department.

Once at Tesla, she earned her promotions the way the men did—by hustling. She had an undergraduate degree from UCLA in the biological sciences, experience in pharmaceutical sales, and no background whatsoever in automobile production. She got steady promotions, and when the head of an automotive manufacturing unit learned she had worked for twenty-six hours straight on a project, he wanted her commitment and drive on his team. She had landed a dream job as a manufacturing engineer.

The General Assembly Department that Vandermeyden joined produced Tesla's world-changing cars. The atmosphere was intense. "Tesla is one of the most innovative companies in the world," one employee wrote in a blogpost, but that same employee also explained that it is often like "working for a company of the future under working conditions of the past." Not only was the pressure unrelenting, but Vandermeyden also maintained that she was subject to "pervasive harassment." It wasn't unusual for her to be the only woman in meetings with forty to fifty men. When Vandermeyden became a manufacturing engineer and was on the factory floor, the men greeted her with catcalls, whistling, and inappropriate name-calling.

But in the end it took more than sexism to do her in. It was her commitment to the mission. She discovered inadequacies in Tesla's quality testing of cars that others had missed. She even suggested a way to fix the problem. That's when her career appears to have collided with the unspoken rules of the "winner take all" (WTA) economy. In the complaint she subsequently filed against Tesla, she charged that the automaker had retaliated against her for complaints about discrimination and the company's quality-testing flaws.

The WTA economy reserves a disproportionate share of institutional power and rewards for those at the top. Elon Musk could be the poster child for this new economy. The not-so-secret key to his success, after all, has been the audaciousness of his goals and his drive to do whatever is necessary to achieve them. The WTA economy rewards Musk's outsized ambitions—and his ability to impose them on his workers. Under Musk, Tesla reached a trillion-dollar valuation (that for a time made Musk the richest man in the world) not just by designing an innovative car but also by setting seemingly impossible production goals and ultimately producing more cars in a shorter period than industry analysts thought possible. Musk admitted that the company was able to do so by allowing quality issues to remain during the production ramp-up. A profile of Musk and his methods noted that "[t]hose who do not wish to toil under such conditions know where to find the door." In the WTA economy, Musk, who like Vandermeyden had no previous experience with automobiles, could create a new company; channel his personal ambitions through it; run roughshod over workers, labor laws, and securities regulations; and emerge victorious so long as he delivered what Wall Street valued.

After three years at Tesla, Vandermeyden decided that she had had enough and she sued Tesla in the fall of 2016, claiming sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation for her whistle-blowing about the car-testing inadequacies. According to Tesla, the company investigated Vandermeyden's claims. A spokesperson said, "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms. Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla." Ultimately, after Tesla insisted on arbitration—ensuring that Vandermeyden would never have a chance to present her case in court or to the public—the parties dismissed the case, reportedly because of a confidential settlement.

This book started with a question: Why, in an era of supposed gender equality, have women stalled in the American workplace? The more we dug into the issue, the more we discovered stories about women like Vandermeyden: talented, driven women who compete on the same terms as men but still do not succeed on the same terms as men.

The three of us are law professors. If you combine all our efforts, we have been studying women, employment, and the family for over a hundred years. Among us, we have written more than twenty books. And yet, while working in our respective positions at universities across the country, we discovered something we did not expect to find. Despite the tremendous gains of the women's movement over the past half-century, the gap between men's and women's economic performance in the United States is not closing.

INTRODUCTION

A. J. Vandermeyden had every reason to believe she would succeed at Tesla. She was passionate about Tesla's mission: the effort to disrupt the automobile industry by producing an emission-free electric car that could be sold on a mass-market basis to the world. She was so inspired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk's transformative vision that, in 2013, the then 30-year-old Vandermeyden parked herself on a bench outside Tesla's main headquarters in Palo Alto, California— and waited. When she saw someone sporting a Tesla T-shirt, she introduced herself and delivered her "please hire me" speech to him. Against all odds, it worked. She started at Tesla a few weeks later as a Headquarters Product Specialist in the Inside Sales department.

Once at Tesla, she earned her promotions the way the men did—by hustling. She had an undergraduate degree from UCLA in the biological sciences, experience in pharmaceutical sales, and no background whatsoever in automobile production. She got steady promotions, and when the head of an automotive manufacturing unit learned she had worked for twenty-six hours straight on a project, he wanted her commitment and drive on his team. She had landed a dream job as a manufacturing engineer.

The General Assembly Department that Vandermeyden joined produced Tesla's world-changing cars. The atmosphere was intense. "Tesla is one of the most innovative companies in the world," one employee wrote in a blogpost, but that same employee also explained that it is often like "working for a company of the future under working conditions of the past." Not only was the pressure unrelenting, but Vandermeyden also maintained that she was subject to "pervasive harassment." It wasn't unusual for her to be the only woman in meetings with forty to fifty men. When Vandermeyden became a manufacturing engineer and was on the factory floor, the men greeted her with catcalls, whistling, and inappropriate name-calling.

But in the end it took more than sexism to do her in. It was her commitment to the mission. She discovered inadequacies in Tesla's quality testing of cars that others had missed. She even suggested a way to fix the problem. That's when her career appears to have collided with the unspoken rules of the "winner take all" (WTA) economy. In the complaint she subsequently filed against Tesla, she charged that the automaker had retaliated against her for complaints about discrimination and the company's quality-testing flaws.

The WTA economy reserves a disproportionate share of institutional power and rewards for those at the top. Elon Musk could be the poster child for this new economy. The not-so-secret key to his success, after all, has been the audaciousness of his goals and his drive to do whatever is necessary to achieve them. The WTA economy rewards Musk's outsized ambitions—and his ability to impose them on his workers. Under Musk, Tesla reached a trillion-dollar valuation (that for a time made Musk the richest man in the world) not just by designing an innovative car but also by setting seemingly impossible production goals and ultimately producing more cars in a shorter period than industry analysts thought possible. Musk admitted that the company was able to do so by allowing quality issues to remain during the production ramp-up. A profile of Musk and his methods noted that "[t]hose who do not wish to toil under such conditions know where to find the door." In the WTA economy, Musk, who like Vandermeyden had no previous experience with automobiles, could create a new company; channel his personal ambitions through it; run roughshod over workers, labor laws, and securities regulations; and emerge victorious so long as he delivered what Wall Street valued.

After three years at Tesla, Vandermeyden decided that she had had enough and she sued Tesla in the fall of 2016, claiming sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation for her whistle-blowing about the car-testing inadequacies. According to Tesla, the company investigated Vandermeyden's claims. A spokesperson said, "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms. Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla." Ultimately, after Tesla insisted on arbitration—ensuring that Vandermeyden would never have a chance to present her case in court or to the public—the parties dismissed the case, reportedly because of a confidential settlement.

This book started with a question: Why, in an era of supposed gender equality, have women stalled in the American workplace? The more we dug into the issue, the more we discovered stories about women like Vandermeyden: talented, driven women who compete on the same terms as men but still do not succeed on the same terms as men.

The three of us are law professors. If you combine all our efforts, we have been studying women, employment, and the family for over a hundred years. Among us, we have written more than twenty books. And yet, while working in our respective positions at universities across the country, we discovered something we did not expect to find. Despite the tremendous gains of the women's movement over the past half-century, the gap between men's and women's economic performance in the United States is not closing.