The airwaves and blogosphere have been buzzing the past week, of course, over the firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. Just in case you missed the debacle, her boss, Agriculture Secretary Tom Valsack, fired her (or ordered her to immediately type her resignation over her BlackBerry, depending on whom you believe) over a speech she made this year to the NAACP. In a two-minute clip that went viral on conservative blogs and Fox News, Sherrod, an African American whose father was murdered as part of a hate crime, implied that she wasn’t inclined to help white farmers who needed her help.

Why can’t we all grow up? That’s the thought that comes to me while watching the kvetching, screaming and tantrum throwing that’s surrounded the health care vote. For some time, both sides have been like four year-olds, squabbling over buckets and rakes in the sandbox. My disgust turned to horror this week when the brawl turned truly ugly by the degenerating into racial slurs and escalating into violence. Unfortunately, I see the same kind of escalation in the workplace.

You may not have the arm (now recovered from rotator cuff surgery) but you may have the same dilemma: to retire or not to retire?

And, like the famously waffling QB, you may change your mind.

For the second summer in a row, Brett Favre, the holder of every major NFL career passing record reversed his decision to suit up for his rival The Minnesota Vikings, hoping to help them capture their first Super Bowl. After spending 16 years with Green Bay, Favre will face them on the line. Most Minnesota fans cheered but a few hissed and booed and promptly produced black t-shirts reading “Brett Who” and “What the Favre.”

By now, most of the pundits have weighed on Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was arrested on the porch of his own home on July 16. Just in case you’ve been on vacation on a remote Atoll and have missed this debacle, while many facts are still in dispute, these are the facts that both sides agree upon:

Gates arrived home from a trip to China, had trouble getting the door of his house open and forced it. Someone called 911 to report breaking and entering. A police officer approached Gates’ home and asked him to step outside. Gates declined. The officer went into the home where Gates showed him an ID that proved he lived there. Gates asked the officer for his name and badge number and did not get them.

The blogosphere and pundits alike have had a field day over the last month with the specter of yet another supposedly straight-laced, upright, morality preaching politician brought down by infidelity. While he hasn’t resigned as of this post, he had a tough time at Monday’s press conference dodging questions about his affair with an Argentine beauty while he was trying to talk about state business.
While I could go on about how he–like other sanctimonious, bible thumping politicians- should have just “kept it in his pants” what I want to remind you about, dear reader, is the stupidity and dangers of email.
The State, a South Carolina newspaper, printed excerpts from the florid emails between the Gov. and the woman with whom he was having an affair, “Maria.” For example:
“Two, mutual feelings…You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light- but hey, that would be going into sexual details…
Sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul.”
What is it about email that makes supposedly smart people abandon all sense? Almost every investigation I conduct these days has the alleged harasser or discriminator leaving an incriminating email trail. These are all people who should know better: lawyers, investment bankers, IT professionals. Yet email they must, despite the fact that an email is a just a postcard on the server floor.
As I often tell my workshop participants, and as I wrote in my book Stop Pissing Me Off! What to do When the People You Work With Drive You Crazy, the e in email stands for evidence! And in the Sanford debacle, I would say that the e in email stands for embarrassing! Some examples of the stupidity I have seen:

Okay, here we go again. The new rap on Sonya Sotomayer is that she is “overly aggressive,” maybe even a “bully” based on comments by anonymous lawyers on the almanac of the Federal Judiciary.
I have to admit that the whole debate makes me tired. I have constantly advised my female coaching clients that they simply do not has as much “bandwidth” as men, even in this day and age.
What I mean by that is that they are walking a tightrope. They can’t be too angry or, of course, they will be labeled with the B word. They can’t be too soft, or they won’t be tough enough. Men, of course, have the same kind of constraints in corporate America; they also have to be charming to be liked but the road they walk is simply wider.
As I wrote in my book Stop Pissing Me Off! What to do When the People You Work With Drive You Crazy, one of my clients learned the hard way that the war of the sexes still rages in the workplace. Coached by a mentor at her old law firm to be direct with support staff, she endeavored to do that in a new firm. She was brief, clear and direct. It failed miserably. Although the terms law firm and soft culture often don’t belong in the same sentence, my coaching client didn’t recognize that the new firm did, indeed, have a much softer culture. Consequently, the support staff found her approach to be nothing more than condescending and abrupt antics.
She had run smack into the old gender stereotype: men can be rewarded for hard-charging and direct, even angry behavior, but women may be penalized for the same tactics. Instead of being applauded, they’re called bitches. I had to inform my client of the sad truth that women’s styles are still examined differently. Women who fail in male-dominated workplaces leave a trail behind them: “We tried hiring a man but it didn’t work out.” It’s not fair, it’s not legal; but it does still happen.
NPL legal reporter Nina Totenberg analyzed the oral arguments of Sotomayor and found that her style was tough and blunt but no more so than other judges, especially when compared to notoriously tough judges such as Supreme Court Justice Scalia. Early in her judicial career Sotomayor was criticized as being too blunt, and her mentor Judge Guido Calabresi, former Yale Law School Dean, started keeping track, comparing the substance and tone of her questions with those of his male colleagues and his own questions.
As he told Totenberg “And I must say I found no difference at all. So I concluded all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn’t stand being questioned toughly by a woman. It was sexism in its most obvious form.”
Since I spent ten years standing in front of federal judges, I frequently joke to my speaking audiences that they can’t insult me, I’ve been insulted by professionals. (Not that they’re not professionals, it’s just not their job to insult me.) The people who are critiquing Sotomayor for behavior that most seasoned trial attorneys would find pretty typical should just get a grip!

Many words have been written about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s 2001 assertion in a speech, later published as a law review article, where she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” These rather innocuous comments have fueled a firestorm (never mind that Justice Alito made similar ones.)
While this all seems like a tempest in a teapot to me, one case where gender would have made a difference is the recent U.S. Supreme Court May 18, 2009, 7-2 decision that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the “PDA”) should not apply retroactively. In AT&T vs. Hulteen the Supremes found that AT&T is permitted to pay lower pension benefits to female employees if they took maternity leave prior to the enactment of the PDA. Predictably, the lone woman Supreme Court Justice, Justice Ginsburg, dissented.
As I wrote in my book on Sexual Harassment, this decision had its roots in a 1976 decision. Prior to that time, those of us who practiced employment law assumed that only women could get pregnant. In G.E. vs. Gilbert, a woman was fired for being pregnant and sued, claiming sex discrimination. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. There, the Supremes - all of whom were male at the time - evidently knew something we did not, since they ruled, quite absurdly, that pregnancy discrimination by employers “was not a gender-based discrimination at all.”
Congress fired back a scathing response to the Supremes by passing the PDA scolding, essentially, “Yo Supremes! Only women can get pregnant.”
So we thought we had that straightened out until last month with the AT&T case. (In her dissent, the current lone woman on the Court, Justice Ginsburg wisely suggested overruling Gilbert so it “can generate no more mischief.”) It is hard to imagine any woman who has ever been pregnant, or has contemplated being pregnant, finding that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination.
While I agree with Sotomayor’s critics that, of course, you don’t want one’s background to lead to race based decisions, you do want, above all else, a judge with wisdom. Wisdom comes from study, yes, but more often from life experience. A diverse and yes, “rich” as Sotomayor tagged it, experience is critical for wisdom.
Coco Channel captured an enduring truth in one sentence: “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, also captured the importance of uniqueness when he said, “America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.” As we teach in our diversity courses if differences make us a better nation, a more relevant organization a more innovative and successful company, we’re going to have to learn to cope with differences while also putting them go good use. I’m proud of the diversity of my own team.
Most of the American public argees. A new Associated Press - GfK Poll suggested that Americans have a more positive view of Sotomayer than they did of any of former President George W. Bush’s nominee’s to the high court. Half backed her confirmation. In the same poll, 63 percent supported affirmative action for women while fewer, 56 percent favor affirmative action for racial or ethnic minorities. Surprising, the poll did not define affirmative action, a critical error since, as I wrote in my book on Affirmative Action most people are confused about the legal definition of this term.
Is Sotomayor different? Yes. Does that difference matter? Yes. We do need a court that reflects the richness of American diversity at least enough to understand that only women can get pregnant.