Sarah Rudolph Cole, a law professor at the Ohio State University who focuses on issues that arise from alternative dispute resolution, said the bill will cause companies to reexamine all mandatory arbitration agreements.
“Really, how do you justify sex harassment not being arbitrable, but race harassment is?” she said.
Ellen Pao, whose lawsuit a decade ago against her former venture capital firm helped expose gender equality issues in Silicon Valley, said the new law is just the beginning.
“We still need to expand the definition to include discrimination, and to include forms of discrimination beyond gender,” Pao said. “We need better ways to repair the harm, to educate employees to prevent harm, and to report and acknowledge harm when it happens.”
Just before Christmas, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. decided it would continue sending employees who claim they were harassed into arbitration but would allow some to waive the confidentiality of decisions. The firm has been fighting one of the largest class-action gender-discrimination cases seen on Wall Street in more than a decade. Bank of America Corp. doesn't require arbitration for gender discrimination or harassment, according to a spokesperson, and Wells Fargo announced years ago it would end that practice.
Businesses should embrace the change, according to Indiana University law professor Jennifer Drobac, because of the financial consequences they face when “predators are left to have their way in a company.”
“If you, as a corporate body, have cancer,” she said, “don’t you want to know that its metastasized so you can properly treat it?”
Stowell, whose arbitration process hasn't ended, believes the legislation comes too late for her. The news was moving but difficult.
“Someone has to be the last one,” she said. “That’s the way it works.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.