Women seize the spotlight in blowing whistle on fraud

Are women more likely than men to be whistle-blowers?

In the past few months, female employees have been key to publicizing scandals and corruption in three high-profile cases: Sherron Watkins at Enron Corp., Coleen Rowley at the FBI and, most recently, Cynthia Cooper at WorldCom Inc. In each case, they saw something wrong and spoke up about it, unlike their male counterparts.

C. Fred Alford is a government professor at the University of Maryland and author of Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power. Researching his book, he found that male whistle-blowers talked in terms of tortured loyalties, having been raised as team players. Women talked about the dichotomy between the home, where the focus is caring for family, and the workplace, where all people care about is making money.

"Women have a model of ethics based on family care," he said. "When they bring that model into an organization, it must put a lot of women through hell."

Mark Schwartz, lecturer in business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said he suspects financial security rather than gender is a key issue for whistle-blowers. Though he is not familiar with the financial status of the three women whistle-blowers, he said, "When you're working as the primary income generator for the family, the pressures not to blow the whistle intensify immensely."

The spate of female whistle-blowers may also be a function of more women moving up the executive ranks and not liking what they find there. And women who are outside the old-boy network may feel more freedom to speak out.

"Women may not quite be part of the team," Alford said. "Maybe that will change -- and maybe not for the better -- in a generation or two."

Not all of the roles played by women in this year's corporate dramas have been heroic. The jury that convicted Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice branded attorney Nancy Temple as the accounting firm's "corrupt persuader" who attempted to hinder a government investigation.

And despite this year's events, whistle-blowers usually are men in their late 40s who have been with their employer for a number of years. Many are in technical or engineering fields, careers that have traditionally been male-dominated.

Douglas Hartnett, national security campaign director for the Government Accountability Project in Washington, said another common characteristic is that whistle-blowers tend to be "true believers."

"They believe in the mission of the company they work for and can't stand by silently," he said. "It could be that women are a little less cynical, and they believe if they stand up and do the right thing, they'll be thanked for it."

Anita Hill, famous for her disputed charges of misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, knows that people who go public with criticism often aren't thanked. But in a recent editorial in the New York Times, she speculated that as the number of women in positions of authority increases, so will their opportunities. "Not only to be whistle-blowers," Hill wrote. "But, more important, to shape institutional standards from the top."

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