The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret For thousands of women, working at the nat

The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret

For thousands of women, working at the nation’s largest jewelry retailer meant unequal pay, harassment or worse.

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The pay-and-promotions lawsuit against Sterling Jewelers Inc. began the way a lot of these things begin: In 2005, Dawn Souto-Coons walked out of the jewelry store where she had been a successful assistant manager and into a local Tampa-area employment office, claiming sex discrimination in her store. She had been working at a Jared the Galleria of Jewelry for nearly four years. But it was only in the last few months that she began to understand that the thing that kept happening to her there, the thing that seemed to keep happening to so many of the women there, went beyond the regular, standard-issue sexism she had been hearing about her whole life. But what woman is certain that the problem isn’t her, but them?

She had been with Sterling for nearly 14 years by then. Previously, she was a manager at another Sterling store, a J.B. Robinson, when her husband relocated to Florida for work. She asked the company for a transfer, too, and was offered an assistant-manager position at a Jared that hadn’t yet opened. Jared was a relatively new concept, Sterling’s first stand-alone, nonmall store with high-end everything, a drink when you walked through the door, a sandwich, too, Rolexes that you couldn’t find in any of the mall jewelry shops. Dawn loved jewelry. She loved being a character in her customers’ stories about a happy day of their lives. She was excited about the even higher-end jewelry that Jared would sell. The idea of working with the really good stuff made the demotion palatable. She told me she took the job on the condition that she would be in the running for the first manager post that opened up.

But she wasn’t. Not when the manager left for training to be a district manager; not when that man was replaced by a man who had just two years of experience at another jewelry store along with a few years of nonjewelry experience at a Men’s Wearhouse. She reminded her district manager that over the course of her tenure, she had helped take the J.B. Robinson from around $800,000 in sales to more than $3 million, but she wasn’t even given an interview. Instead, she was made acting manager while her district manager looked for someone new. The manager he hired made dirty jokes about the bodies of female customers who walked in and shopped. But at the same time, her district manager brought in a manager in waiting, a man who would train under Dawn at a manager’s salary so that he could be fast-tracked to management. The manager in waiting told a female sales associate that he wanted to “lick her head to toe,” Dawn told me. He also would sometimes ask a saleswoman if she would meet him and a few others at the Bennigan’s nearby, but when the woman got there, she’d find that she was the only one he’d asked. He was soon promoted to another store, and yet another man was made store manager. It wasn’t that Dawn felt entitled to the manager position. She simply wanted to be allowed to interview for it. She never was.

She found out about the pay issue by accident. She had helped recruit Marie Wolf, a woman who had sold a million dollars’ worth of jewelry in one year at the Service Merchandise down the road. According to Dawn, her manager didn’t seem to like Marie, despite the fact that Dawn said she was the top salesperson not just at Service Merchandise but now at Jared as well. She didn’t have “the Jared look,” the manager told Dawn. Marie was tall and wore pants and blouses, not short skirt-suits, and she wore little makeup. One day Marie asked for a raise, and the manager told her she was already making more than any other salesperson in the store. Dawn knew better. While she was acting manager, she had access to payroll forms and had seen some discrepancies: in particular, that a male sales associate who was recently recruited from a tile store was making $2 an hour more than Marie. The egregiousness of the manager’s lie bothered Dawn. That night, after the manager went home, she closed the door to the administrative office and took out all the payroll records and spread them out over the desks. One by one she saw it: There were seven women and five men who were counted as full-time sales associates. In only one case was a woman making more than a man, and it was only when you compared the highest-paid woman with the lowest-paid man. The women’s hourly wages averaged $10.39, and the men’s averaged $13.40 — so that on average, a woman working a 30-hour workweek for 52 weeks each year would make $16,208.40 before bonuses, while a man working the same amount would make $20,904. The men did not have more experience, nor were they quantifiably better salespeople.

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Dawn Souto-Coons, a former assistant manager at a Jared the Galleria of Jewelry in greater Tampa, who helped initiate the class-action suit against Sterling Jewelers Inc.CreditElinor Carucci for The New York Times


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