Happy New Year!!

Happy 2024! I hope you had a restful holiday season (or at least a few days!) and are slowly readying yourself for a new year of challenges and joy. I’m looking forward to continuing to hear from you all during the year.

Over the holiday I read Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career by Kristi Coulter. (I referenced the book in this issue of Comes Now but hadn’t gotten around to reading it until recently.) It’s the story of Coulter’s career as an Amazon executive from 2006 to 2018. Excited by the promise of changing the world, she moved to Seattle with her husband to work at the company, leaving behind a stable job at All Music Guide where she felt bored and unchallenged.

Coulter held senior management roles at different parts of Amazon, including in book and media merchandising, its book publishing imprint for translated titles, its executive leadership program, and then its grocery business. She describes an insanely frenetic, high-pressure atmosphere where employees are encouraged to tear each other apart in the name of improving Amazon’s products, to do the impossible with virtually no resources or support, and to work in an environment where management is indifferent to the demands placed on its employees.

As the New York Times profiled during Coulter’s tenure in an article to which she contributed, Amazon was a particularly isolating place for women. Some of the most painful parts of the book to read are those where Coulter describes her own callousness to decisions by Amazon executives—particularly those that hurt women. As one example, she describes attending a book publishing conference where visibly intoxicated male authors mingle with far younger female employees responsible for managing the relationships with those authors. As the night progresses, one of Coulter’s female colleagues asks whether those women are safe. Coulter dismisses her colleague’s concern on the grounds that those women knew what they were getting into.

Working in that type of an environment takes a toll on Coulter. She begins to drink heavily, and ends up authoring an article—that leads to a book deal—about her struggles with alcohol and her ultimate sobriety.

As you might imagine, there are many opinions about Exit Interview, most of which are centered on how Coulter stayed so long at—and appeared to enjoy—an undeniably toxic workplace. The New York Times suggests that certain readers may be “frustrated” by the tension between Coulter’s description of the Amazon workplace and steadfast desire to remain there, hoping for a promotion that she never achieves. The Observer bemoans the book as “a guide to—and celebration of—success at Amazon rather than an effort to question the structure of achievement and labor that it shows quite clearly is inequitable and cruel.” It takes Coulter to task for describing Amazon’s culture as singular, rather than indicative of larger cultural norms. Slate, in turn, describes the book as an indictment of hustle culture.

There is an unquestionable discomfort in reading a story not only about a woman who continued to work at a toxic company, but also about how she came to embrace and defend many aspects of it—particularly its treatment of women.

I know where that discomfort comes from. I suspect that many of you are or have worked in work environments that share more than a few similarities with Amazon—where there is incredible pressure to succeed and an attitude that everything should be sacrificed to achieve that success. Like Amazon, such workplaces are also often draped in some higher purpose or mission that hide their fundamental brutality, as if it’s they just can’t be bothered to treat people in a humane fashion when they’re saving the world or fighting the good fight. That mission rhetoric can lead us to remain silent in when we see things that otherwise would motivate us to speak up.

While the above might sound like a pathetic justification, it has some foundation in social science. In an article about silence in the face of sexual harassment, authors in the Journal of Applied Psychology describe [paywall] the “network silence” that often exists in male-dominated workplaces, where a male harasser is surrounded by a network of men that valorizes men and masculinity and perpetuates myths about sexual harassment, leading to a culture that silences, ignores, and doesn’t hear about sexual harassment, and, as a result, the culture of harassment persists. Think about how many serial abusers we’ve heard about in the past ten years, and then think about how many people—men and women alike—who knew about that abuse long before the public did, but said nothing. That’s network silence at work.

It’s easy to label anyone who would work at a place or remain at a place like as a “people pleaser.” Coulter admits that she is one, but I don’t think her desire to please, or to succeed at all costs, fully explains why she stayed at Amazon so long. The JAP article above talks about how for years social science only studied why victims didn’t come forward, rather than asking the more important question of why no one else outed a serial abuser. Similarly, blaming Coulter (or anyone else in a toxic workplace) for failing to leave sooner ignores the reinforcing power of network silence.

Why we stay silent or stay is far more complex than who we are as individuals. As with many other issues, we need to start looking at our toxic workplaces to challenge the notion that women are solely responsible for speaking out about them.

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