For Women Who Refuse to Be Underestimated, Underpaid and Undervalued

Over the years I've spent representing women, I've watched the same patterns repeat themselves so consistently that I could set my watch by them. A woman in her fifties, fired for being too experienced, which is another way of saying too expensive and too hard to push around. A woman who reported a man's misconduct on behalf of other women, and found herself managed out within the year. A woman who made too much money and made her boss look bad by comparison. A young woman, brand new in her career, sitting through casual, degrading sexual comments about other women in the room, said like it was nothing, because to the men saying them, it was.

Here is the pattern underneath all of it. The person protecting the bad behavior is usually, though not always, a man protecting another man, because that man is his friend, and, you know, he has a family. That sentence alone has justified more terminations, promotions, and pay decisions than any performance review ever has.

I've lived a version of this double standard myself. Years ago, single and childless in my thirties, I was out at a club in the Hamptons at three in the morning, living my life exactly the way anyone in their thirties with no one waiting at home is entitled to. A client saw me there. He did not like that his lawyer was out that late having fun, and I nearly lost him over it. Nobody was auditing whether the men representing him were in bed by midnight. My job during business hours had nothing to do with my life at three a.m., except that, apparently, as a woman, it did.

Here is what almost nobody outside this work understands. These stories essentially never become public. Not because they aren't true. Because the system is built, deliberately, so that they can't be. A company facing this kind of claim knows the fastest way out is a settlement, and settlements come with a release and a nondisclosure agreement attached as the price of payment. Litigating instead would mean years, real money most women don't have sitting around, and a legal system that makes suing prohibitively expensive unless the dollar amount is large enough for a litigator to take the case on contingency. Most of these cases are not that large. So they settle, quietly, and the story disappears along with the woman's ability to ever tell it. The same man keeps his job. The same pattern repeats with the next woman, and the one after her, invisible every single time. Remember, this system was not built for you. Don't treat it like it was. Be strategic.

This is exactly why independent media matters as much as the legal system does. A lawsuit can win one woman her dignity back. It cannot, by design, tell the public what actually happened. Journalism can. This week's guest on Takin' Care of Lady Business, Emily Ramshaw, built The 19th because she understood that gender, power, and workplace stories weren't being told anywhere at the scale or with the specificity they deserved. She's raised nearly $120 million to make sure they are.

With Love & Lady Business,
JJ 

In today’s edition:
1. She Asked for $100K. She Got $1 Million. - with Emily Ramshaw
2. Report It Anyway, In Writing.
3. TJD Power List
4. Lady Bits

1. She Asked for $100K. She Got $1 Million. - with Emily Ramshaw

Emily Ramshaw had spent nearly two decades in nonprofit media, running newsrooms, understanding the audience, knowing exactly what was missing, and she still thought of herself as a great number two. It took one prominent journalist telling her, essentially, if you don't build this yourself, somebody else will, for her to actually do it. In 2020, she launched The 19th, a national newsroom covering gender, politics, and policy. She started with $20,000. She has since raised nearly $120 million. This episode is for anyone who has spent years collecting proof they already had, while watching other people raise money on a deck and a big idea alone.

In this episode, you'll learn:
 — How a donor meeting once got Emily to name what she actually needed and pushed a $100,000 ask into a $1 million gift
— Why she was once coached to uncross her arms and smile more in fundraising meetings, to make her ask feel less threatening
— How she turned every rejection into three new introductions, and built an entire fundraising strategy on repetition instead of charisma
— Why she built The 19th around paid family leave, elder care leave, and a higher salary floor from day one, instead of retrofitting those later
— The worst business advice Emily ever received, and why she ignored it

🎧 Listen here: Spotify | Apple | YouTube
Explore The 19th: 19thnews.org

2. Report It Anyway, In Writing

Until last week, I was proud of my Cornell degree. Proud in the uncomplicated way you're proud of something you worked hard for a long time ago and don't examine too closely anymore. Last week, a lawsuit became public alleging that seven fraternity members drugged and sexually assaulted a female student at the Chi Phi house in 2024. According to reporting on the case, the university's own investigation resulted in two expulsions. No one was arrested. The district attorney's office reviewed the matter and filed no criminal charges. The allegations remain just that, allegations, unproven in court. But the institutional response is a matter of public record, and it is exactly the pattern I described above, just with a much higher name attached to it than most of my clients will ever have.

I bring up a university, but I want to be direct about where this actually lives day to day for the women I represent: corporate America. The same dynamic, an institution weighing the cost of real accountability against the cost of managing a problem quietly, plays out in performance review cycles, in HR conference rooms, in the closed-door conversation a general counsel has with a CEO about "exposure" before anyone has asked a single question about what's actually true. A company protecting a valuable executive from a harassment complaint is running the exact same calculation Cornell ran. Quiet is cheaper. Quiet is faster. Quiet doesn't require anyone powerful to answer for anything.

So here is what I tell every client, and what I want every one of you sitting inside a company right now to actually do, not just nod along to.

1. Report it in writing, to HR and to whoever sits above HR. Not a hallway conversation. Not a Slack message you can't fully control. An email, dated, specific, sent through a channel your employer cannot later claim never happened.

2. Document everything contemporaneously, the good and the bad. Every review, every promise made in a one-on-one, every comment that crossed a line. Write it down while you still remember the exact words, not weeks later when a lawyer asks you to reconstruct it under pressure.

3. Save copies of your own record before you need them, excluding company confidential data. Performance reviews, your own emails, anything documenting your standing and your treatment- forward it to a personal account as you go. If you get terminated, many companies cut your access and walk you out the same hour. You will not get a chance to go back for anything.

4. If you are legally able to record, record. New York is a one-party consent state, meaning you can legally record a conversation you are personally part of without telling the other person. A meeting with HR, a conversation with your manager, an exit interview- if the law where you are allows it, record it. Know the law in your state and the state of anyone on the call before you do this, since some states require every party's consent.

5. Remember who HR actually works for. HR represents the company. That is not a criticism; it's their job. It is not, however, your job to forget that while you're in the room with them, believing they're there to help you personally.

6. If they do nothing after you report it in writing, you have your answer. Silence from HR is not neutral. It's the company telling you, clearly, what it has already decided to protect.

7. Hire an employment attorney the moment you sense it coming, not after you've been let go. The negotiation for a better severance, better terms, a cleaner exit, largely happens in the window before you're actually terminated. Once you've been fired and handed a standard release, most of your leverage is gone. If your gut is telling you something is coming, that's exactly when to make the call.

8. Start looking for a new job before they force you to. Protecting your income and pursuing accountability for what happened to you are not mutually exclusive. You can be interviewing elsewhere and still be owed something for what this company did. Don't wait for them to make the decision for you before you start making your own.

REAL TALK
A company's reputation is not the same thing as its record. Reputations survive intact for a long time, right up until they don't. Build your own record the same way a good plaintiff's file gets built, in writing, contemporaneously, outside anyone else's control, because you may need it to tell the true story long after your employer has decided to move on. Remember, this system was not built for you. Don't treat it like it was. Be strategic. Have a decision you're navigating and need a second set of eyes? Reach out to The Justice Dept.

3. TJD Power List: Julianna Glasse

Julianna Glasse Read Her Way Out, Then Built the Door for Everyone Behind Her

"This is what happens when women read." A man in her church sneered that line at Julianna Glasse to shame her back into obedience. She made it the name of her foundation and the title of her forthcoming memoir instead.

Glasse spent years as a Christian pop singer at the center of evangelical culture, performing at Trump's 2017 National Prayer Breakfast, before the birth of her third child pulled the first thread on everything she'd been raised to believe. She started reading and eventually left that world entirely, career included.

Her foundation, This Is What Happens When Women Read, has reached more than four million people across nearly 67 countries, and she's partnered with Oxford's Saïd Business School to fund scholarships for women building independent futures. Her memoir publishes worldwide October 13.

She was a guest on this podcast once before. Listen to that conversation here. It's worth revisiting now that the book is finally here. And that is why Julianna Glasse lands on this week's TJD Power List.

💋💋 Lady Bits

🤯 A group of women went through the same grueling astronaut tests as John Glenn in the early 1960s, and beat him on several of them. NASA still shut the program down before any of them flew.

🤦‍♀️ A federal bill moving through Congress this year has a quiet consequence nobody flagged until a reporter did the math on married women's IDs. One of its own supporters called the result "ridiculous," then kept backing the bill anyway.

🙌 A founder says she took on one of the biggest companies in the world in the smallest possible courtroom, and won. She's asking people to help her actually collect on it.

👏 A board member made a joke about why women don't get more seats at the table, in a meeting specifically called to fix the company's sexism problem. He didn't have a job by the end of the day.

💰 There was a year, not that long ago as these things go, when a woman inventing something didn't automatically mean it was legally hers.

Hi, I’m JJ

Since starting the Justice Dept, we have increased women's wealth by over $100MM in just over 5 years. Want to know what inspires me to do this work, other than making women money? My clients' surprised reaction when we manage to get them much better terms for themselves and their companies, whether via talent agreements, employment, severance, partnerships, asset sales or investments. They often admit that they never thought they could get that result. Not even hoped. This blows my mind. As we know at The Justice Dept. you are all worth everything you ask for and more. Reach out and we’ll show you how!
x TJD