Women as Whistleblowers

Abstract

Over the past year, a number of women whistleblowers have been in the news: Sherron Watkins of Enron, Cynthia Cooper, an auditor at WorldCom, and Coleen Rowley of the FBI are among the most well known. All three made the cover of Time magazine (December 30/January 6, 2003) as Persons of the Year. Though one might argue that they are not all whistleblowers, I believe that they all are. Certainly they fit the definition of the whistleblowing that I employed in my recent book, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, upon which most of my general izations about whistleblowers are based.1 Though all three women made headlines (almost every whistle blower's dream) in the months after my book was published, I interviewed a number of women whistleblowers for my book, and I've interviewed several since, mostly to see how they react to all the attention women whistleblowers have been receiving. Are they proud? Envious? Both? Are more women blowing the whistle? Do they differ from men who blow the whistle? About the first question it is hard to be sure, for reasons to be explained. About the second, I can say that women whistleblowers talk differently about their experience than men.2 In her New York Times (June 6,2002) op-ed piece, Anita Hill, another famous woman whistleblower (she testified against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at his Senate confirmation hearings), speculates that more women are blowing the whistle because many have reached high enough positions in the organization to see malfeasance by policy, as it might be called, while still remaining outsiders, not one of the boys. Women work