Carney R. Shegerian, an employee rights attorney and founder of Shegerian & Associates, a Santa Monica-based litigation law firm that represents employees exclusively, expresses his point of view on “Sex and the City” character, Miranda Hobbes, gone jobless for being an outspoken, intelligent, accomplished, and successful female lawyer.
For those who have yet to catch the Sex and the City sequel, type-A lawyer Miranda Hobbes, was forced to quit her high-profile law firm job, because of a new chauvinistic male boss. Hobbes claimed in one of the scenes, “his problem [her new boss] wasn’t that he didn’t like my voice, he didn’t like me because I had a voice.”
“Sex and the City 2″ captures the harsh realities of women in the twenty-first century working world: gender biases, gender discrimination, and pay differences between genders. Perhaps more demeaning than the archaic ways of flat-out denying female working rights is this contemporary way of thinking that if nobody speaks up about gender discrimination, then it will go unnoticed. So how do we keep our employees from speaking up about gender discrimination, America? We keep them from speaking, period.
Wrong! Carney Shegerian states, “While it may seem like gender discrimination is a thing of the past, female employee rights may still be stifled by remnants of outdated bigoted ways of upper-management in Corporate America. Subtle tactics to repress female employees from speaking up in the workplace could ultimately lead to an illegal constructive termination.”
Shegerian encourages his fellow female corporate employees, “Employees need to know that a failure to engage all employees in an interactive workplace process because of one’s sex, consequently and perhaps subconsciously giving the cold shoulder, is considered gender discrimination and is illegal. A lesson to be learned from Sex and the City is for female employees to assert their rights in the workplace and ensure that their treatment is the same as their male counterparts.”
An experienced trial attorney, Shegerian has tried many jury trials to verdict in both state and federal court, always representing individuals that have suffered financial or emotional losses and have been wronged by employers, including major corporations. Shegerian has built a remarkable career on helping those who have been wronged in the workplace. He remains undefeated in federal jury trials and has won 14 seven figure verdicts representing employees.
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