Woman erased: Sacramento Business Review deletes mention of female author who criticized all-male panel

The Sacramento Business Review scrubbed from its website the name, image and biography of a female author after she criticized the group for using an all-male panel to present an economic forecast she and four other women co-wrote.

Oracle Corp. organizational development consultant Jessica Kriegel no longer appears on SBR’s author’s webpage, even though she was one of 17 contributors to a 48-page report on emerging economic trends in the Sacramento region, which was presented January 17 inside Sacramento State’s University Union Ballroom.

Kriegel has written or co-written the forecast’s section on human resources the past two years. In the last forecast, the data she collected revealed Sacramento businesses were disproportionately run by men.

The UC Davis Graduate School of Management corroborated those findings in its own study, which showed only incremental gender equality progress among California’s top firms, where women held 12.3 percent of board seats in 2015.

Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings LLC in Rancho Cordova, which ranked 235 out of the top 400 companies, featured women in 7.7 percent of the company’s leadership roles.

Kriegel highlighted these disparities before last year’s main presentation, when she was invited to give a 4-minute preamble. Given the attention her mini-talk garnered, Kriegel didn’t expect to find herself in the role of gender police 12 months later. But when the lead panelists were announced, it was the usual male suspects—and zero women.

Eight days before the Sac State event, Kriegel cited her concerns in an email to SBR director and chief economist Sanjay Varshney and two board members. Kriegel says Varshney responded that the forecast wasn’t meant to be a social experiment.

“Which, in my mind, is such a silly perspective,” she said. The report “is massive,” she noted, and the presenters get to pick which elements to highlight—or not. By inviting a woman to speak, she said the SBR would have allowed a minority perspective to help shape an important conversation.

“You could have expanded the perspective,” Kriegel said.

Kriegel articulated that view in an op-ed that appeared in the January 13 “Soapbox” section of the Sacramento Bee.

Writing that “a lack of diversity in speakers limits the quality of the message being delivered,” Kriegel continued: “All-male panels suggest that women’s perspectives aren’t important, and they reinforce the perception that women don’t have the skills or expertise.”

That message got a cool reception. Kriegel soon realized her email address had been dropped from SBR’s distribution list. She wasn’t sent a parking pass to the forecast event as in previous years. And, while her name and bio remains in the actual report (PDFs are harder to alter, apparently), it’s been removed from SBR’s website.

Reached by phone, Varshney declined to comment on the decision to erase Kriegel from SBR’s website. He did say Kriegel’s op-ed represented an opinion and wasn’t “a factual piece,” and argued the SBJ team of 17 authors, which included five women, five people of Asian descent and himself, was “diverse in every sense.”

“To suggest that four people on stage represents the whole 17 … is not true,” he added.

With President Donald Trump and a Republican-held Congress reanimating the party’s obsession with appeasing business interests, Kriegel thought it important to reflect that diversity on stage.

“As of now, I would assume I’m fired,” Kriegel said when asked about her status.

As for the event itself, Kriegel attended and said she found it “totally awkward.” But what bugged her the most was that, except for inviting a female author to split this year’s 4-minute preamble with the woman’s husband, the presentation went forward with the all-male panel.

“The really sad thing for me was that they didn’t change,” Kriegel said.