International Employment Lawyer features Bonnie Levine among 2022 Women Leaders

The International Employment Lawyer (IEL) selected Verse Legal’s Bonnie Levine among its 2022 women leaders in a survey published June 15. IEL is an independent publication focused on cross-border employment topics. Its Women Leaders survey asked Bonnie and others from around the globe questions on a designated specialty practice area, in Bonnie’s case, investigations.

“Many employers fail to connect the dots between their diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] initiatives and investigations into workplace conduct,” Bonnie said in her interview. “[DEI] initiatives cannot transcend performativity unless enforcement mechanisms can keep up to protect victims of biased treatment.” Bonnie went on to identify sources of decisional errors in investigations, explaining that “many investigations are conducted internally (where true independence is often difficult if not impossible), but external investigators are often insufficiently attuned to institution-specific factors and make infeasible or even unknowingly harmful recommendations.” She pointed out that the unconscious biases that cause us to favor certain groups in other employment decisions operate similarly to create double standards that lead to unfair investigation results, noting anecdotal observations that the same behaviors from white men—a group that unconscious bias often predisposes employees to presumptively accept as authority figures—elicit fewer complaints than when these behaviors are engaged in by, for example, Black women.

Read the rest of Bonnie’s IEL interview here, and check out her profile along with IEL’s full list of women leaders spanning every region in the world.