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Intolerance

When Intolerance Becomes Intolerable
By MARCI ALBOHER

Many career shifts involve an “aha” moment. In Lisa Sherman’s case, the moment was not only the catalyst for a career change but also led her to tell her boss she was gay.

And her experience ultimately became memorialized in a case study for the Harvard Business School.

It all started in 1993 with a diversity training seminar at what was then Bell Atlantic, where Ms. Sherman was a vice president for marketing. She kept the fact that she was a lesbian to herself at work because, she said, she worried that being openly gay would derail her career. She was, by her own account, a master at what she calls the “black art of pronoun puppetry, substituting ‘him’ and ‘we’ for ‘her’ and ‘she.’ ”

During the seminar, participants were asked to write on flip charts, filling in the blanks on a variety of sentences: “Blacks are ...,” “Asians are ...,” “Jews are. ...” Ms. Sherman said that many of the answers reflected certain stereotypes. But when she got to the page with gay people on it, she said that seeing the words written by her colleagues literally made her sick. “Pathetic,” “perverse” and “immoral” were among the ones she recalls. Some were written by people she had worked with for 15 years, many of whom she considered to be friends. More

Do bridge! Da bridge!

Bridge Construction Draws Crowds in Minneapolis
By MONICA DAVEY

MINNEAPOLIS — On a sunny Saturday, more than 300 people stood in clusters squinting out at the gurgling Mississippi River and the spot where one of the state’s most-traveled bridges fell down one evening last August, killing 13 people and injuring many more.

Near the front of this morning’s crowd, which included tourists with cameras and water bottles, a Boy Scout troop all in navy and a local man celebrating his 75th birthday, stood Peter Sanderson, the project manager for a new $234 million bridge that is rising fast above the waters here.

Trailed by workers in hard hats lugging loudspeakers, Mr. Sanderson used a microphone to answer seemingly endless questions. How strong will the metal be in the new concrete bridge? How peculiar is its design? Has it been used before in this country? What is that puff of smoke over there? What exactly are those construction workers there doing? What are those tubes for?

On and on the quizzing went, as it does most weekends now, part of an unusual series of public meetings the Minnesota Department of Transportation calls the Sidewalk Superintendent tours. More