President and CEO Christine Jacobs’ Discrimination Lessons

The following is a book excerpt from From the Sandbox to the Corner Office by Eve Tahmincioglu. Her specialties include workplace issues, the small business and entrepreneurial world, and leadership, including interviews with some of the biggest names in Corporate America.

Christine Jacobs, President and CEO of Theragenics Corporation

It was one event when Christine Jacobs was a supervisor at a hospital in 1979 that in many ways set the stage for how she’d deal with gender bias throughout her career. She was in her late twenties, in her first managerial role, and her father’s boss was admitted to the hospital where she worked. As part of her supervisory functions at the hospital, she would oversee blood work and other tests being done, but she took extra care to keep an eye on her father’s boss given who he was.

A few days after the boss was released from the hospital, Jacobs received a velvet box in the mail at her home from the former patient, and in it was a bottle of Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps perfume. Jacobs called the boss, who was married, to find out why he had sent her such a lavish gift. During the discussion, he made it clear that his intentions were not at all admirable. He was interested in having a relationship with Jacobs and told her he would take care of her by paying her bills and also ensure that her dad would have a nice, comfortable life.

“The idea that this man would act this way was a shock. This business of a man holding my dad hostage was new for me and awful. It taught me that things could be pretty dirty out there and it was a wake-up call for me,” she says. She told the man she had no interest in his advances but kept the perfume, she admits. As for her father’s career, she never found out if the boss took the rejection out on her dad because he was always so private about his work. And, until this day, she never told her father what transpired. Her dad, who raised nine children, putting them all through college, left that job within the year, but Jacobs never knew the circumstances.