Hurricane Harvey; Why women don't win Nobels; Fearless #branding

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the second issue, published October 12, 2017.

Hurricane Harvey

You know that feeling after you publicly commit yourself to a weekly writing project, and hit "publish" for the first time? A certain low-level panic set in for me last Thursday morning, after I sent out the first Lady Business newsletter. Would there be enough new stuff to write about this topic every week, I worried, without it becoming repetitive or stale?

Hahahasigh:

In interviews, eight women described varying behavior by [this powerful man]: appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself. At late-night, wine-soaked gatherings with colleagues, he bragged about his sexual conquests and the size of his genitalia.

“When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me...they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to,” one woman wrote.

The women who made allegations...either worked for him or appeared on his show. They have complained about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if [he] was masturbating. Many of the women also said they believed they had limited ability to push back against inappropriate behavior, often because they needed funding, a job or other help.

The allegations have come to light as the [fill-in-the-blank] industry grapples with criticism over long-standing gender inequality and bias.

"Sometimes the whole world felt like a nerdy frat house," she wrote. "After everyone left, my co-worker turned to me and shrugged. 'It’s like we don’t exist,' she said."

That is, of course, not one story or company or industry or predator, but a full sampling of 2017’s finest sexual harassers and rapists. (Soon to be a bar-trivia topic near you!)

Correct answers: Hollywood’s Harvey Weinstein; SoFi’s Mike Cagney; Uber employees under Travis Kalanick; Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly; 500 Startups' Dave McClure and a bevy of other venture capitalists; Lightspeed Venture Partners' Justin Caldbeck; and Kleiner Perkins, former employee of Ellen Pao. 

Much has been written about the Weinstein case, why it’s finally becoming fully public now, and whether there’s progress to be seen in the fact that all of these powerful predators are finally being publicly named and shamed. On the one hand, yes, at least we’re talking about it now. On the other hand, talking about it hasn’t stopped it from happening. Talking about it didn’t stop one of these predators from becoming president.

The thing I keep thinking about is the unknown damage. For every Gwyneth Paltrow or Megyn Kelly or Ashley Judd or Katrina Lake, for every celebrity whose own power and fame lends her claim public legitimacy, how many unknown women were harassed by these predators? How many women knew they didn’t have anything like the power of their abusers, and that they would be automatically discredited if they dared to speak out? How many women were derailed from becoming the next Paltrow/Kelly/Judd/Lake because they were targeted by these predators?

"I actually decided not to go into entertainment because of this incident,” a former Weinstein Company temp named Emily Nestor told The New Yorker.

How many more women made that calculus in Hollywood/Silicon Valley/Wall Street/Washington/name-your-corridor-of-power? No matter how many more women come forward, we’ll likely never be able quantify their absence.

Also important: Maureen Ryan and Lena Dunham and even The Onion on how none of this stops until men speak up.

Nobel Intentions

For instance, Lise Meitner, one of the co-discoverers of nuclear fission, was nominated for the physics prize 29 times from 1937 to 1965 and the chemistry prize an additional 19 times from 1924 to 1948, according to Nobel Foundation archival records. She never won. And while astronomer Vera Rubin's groundbreaking work revealing the existence of dark matter received wide acclaim, she died on December 25, 2016, with no Nobel to call her own.

--National Geographic

This year, for the second straight year, the Nobel prizes were awarded entirely to men. Only 49 women have ever won a Nobel--out of 923 awarded since the prize was founded, in 1901.

When discussing this gender discrepancy, the people who give out the prizes blamed ladies for not speaking up for themselves ("we have started to identify leading women scientists and have invited for them to be nominated") and also the fact that ladies apparently didn’t do science or other sorts of research in the 20th century ("we are indeed awarding research, where discoveries were made in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, during a time when we had much more of a gender bias").

Um, except that women have made major scientific discoveries since the Nobels have been around. See also: the injustice done to Rosalind Franklin, the woman whose work led to the discovery of DNA--but who was sidelined by Watson and Crick, and who conveniently died before their Nobel was awarded.

Or take the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. This week, Richard Thaler was named the 79th person and 78th man to receive that award. The lone female exception, Elinor Ostrom, received the prize in 2009 and died three years later. Her singular status persists despite the fact that, for at least the past 20 years, women have accounted for about a third of new economics PhDs. 

One partial explanation comes from that green line: despite women's pursuit of advanced economics degrees, less than 15 percent make it to the rank of "full professor." It's almost as if there's a subtle bias to dismiss the research women do, and to focus on their sexuality and physical appearances rather than their professional accomplishments. But that would be crazy, right?

Fearless #Branding  

State Street Corp., parent company of the investment firm behind Wall Street’s iconic Fearless Girl statue, today agreed to pay a combined $5 million to more than 300 women and 15 black employees who were paid less than their white, male counterparts, according to a federal audit. 

--Adweek

I mostly sat out this year’s culture wars over the clashing Wall Street statues, in part because I never understood the depths of the passion over marketing gimmicks. The Charging Bull is not, forgive the pun, some sacred cow. It’s a gaudy, oversize piece of kitsch that its sculptor littered onto Wall Street, like a 7,000-pound bag of broken Dorito remnants, with a vague and retconned artistic “message" about capitalism and "world peace." Its of-course-enormous testicles have been rubbed shiny by all the giggling, selfie-stick-toting tourists, in the grand tradition of most anatomically-endowed larger-than-life pieces of public “art."

Meanwhile, the pre-pubescent Fearless Girl is an extremely smart marketing stunt by a company that is actively working against what the stunt represents. In a vacuum, Fearless Girl is awesome. It’s great branding, offering a moving and timely image that represents what it’s like to be a #woke lady in 2017. (#Feminism! #Resist!)

Unfortunately the message goes hollow pretty quickly when the company behind the branding exercise has systematically underpaid the women and people of color it did employ. So much for feminism, or fearlessness. 

Lady Bits:

—ESPN continues to make terrible decisions about Jemele Hill, a woman "it pays to express her opinions," for expressing her opinion that racism is bad. That forces the sports channel to acknowledge the overt-racists-versus-everyone-else split in the NFL, and in the country, that ESPN would rather ignore. And it's picking the wrong side.

--How not to critique romance novels, by a dude. For a more legitimate criticism of the romance industry, read this article about the genre's diversity problems, or the always-interesting Twitter feed of Courtney Milan, a lawyer (and former Supreme Court clerk for Sandra Day O'Connor) turned excellent romance author.

--What I’m watching: I have previously expressed my deep, abiding, not uncritical but completely unironic love of the Fast and the Furious franchise, most of which I’ve seen either at the gym or on airplanes. Last week, during a series of flights, I finally caught up with this spring’s Fate of the Furious, or "the one with the submarine, and also the beef between The Rock and Vin Diesel."

I was a little disappointed! (Spoilers for a six-month-old nonsense film.) Aside from the wincingly painful Cuba condescension, there was also a completely unnecessary fridging and a creepy Instant!Baby for Vin and Michelle Rodriguez. (Her: "Let’s talk about maybe having kids." Him: Discovers he has a baby via his kidnapped ex, who becomes a dead ex by the end of the movie. "Honey, I got you a kid!”)

Still, I can’t complain too much about an airplane movie with that starts off with Vin racing a flaming car backwards into the ocean, or that gives us this sort of dialogue: "In layman's terms? She just CARJACKED a SUBMARINE.”

--Housekeeping note: Lady Business will be publishing weekly on Thursday mornings. (This was a carefully vetted and market-researched decision that in no way was randomly decided by my schedule last week.)

Thank you to everyone who commented, gave advice and signed up after my first newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what else you think, and what you’d like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com