Lady Business: Book launches, financial quote ratios, and Valentines obligations

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 fifty-eighth issue, published February 14, 2019.
 

Money Talking

 
(My favorite endorsement so far. Credit: His mama.)
 
My book for Inc. and Harper Collins, Startup Money Made Easy, came out on Tuesday. It’s been very exciting and a little overwhelming, in the best way, and I’m feeling very grateful for the support of so many friends and colleagues (and the lovely teams at Harper Collins Leadership and Two PR).
 
Obligatory promotional paragraph, and then I’ll get on with it: As the title suggests, Startup Money Made Easy is a guide to many of the financial questions entrepreneurs face when starting, running, and growing their businesses. You can read an excerpt here, or an op-ed I wrote for USA Today about the book and smart startup risks here; you can buy the book here or here, and if you do, I’d love it if you could leave me an Amazon review.
 
But I want to talk a little bit about the book’s structure, and the people I quote in it, because it magnifies an issue I think about a lot in my daily journalism job (and in this newsletter, obviously): Who gets to be an expert? Who do writers/editors quote, and what do those experts look like?
 
Men are the default quotes for most journalists, even the ones who self-identify as feminists and who regularly think about these things. For financial reporting, it tends to be even worse; as I mentioned last week, last year the Financial Times found that only 21 percent of the people it quoted were women. (So the FT created a bot to warn editors when the problem persists.)
 
Journalists including The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, and especially Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance have written smartly about this issue and its causes -- as well as how it affects their reporting, and how they’ve tried to fix it. As LaFrance put it in 2016:
 

Part of the problem, clearly, is that the people who are considered newsworthy—presidents, governors, military leaders, CEOs, and so on—are often men. 

…[But] by failing to quote or mention very many women, I’m one of the forces actively contributing to a world in which women’s skills and accomplishments are undermined or ignored, and women are excluded. (Assessing my work for racial diversity would be more complex, but, I suspect, similarly revealing and disheartening.)

Some people would argue that I’m simply reflecting reality in my work. That’s an overly generous interpretation. Another popular reaction is that my job as a journalist isn’t to actively seek out diverse sources, but to find the most qualified people to help me tell the best possible story. I only agree with that in part: Yes, my job is to serve readers by finding the best sources for my stories, but why assume that the best source isn’t a woman? By substantially underrepresenting an entire gender, I’m missing out on all kinds of viewpoints, ideas, and experiences that might otherwise sharpen and enhance my reporting.

 
Paying attention to this was especially important to me when writing a book about finance and startups, two sectors where men -- especially white men -- tend to be very heavily represented at the top. They’re most of the bank CEOs, the venture capitalists, the unicorn startup founders. So, sure, it would be pretty easy for a book about startup money to quote them pretty heavily, if not exclusively.

But white men are hardly the only ones working in those fields, or the only success stories. White men aren’t the only business “experts” -- even if a lot of business books and business publications seem to be mostly about them.

And so as I sat down to write a business book about the financial advice of successful entrepreneurs, I was pretty determined to make sure that men and women got at least equal billing for their expertise, their range of experiences, and their financial accomplishments at their companies.

Which is why I was particularly pleased with an early piece of feedback from one of my editors, who remarked on the “nice diversity of voices” in my first chapter. I also made sure to start the chapter on venture capital -- where men get 97.8 percent of the money -- with quotes from two women.

And overall: There are 12 quotes that start the book’s chapters. The quotes are evenly divided between men and women. Three come from white women, three from women of color. Two come from white men, four from men of color.

I’m proud of that, but it’s just one metric. I tried to take the same care when choosing the case studies and interviews I cited throughout the book, but I didn’t actively track every chapter on a Yong-style spreadsheet. I’m sure there’s more I could have done to highlight a plethora of diverse voices and inclusive experiences.

But I mention it to point out: Men are not the only people who start businesses, the only ones who succeed at it, or the only ones who want advice about finance and startups. I very much hope this book will appeal to men, and reflect some of their experiences. But I equally hope it will appeal to the women who are doing the same work, facing the same problems, and rarely getting the same amount of public credit.

Lady Bits:

--I’m a sucker for a good Groundhog Day conceit, and so I really enjoyed Netflix’s Russian Doll. Like the best time loop stories, it managed to make a very dark (and potentially repetitive) story fresh, funny, and ultimately hopeful:
 

 
--Also, yay more Miss Fisher!
 

 
--Happy birthday to my friend Julia (and, this weekend, to my friends Angela and Amy, and my brother Paul)! And, of course, happy Valentine’s Day. However you’re celebrating today, may it be free of obligation chocolate.
 
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