Lady Business: Businessmen flailing, bitcoin bros, and Wrinkles in movie casting

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 nineteenth issue, published March 1, 2018. 
 

The Flailing Gap

There’s a certain reaction I’ve noticed in men I’ve interviewed of late, when I’ve asked them about topics like sexual harassment and pay equity. I call this reaction “the flail,” and it’s a healthy mixture of discomfort and surprise that they would have to address, well, women’s issues.

“I don’t know what else to say,” one executive told me, repeatedly, when I recently asked him an open-ended question about the impact of #MeToo on his industry.

Which is telling: Usually, with sensitive topics, executives are prepared and practiced and have their sound bites close at hand. On this topic, notably, this guy did not have any of that. Clearly he hadn’t been asked that before. And clearly he hadn’t thought it was a topic that affected him.

Which is on him and his company, but also on we the reporters. Why hadn’t anyone asked him about this before? Sexual harassment is a major business story right now; discrepancies about how women are paid and promoted have been major business stories forever. All of those should be relevant topics to the men who run 95 percent of this country’s biggest companies. And yet we’re generally only asking women (or men who have been accused of something, or men adjacent to those who have) to weigh in?

I felt a similar irritation this week when I showed up at yet another financial industry event that featured, of course, six white male speakers and no women and no people of color. This one was about bitcoin and cryptocurrency, a notably bro-y niche. The event was held a couple of days after the publication of the latest splashy article about the bitcoin boys club, but nobody on the panel thought to acknowledge the big elephant in the room. None of the questions they took from the audience went near it.

We should be asking these questions of every man in power, the same way we reflexively ask every woman in power about how she manages to be a female founder, how does she do it all, how is she a lady and anything else at the same time? Because women may be the ones dealing with the handicaps that their employers put upon them – but, whether deliberately or passively, men are by and large the ones creating those handicaps.

In short, gender is a business topic that’s directly relevant to all men. It’s well past time that they start thinking of things to say.
 

Hollywood Wrinkles

So I finally saw Black Panther and enjoyed it, aside from the superhero bits! (Lady warriors with agency and sensible armor, awesome; lady warriors filming car commercials and winning showdowns against their husbands’ killer pet rhinos, sigh.)

I realize that the Marvel franchise participation was a necessary and historic pre-existing condition, and one that paid for the excellent cast. But on a pure story basis, I would love to see the more indie, District 9-style treatment of the movie’s underlying ideas.

That said, Black Panther obviously addressed one of the big problems about recent superhero movies, one that I wrote about for the Los Angeles Times a while ago:

Set aside, for a moment, the very valid criticism that these unimaginatively cast franchises are racist and sexist. Focus, instead, on the fact that they're deathly dull. It's become indescribably boring to watch the same dudes, with the same conventionally white side chicks and ethnically diverse sidekicks, carry out the same rote beats in the continuing sagas of the Hollywood franchises of today.

So I’m even more excited for Ava DuVernay’s upcoming Wrinkle in Time movie, with its mixed-race casting for the main family and what the director describes as “a fantasy where a black girl goes to another planet and saves the world.”

Also I love this bit from that Washington Post profile, not least for running down the Hollywood prestige structure while demonstrating DuVernay’s work ethic:

The question lingers as she floats into her office and returns when, nearing midnight, DuVernay is asked what might happen if “Wrinkle” isn’t a smash. Does she worry that all of this — the magazine covers, the studio muscle, the platform — will disappear? She doesn’t miss a beat.

“If they won’t let me make films at a certain point, I can still make them indie. If I can’t make films, I’ll make TV. If I can’t make TV, I’ll do commercials. I’ll do the installation at the Smithsonian. I’ll do the Prada ad,” and she tails off.

Lady Bits

--I had not seen this thing, apparently called the Vessel, until a recent walk along the High Line. But this week I learned all about it and its creator, celebrity sculptor Thomas Heatherwick, and its billionaire sponsor, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, in this politely brutal New Yorker profile. (Favorite flourishes: The devastating fact-check parentheticals.)

--I quite enjoyed Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s novel about several generations of a Korean family living in Japan during the last century. It’s a good mix of soapy and literary, and it does the impossible task of making US immigration policies seem almost reasonable in comparison to those of Japan. Do not read without a generous supply of kimchi close at hand.

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com