Lady Business: Coronavirus, space dictators, and other long-delayed consequences

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a 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 95th issue, published March 8, 2020. 
 

And Then There Were None*

*Well, technically, one. Stay gold, Tulsi.

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone! You might think today would make this newsletter an easy one to write, for someone with a track record of covering Women And Diversity And Stuff. And my inbox certainly is overflowing with IWD pitches trying to shoehorn in their claims on “female empowerment,” for whatever cynical pink-washed value that has these days.
 
As my Fortune colleague Claire Zillman put it in a justifiably scathing essay,
 

The day is intended to honor women’s achievements worldwide and to recall past protest movements that pushed for women’s working rights and universal suffrage.
 
In recent years, though, brands have hijacked the occasion, latching onto it as a marketing opportunity as they look to capitalize on the feel-good, girl-power spirit that the day evokes.

So sure, I could have spent the past week reflecting on the “empowered” strides made by #brands this year. Instead, I’ve been reading apocalyptic science fiction.
 

And behind it all, pressing down on her soul like a suffocating hand, the Tempest made its vast, stately way sunward. Already past the halfway point. Already braking. She understood their strategy perfectly. A single ship, making its way for everyone in every system to see. It was a demonstration of authority. Of inevitability. A piece of theater designed to humiliate, to subjugate, to control.
 
It was what she had done to Freehold. … Now she wondered whether the colonists there had sat up in their beds in the night. Wondered how they would feed their children. Whether there was some way to finesse their way out of the future that was bearing down on them. Probably they had.

That passage, about an intergalactic dictator sending a war ship to annihilate life on Earth, is from the seventh book in the “Game of Thrones in space!” saga called The Expanse. Which I cite with some guilty-pleasure caveats: The Expanse books are fun reads, but not great works of literature. The prose is serviceable at best, falling into the “better to be thrilling than smart” style that I associate with male-skewing genre fiction. Indeed, the two men who write the Expanse books could dearly use a Phoebe Waller-Bridge polish for their (admittedly many, and much-improved in recent books!) female characters.
 
And yet. That image -- of someone watching the long arc of an incoming disaster, with no power to flee or stop it -- has haunted me this week. As the coronavirus has shifted from distant “global” threat to local states of emergency, panicked grocery-store runs, and emergency Fed reactions last seen during the 2008 meltdown. As stock markets have tumbled, businesses have shut down their offices and canceled events both last-minute and months-ahead, and scientists and officials alike have sounded alarms about what government responses now could mean in the weeks ahead.
 
And as the interminable presidential election cycle yielded a sudden and yet inevitable-seeming shakeup, collapsing months of “the most diverse group of presidential candidates ever” into a contest between three septuagenarian, northeastern white men.
 
Yes, sure: three septuagenarian, northeastern white men with vastly different policy positions and track records. (And health problems!) But still: These are our choices? And of course, these are our choices. The arc is still continuing, the results seemingly inevitable, the impact not yet fully upon us. Happy International Women’s Day, everyone.

Lady Bits

--A housekeeping note: If you click on the above link to Claire's essay on IWD, or most other Fortune links I include going forward, you'll hit Fortune's new paywall. That's the bad (/necessary-economics-of-quality-journalism) news. The good news is that readers of Lady Business get a 50 percent discount for Fortune subscriptions, starting at less than $25/year. If you'd like to support me and my colleagues, and continue reading our work, please consider subscribing today! 
 
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