Lady Business: End-of-year meta; Vanishing acts; Star Wars shipping

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 eleventh issue, published December 21, 2017.
 

What Kind of Year Has It Been?

With all due* respect to Aaron Sorkin, (*which is not much most days, internet boy), it’s been freaking strange. Personally, I’ve been happy with a lot of writing I’ve published, including this newsletter, so thank you all for your subscriptions and encouragement and support. (And, I suppose, thank you also to the hornet’s nest of men like Harvey Weinstein, for spending decades giving me fodder for this; and also to men like Matt Damon for making a great case for Feminism: A Thing That Still Needs to Exist.)

I ended the year with the publication of a fun cover story for Inc., and one that somewhat kick-started this newsletter:

Chestnut, who's watched his company grow "from startup to grownup" with a parent's mixed emotions, has some free time now that he's no longer always worrying about survival. His father recently reminded him he was once a good cyclist, so now Chestnut has a group of mountain biking friends, a Peloton at home, and a Strava addiction. He has a couple of weekend racecars, too, to go with the Tesla he drives to work.

Tonight, he's riding a cheap, lightweight company bike that someone at MailChimp, in-house quirk firmly in place, has named the Batmobile. It's somewhat apt: Take away his quick and slightly goofy grin, his ready embrace of the absurd, and what one employee calls "the Mister Rogers look," and Chestnut sometimes seems like he could outbrood Bruce Wayne.

"People will ask me, 'Your business is doing so well. Aren't you happy?' No. I'm in pain," he says. "But that's how you know you're growing."

MailChimp is a pretty interesting company in a seemingly boring business; read the whole thing for a Mister Rogers lede, a reassurance that the guy I’m interviewing “isn’t a real sadomasochist,” and quotes from the creator of the viral Nasty Woman t-shirt and a few other smart ladies (something I try to consistently do, even when I'm not writing about a woman-run company, given that much business reporting chronically under-quotes women experts). Appropriately, given MailChimp’s breakout pop-culture moment on Serial, I also discussed my story on last week’s Inc. Uncensored podcast (first segment).

This Is How We Disappear 

I also started this newsletter to point out just how often women’s professional accomplishments are ignored or actively erased: from history, as with the crucial contributions women made to the early days of computer programming, but also from the modern workplace, where we’re still ignored or talked over or expected to do invisible “office housekeeping” or “emotional labor.”

It's easy to think of those two types of erasure as separate phenomena, rather than a continuum: After all, whether it’s women spies of World War II or the astronaut-adjacent computers of Hidden Figures, much of our history is from a pre-Internet era. The Internet made it so much easier to keep track of all sorts of records, to publish all of our news online, and for anyone to find recent history with a simple Google search.

Right?

I'm going to show you how a woman is erased from her job. First, it begins with her existence. In January 2004 @aparisreview managing editor Brigid Hughes was named editor to succeed George Plimpton and the @nytimes profiled her. https://t.co/d2CbYTw2dM

— A. N. Devers (@andevers) December 7, 2017

I highly recommend Devers’ full Twitter thread, which she expanded into this Longreads piece, but the short version is: Brigid Hughes took over as the editor of the Paris Review in 2004. The New York Times wrote about it, in an article that is available online. Yet after Hughes was fired a year later, her name and tenure as Paris Review editor was systematically erased – by Paris Review board members, by the magazine’s website, by anonymous Wikipedia editors, and eventually by the New York Times itself, which forgot about Hughes’ existence and only corrected subsequent articles after Devers' thread went viral this month … years later.

The most infuriating thing about the Hughes story is that it isn’t an isolated incident. Forget the best-known cases of Rosalind Franklin or Hedy Lamarr; this week alone I came across two other accounts of women whose industry-leading contributions were systematically overlooked in recent decades. LennyLetter mentions Ginny Fiennes, a pioneer explorer to Antarctica:

In 1987, she became the first female recipient of the Polar Medal in recognition of her pioneering work in radio signaling. Yet Fiennes's New York Times obituary records her as the "muse of a British explorer" and includes almost as many details about her husband, the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, as it does about her own work.

Horrifying side-note: That obituary names Ginny’s husband in its first line but doesn’t actually mention her own first name until halfway through its fifth paragraph. In 2004. Yes, she was the one who actually died.

Or there’s architecture; as Fast Company this week pointed out, “Denise Scott Brown has not received a Pritzker Prize, but her husband, Robert Venturi, did, even though they worked side by side.” (And, in fact, the Pritzker Prize committee CITED DENISE BY NAME as “his talented partner” -- when giving her husband an award for their joint work.)

The Internet called my attention to these erasures, but it also didn't stop them from happening in the first place. Which brings us back to the modern problem of how much women's contributions remain overlooked in the current workplace. So will the histories of our era really be any different?

Lady Bits

-- "Feminism" is Merriam-Webster's word of the year. "Complicit" is Dictionary.com's. No relation, I'm sure.

-- So last week I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Non-spoilery reaction: I liked it more than I was expecting to, loved the visuals, badly wanted 45 minutes cut, have given up on the character choices, and really enjoyed how deliberately Rian Johnson (finally) showed women other than Leia and Rey actually present throughout the ranks of the rebellion/resistance/whatever the kids are calling “rebel scum” these days. Also I want Leia's cape.
 
Spoilery version: But, real talk, Leia was totally sleeping with Oscar Isaac's flirty, mutinous, hand-holding pilot, right? Last weekend, I went looking for thinkpieces about the movie and especially the Leia-Poe relationship and found... lots of interviews about how he sees her as a surrogate mom. Which, huh. Their relationship read as much more sexual than parental to me. True, this is the franchise that has a hilariously bad record of unintentionally (?) sexualizing young men's relationships with their mothers. But I kind of hope the Leia-Poe chemistry was deliberate; since she’s gotten (inexplicably) ditched by her husband and son and brother, Leia is way past due for some fun with the Internet's Boyfriend.
 
Finally, this prediction of the next Star Wars movie’s title is old now, but always makes me laugh:
 

--Programming note: Lady Business will be off next week for the holidays, returning Jan. 4. Happy New Year!
 
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