Lady Business: Good news, bad news and harassment fatigue; Losing Yellen

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 seventh issue, published November 16, 2017.
 

Rose-Colored Blinders

I had an unusual conversation this week, with a successful businesswoman who's achieved power and prominence in a very male-dominated industry. We spoke, inevitably, of the current avalanche of sexual-harassment allegations. But then she surprised me, by saying she was a little tired of all those stories.

All of the horrible things going on in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, New York media, Wall Street, etc. had never happened to her, this woman said. She had overcome the percentages and the misogyny of her industry, as have (a few) other women. So why not tell those sorts of stories? Why can't we focus on the good stuff?

My knee-jerk reaction was a little incredulous. "Good stuff?" I thought. "There's a raw and furious and unprecedented outpouring of decades of suppressed trauma from women who quit jobs or were forced out or discouraged from promising careers or depressed by the daily cuts and less frequent slashes against their personhood, and their right to do the work they were hired and paid to do. And you want to ignore that in favor of some ‘good stuff’?”

If you are a woman who’s never been harassed or belittled or assaulted or dismissed because of your gender, congratulations, and also, really? I mean, not to go all alarmist humorless feminist on you, but sometimes experiencing any of the bad stuff of being publicly female is exactly as easy as walking down the street:

(I did have to admire the efficiency of combining a neg on my hair with a physical assault. He probably won that round of creepy-dude Bingo!)

So this week I’m not the most receptive audience for a plea to focus on positive, sunny stories. Yet if such a plea sounded privileged to me, it also sounded fatigued—which is a reaction I recognize from recent days, trying to keep up with the latest gross stories. Where oh where to focus: Louis CK? Brett Ratner? The dude from One Tree Hill? The vampire squid guy? Dustin Hoffman? George Takei (oh, George)? Roy “banned from Claire’s” Moore?

Or there’s Sheelah Kolhatkar’s article this week on the sexist, racist rot at the core of the tech industry:
 

There have, of course, been other male-dominated fields notorious for similar behavior, including Wall Street and Madison Avenue. But part of what differentiates tech is the industry’s self-regard, as a realm of visionary futurists and tireless innovators who are making the world better. Without irony, they tell themselves, “Don’t be evil,” parroting Google’s code of corporate conduct. In many ways, the tech world does represent the future: it has attracted a generation of the most promising engineers, scientists, and coders and paid them handsomely, all but assuring that they will have influence over the nation’s ideas and values for years to come. It’s deeply troubling, then, that many of these companies and their C.E.O.s have created an internal culture that, at least when it comes to sexual harassment and gender inequality, resembles the Mad Men era, without the skinny ties and Martini lunches.

Tesla and Google come off looking particularly bad in the New Yorker’s account, but they’re lead examples rather than outliers. Kolhatkar also quotes women saying that the allegations we’ve heard are only “the tip of the iceberg."

So yes, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the bad stuff.  It’s one of many reactions the always-excellent Rebecca Traister considers in this fantastic analysis of what the post-Weinstein era has wrought. So much of her essay has stuck with me, including her acknowledgment that we’re in a weird new celebrity zone of sexual predators. If you were harassed or assaulted by a man who doesn’t “meet a certain bar of notoriety, or power, or villainy,” she writes, right now your story just isn’t newsworthy enough.

And then there was this sober warning of the backlash that’s surely to come:

Letting all this out is undeniably exciting. Its power, to some extent, comes from the fact that it is almost terrifyingly out of control. Anything is possible, good or bad. And yes, there is satisfaction that for a month or so, it’s like we’ve been living in the last ten minutes of an M. Night Shyamalan movie where the big twist is that women have been telling the truth all along.
 
Yet you can feel the backlash brewing. All it will take is one particularly lame allegation — and given the increasing depravity of the charges, the milder stuff looks lamer and lamer, no matter how awful the experience — to turn the tide from deep umbrage on behalf of women to pity for the poor, bullied men. Or one false accusation could do it. One man unfairly fired over a misinterpreted bump in the elevator could transform all of us women into the marauding aggressors, the men our hapless victims.
 
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, himself once having been returned to power after a plagiarism scandal, has mourned publicly for the injury done to his friend and former colleague Mark Halperin, who got canned after being accused of pushing his penis against younger female subordinates: “He deserves to have what he did deplored,” Barnicle declared. “But does he deserve to die? How many times can you kill a guy?”
 
A powerful white man losing a job is a death, and don’t be surprised if women wind up punished for the spate of killings.

In a news atmosphere where there’s not enough oxygen for all the bad stuff that’s come to light, and all the bad stuff yet to come to light, good stuff seems like so much superfluous carbon dioxide: secondary at best, toxic at worst.

Another One Bites the Dust

Hey, remember that one Lady Business about women in economics, and how they get systematically forced out of positions they’re (over-)qualified for? We have a new data point!
 

“Janet Yellen was known to be the hardest-working person around: She set the bar so high, and as a result of her hard work she was ahead of the curve on so many things,” said Julia Coronado, president of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Fed staff member. “Despite that, she’s not getting the job back. What is a young woman economist supposed to make of that? That I can work harder than anybody else and be smarter than people around me and get fired? That’s a tough message.”
 
The decision — if confirmed, Powell will become chair in February; Yellen has the option to stay on as a governor — comes amid growing concern about the low numbers of women in economics and the challenges they face in moving ahead in the field.  Only 13 percent of full professors in PhD-granting economics departments are women. Male economics majors outnumber their female peers by nearly 3 to 1. 

Lady Bits:

--Theater rec: The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, now at Lincoln Center, is a sharply-written and well-staged (and short!) play about teenage soccer players. It's worth seeing for the opening scene alone, and its funny, furiously overlapping dialogue about genocide, Harry Potter and periods. (Also, while it's focused on ultra-competitive high school soccer players rather than ultra-competitive high school ballerinas, the play strongly reminded me of the short-lived Bunheads, aka the spikier, sadder Gilmore Girls.)

--Wonder Woman’s new armor seems to be missing...something.

 
--Programming note: Lady Business will be off next week. Happy Thanksgiving, and see you in two weeks!
 
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