Lady Business: ‘Innovative’ lists and sausage-making; Polling 600 female founders

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 80th issue, published September 12, 2019. 
 

(Everywoman -- and Only Woman)

Self-Imposed Constraints

So last week, Forbes -- to use a technical term -- completely stepped in it. The publication unveiled a list of 100 of “America’s Most Innovative Leaders,” which (stop me if you know where this is going) included 99 men, and one single woman: Ross Stores CEO Barbara Rentler, aka “Not pictured.”
 
Side note, but: Female public-company CEOs are thin on the ground, as everyone knows, but Ross Stores? Really? That’s the only one you’re going to include on your 100-person-strong list? Forbes’ bare-bones entry for Rentler doesn’t even explain what she’s done that’s so innovative! That’s not a criticism of her; but it is a question about how the list-makers decided that she was the only token who got to join their boys’ club.
 
I mean, if you’re sticking to public companies, as Forbes apparently was: In retail alone, there are several interesting and innovative-seeming women running public companies, like Kohl’s Michelle Gass and Stitch Fix’s Katrina Lake and The RealReal’s Julie Wainwright … and that’s not to mention non-retail, equally-innovative public-company CEOs like BlackLine’s Therese Tucker or Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz or Sunrun’s Lynn Jurich or or or or…. Yes, women leading public companies are a minority, but they do in fact exist. And those are just the names I could rattle off the top of my head, given Forbes’ “but the methodology!” defense of its self-imposed list constraints.
 
About those constraints: Look, I’ve spent my career working at business publications, and I’ve overseen my fair share of lists. Like constructing laws or sausages, it’s not a pretty or particularly fun process. And it can be really frustrating if your publication’s mandate, or your advertiser sponsor’s requirement, or your associated upcoming event’s purpose, is to cover big, public companies.
 
If you decide your list will only consider those companies, you limit yourself to a pool that is 95% male and overwhelmingly white. If you decide your list will only reflect companies with great recent stock-market performance, you limit yourself to mostly older or more established (and often less innovative!) companies, because most post-IPO companies underperform the market during their first few years being public. If you decide that “media reputation for innovation” is one of the softer criteria you’re going to use to refine your list -- well, it’s not like there’s any well-covered institutional problem with sexist media coverage of women leaders, or with investors assuming that women will face more negative situations than men.
 
The point is: All lists are subjective, no matter how “rigorous” or “data-driven” you claim yours is. You chose the criteria. You chose what rules to set. You defined “innovation.” And since that’s a pretty amorphous and frequently-used word in business journalism, you also decided that the world was crying out for this particular definition of “innovation.” You thought that this list, your list, needs to exist, to set a new, higher bar for what it means to be an innovative business leader.
 
Or you could just publish a list that reiterates what we already know about the barriers to being a woman in business, and the fact that even the most successful will continue struggling to get recognition and equal representation -- or even just a decent photo on their profile page.
 

Female Founders 100

Disclosure on the above: I’ve spent most of the summer overseeing my own list of “most innovative leaders” in America, one that’s being published next week -- and one that’s entirely female.
 
I’ll have a lot more to say about Inc.’s 2019 Female Founders 100, and the flipside challenges of putting together a list that considers a much wider pool of potential candidates, in next week’s issue. But let’s just say that, whatever sausage-making is inevitably involved in compiling any list of 100 people, I now have many reasons to know that women are extremely, impressively -- and equally -- innovative.
 
The first part of the Female Founders 100 package is out today: the second annual Survey of Women and Entrepreneurship, in concert with Inc.’s sister publication Fast Company, polled more than 600 female founders around the world. The findings are interesting, and predictably a bit depressing: 62% of American women who have founded companies say they have experienced discrimination, harassment, or both; 37% say they are bracing for the economy to get worse in the next 12 months.
 
And, shockingly, there remains a big divide between the political priorities of male and female founders. 70% of the women we polled said “treatment of women” would be an important issue in determining their 2020 vote; only 35% of a group of largely-male CEOs, in an earlier Inc. poll, said the treatment of women would affect their 2020 vote. My Inc. colleagues Kimberly Weisul and Nick Devlin have the full story.
 

Lady Bits

--A reminder that, even after some progress and dedicated efforts by many people, not even 1 out of every 5 Wikipedia biographies is devoted to a woman.
 
--Corporate pink-washing alert, Monopoly edition: “If Hasbro is serious about women’s empowerment, perhaps the company could start by admitting that a woman invented Monopoly in the first place.”
 
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