Lady Business: Juneteenth and other belated business decisions
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 104th issue, published June 21, 2020.
Delayed Reactions
Aunt Jemima is being retired. Confederate flags are finally banned from Nascar races. And many Americans, myself included, just celebrated Juneteenth with a last-minute corporate holiday.
All of these things, as events, are good! Even if the timing and the larger context leave something to be desired.
“You literally think to yourself, ‘Are we serious here? It’s 2020.’” That’s how Katie Rae, the CEO and managing partner of MIT-affiliated venture capital firm The Engine, put it as we recently were discussing ongoing racism and sexism in VC.
Of which there is still plenty, no matter how woke the syrup tech investors use on their pancakes. (Or, let’s be real, drizzle into their Soylent.) Black founders still get 1 percent of venture capital dollars, with Black women getting a fraction of that percentage point.
Not that business gets so much better out of the venture-backed startup world; there are only five Black men on the most recent list of Fortune 500 CEOs, and no Black women. In fact, there’s only ever been one Black woman to run a Fortune 500 company on a non-interim basis: Ursula Burns, who stepped down as Xerox CEO in 2016.
While important, these statistics are inadequate proxies for racial equality, as is corporate America’s awakening to Juneteenth. Getting more people of a particular demographic into the C-Suite won’t solve racism, just as the presence of several openly gay CEOs on the Fortune 500 list hasn’t protected all LGBTQ employees from job discrimination.
It would still be nice to see a little more effort made towards improving these proxy statistics, now that businesses and other large organizations have finally stopped defending racist marketing choices that they knew were racist for decades. (At least in grocery stores. Your move, Washington NFL team.)
But the longer it takes to make these obvious and long-overdue decisions, the more difficult it is to celebrate them when they’re so many decades, or centuries, late. Are we serious here? It’s 2020.
Lady Bits
--“What’s the cost of giving the citizens of Alabama insurance versus allowing us to die?” A brutal New Yorker read about how the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid is killing women -- through a cancer that should be almost entirely preventable.
--“The easiest way to kill someone? Be a cop.” I'm catching up on British thriller Line of Duty, which has possibly the most entertainingly bloodthirsty approach to its big-name TV stars since Game of Thrones -- and which, with its focus on police corruption, feels like the only cop show that's watchable right now.
-And I’ve been enjoying Naomi Novik's "dragons fighting Napoleon" Temeraire fantasy series, which peters out a little in its last books but remains plenty diverting for its worldbuilding. (The story starts off Eurocentric but eventually goes to China and imagines a parallel history of Africa, in which dragons help the Tswana oust European colonists and eventually destroy the slave trade.)
--Happy Father’s Day to all who celebrate, including my fantastic and endlessly supportive father.
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