Lady Business: Male allies, and speaking out vs. taking credit
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 fifty-seventh issue, published February 7, 2019.
He for She
Someone asked me recently how many men cover gender news. Which is a good, and revealing, question! On the one hand: I think it’s fair to say that (straight, cis) men can be at a disadvantage when reporting on gender, since many don’t have the same degree of lived experience of going through life/business as the "other," rather than the norm.
On the other hand: Some men do cover gender, at least occasionally, and maybe more should. Many men care about it -- thank you, male subscribers to Lady Business! -- and there’s an increasing business-world awareness that gender affects all of us. (Just ask Gillette! Or, more sincerely, ask Terry Crews, who’s been pretty tireless in talking about toxic masculinity and his assault without making #MeToo all about him.)
This newsletter is based upon the belief that gender (and race, and sexuality, and identity in general) is fundamentally a part of the business world. More diversity means better business performance, study after study has shown. And better performance is, obviously, relevant to everyone in business -- not just the ladies or the non-white folks or the non-straight folks who have fewer colleagues, mentors or bosses who look like them.
So it’s crucial for men to champion diversity and inclusion -- and to make these concerns just as relevant as any other business issue. And yet … there’s a necessary element of “knowing when to shut up,” to quote a male friend who’s involved in his company’s gender diversity efforts. Especially when it comes to attracting external attention, and taking credit:
It’s an unquestionably tricky balance: Let women do all of the talking, and gender becomes a “niche” issue, an echo chamber between the people who don’t have most of the power.
Let men do too much of the talking, though, and you get the status quo – men taking most of the speaking slots while telling women to “speak up” more, or appearing on well-meaning but hilarious all-male panels like the above, or providing 79 percent of the quotes in some business newspapers.
Or, you know, somehow taking the credit for helping to elect more women than ever to Congress. Even if they mostly ran in opposition to him.
Lady Bits
--Sadistic, womb, venomous, kissing … it's like Trump was playing State of the Union mad libs.
--My expectations for Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird were Newsroom-low, so I wound up pleasantly surprised. The play was beautifully staged, well-acted, and a fairly straightforward retelling of the novel’s plot, if one mostly stripped of Scout’s inner voice and character growth. (But it’s Sorkin -- of course he’s going to be more interested in the intellectual struggles of Jeff Daniels than in the moral development of a young girl.)
That said, I side-eye Sorkin’s self-satisfied interviews about how he gave the story’s African-American characters more of a voice. (Tom gets two main scenes and Calpurnia maybe three, during almost three hours of stage time.) And there’s something … performative, and cringe-worthy, about just how much Sorkin’s evil white characters use the N-word on stage. Yes, it’s historically accurate, and an easy way to demonstrate the characters’ racism. But for a white man in 2019, adapting a white woman’s book, heavy usage of that word feels gratuitous at best.
--As if I called down the wrath of the toilet gods last week, the women’s bathroom situation at that theater was even more ridiculous than usual. (Two! Stalls! For the whole mezzanine!)
--Happy birthday to my amazing mother, a musician and teacher and all-around fantastic person. Love you, Mom!
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