Lady Business: #MeToo’s jagged blast radius; Costs of running for office; Catholic school memories

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 ninth issue, published December 7, 2017.
 

Silence Breakers

Time has a(n awkwardly plural) Person of the Year, and I have feelings. Short version: endorse the pick, obviously; admire both the cover and the story; wish the latter had wrestled, a little bit more, with the lopsided nature of the fallout from all these sexual abuse allegations. I wrote about it all at Inc.:
 

There have been some big explosions as the result of these bombs, but there have been some duds, too. It's hard not to see that some silence breakers are getting faster consequences than others.

… It seems like the biggest, most public firings have befallen highly-visible media figures, the guys in front of the cameras. Which makes cynical sense: fundamentally, Charlie Rose and Kevin Spacey and Matt Lauer get paid for being popular. They're valuable to their employers only so long as the rest of us want to watch them on TV or Netflix or in theaters. They get paid for being likeable (even if "likeable" somehow means a man asking a CEO if being a mother disqualifies her for the job, and not a woman running for president).

It says something about the enormity of these men's monstrosities, as well as the enormity of their former power, that it took so much to take them down. It wasn't until stories about naked work meetings and secret rape buttons neared public awareness that their employers decided that these men's "likeability" was probably too damaged for them to be profitable any more.

However, can I say again how much I like Time’s cover? Especially the choice to show specific women, with specific stories, rather than figurative art or a hashtag illustration?

 
(My feelings may be overly influenced by some unappetizing office swag we got this week at Inc. HQ. Some company sent a collection of frosted sugar cookies decorated to represent the biggest headlines of 2017. The “#MeToo” cookie, which used the Weinstein Company logo in place of the “M,” was particularly unappealing. Happy holidays!)
 

Wage Gaps and Campaign Costs

How about a somewhat positive electoral politics story that doesn’t directly involve Moore, Conyers, Franken or (ugh) Blake Farenthold?

Last year, many people started asking if Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and then her loss would spur more women to run for office. Signs have long pointed to yes, as the The New York Times was the latest to report this week:
 

Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, the largest national organization devoted to electing female candidates, said that in the 10 months before the election in 2016, about 1,000 women contacted her organization about running for office or getting involved in other ways. Since the election, she said, the number has exploded to more than 22,000.
 

I also recommend this Vox piece from last month, which had some surprises -- researchers “found no difference in how the media covered male and female candidates” -- along with the predictable obstacles:
 

Fundraising can also be a challenge for women, in part because the biggest political donors tend to be male. In 2016, the top 10 male donors gave $155.4 million, more than the amount given by the top 100 female donors combined, according to OpenSecrets.org. When female candidates talk to male donors “they get grilled on their policy issues, and they walk out with maybe a $1,000, $1,500 check,” said Chamberlain. Meanwhile, “a man will go in, talk about the World Series,” and walk out with $2,700. “That’s something we really need to change,” she said.
 

Something I was recently reminded of by a friend who’s run for state office: it’s freaking expensive, in some ways that I, at least, didn’t immediately think of. First of all, in lost salary; depending on the level office you’re seeking, you may need to quit your job, or at least take a leave of absence, meaning you’re not making any money for the duration of the campaign. And then of course there are all the new expenses you’re taking on, whether you’re printing flyers at home and using your living room as your campaign headquarters, or going all-out with TV commercials and fundraisers and buses full of paid staffers. 

In 2016, the average winning candidate for the U.S. Senate spent more than $10.4 million on the campaign, according to OpenSecrets; House of Representatives winners spent more than $1.3 million. (And that’s of course not counting all the Citizens United-enabled dark money flowing into many of these races.)

YMMV, of course, depending on the type of office you’re running for—you shouldn’t need millions to win a school board seat. Still, it’s not just the obvious, soft barriers holding women back historically from running for office. They exist: the need to be smart and experienced and yet also likeable, plus the relative lack of female leadership advocating for and helping more women get into established government power structures.

But there’s also a pervasive, hard, economic reason why women, still making 80 percent of what men do and with only 32 percent of the average man’s wealth, don’t run for office: It’s a lot harder for us to afford to.
 

Lady Bits

--Also from the Vox piece above, there’s also of course this nonsense. (Never underestimate the power of those soft barriers!)
 

One of the strangest questions I’ve gotten on the campaign trail is this: ‘Are you running as a woman?’” Gretchen Whitmer, a Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, said at the EMILY’s List training. 
 

--This weekend I became the latest convert to Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s somewhat autobiographical movie about growing up middle-class while attending a wealthy, Catholic, all-girls school. (I can’t think why I related.) This America interview identifies some of the “kindness, weirdness, friendship and rebellion” that Gerwig portrays instead of the usual Catholic-school stereotypes; I also may have laughed out loud at the senior-year parking lot filled with expensive jeeps, the sloppy uniform fashion, and the outcome of the main character’s prom. 

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