Lady Business: Pink-washing celebrations, Twitter’s #WhereAreWe, and Milk Bar success recipes

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 twentieth issue, published March 8, 2018. 

International Pink-Washing Day

Happy International Women's Day! According to my inbox, today is the perfect day to celebrate everything and anything that could be tangentially related to half of the world’s population, including but not limited to: organic skincare, smart water bottles, legal cannabis businesses, global search engines, remote jobs, "indulging in chocolate,” fintech, Toronto, and Airbnb.

That’s just a selection of the pitches I’ve received in the past week or so, most with a dubious subject line shouting about "International Women's Day" or a "Female Founder." This is obviously a newsletter with an interest in those words ... but if someone’s gender is the most interesting thing about her, she’s doing something wrong. Or you’re massively underselling her.

Some of these celebrations ring a little empty—like, say, producing an awards ceremony that pays lip service to #MeToo and #TimesUp while also giving out trophies to accused rapist Kobe Bryant and accused domestic abuser Gary Oldman. Or like paying for a slick "Feminism Yay!" commercial during said awards ceremony, without actually doing anything to address the verbal abuse and threats slung at women, especially women of color, all day every day on your platform.

(During the Oscars party I attended, when the Twitter commercial started, we all started betting on which #brand was trying to perform feminism for money. My guess was Dove, originator of some remarkably negging feminist-frenemy commercials: "You know, everyone says that haircut makes you look fat. But don't pay attention to them! I think it's great.")

Pink-washing is a time-honored corporate trend, one getting more and more popular in these #MeToo times. Some Jane Walker scotch to go along with your KFC and Lady Doritos, all of which you can consume in front of the Fearless Girl statue while wearing your Thinx?

But it seems especially brazen these days, when sexism and its effects are so widely discussed, to attempt to profit off of feminism without actually, yaknow, being feminist. Like publicly telling women, “#HereWeAre,” when barely more than a third of your employees are women and only 17 percent of your technical workforce is female. Hi, Twitter! #WhereAreWe?

The Business of Food

I was describing my job to someone yesterday, and found myself talking all about food business stories: besides this recent Inc. feature I edited on Sweetgreen’s supply chain, and two food-related features I’m currently working on, for Inc.’s new issue I interviewed pastry chef Christina Tosi. She’s the founder and CEO of Milk Bar, and a very thoughtful, fun conversation:

I'm really, really, really happy with the decision that I made. One, to raise the money; two, to wait nine years to raise the money. I think that's an anomaly in this day and age. You typically raise money and then you go, and then you raise more money and then you go.

I wanted to make sure I had a real business on my hands--not just a brand that people lusted after, with the dirty little secret that we didn't make money.

It was one of those interviews that was painful to edit down; Tosi was willing to talk through everything from fundraising to her emergency butter recipe to her complicated reaction to #MeToo:
 

It's 100 percent real. I've dealt with it. I've dealt with it since before I even moved to New York and I was working in restaurants in Virginia. … But I think it's happening so quickly, or vocalizing it is happening so quickly, that what it is and what it isn't--we're still struggling with that. … Lord knows Milk Bar is very largely female, but we have a lot of incredible men that work for us as well. And they're the kind of men that I want to make sure aren't alienated by the conversation. They're the ones that we need behind us! 

Lady Bits

"If you still think there is a case for being on a male-only panel (if you were for instance asked to moderate a panel of Catholic cardinals or members of the Chinese Politburo), please explain it to … me. But I think this is a standard that we should be able to uphold on the vast majority of occasions."

--Bloomberg’s new policy for its journalists is a nice thought but an incomplete one, since the moderator!diversity exception still applies: “At the risk of stating the obvious, the woman could be you.”

--The first recorded use of “mansplaining” involved, of course, Livejournal and was committed, of course, by someone self-named after a Russian man.
 
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