Lady Business: She Said, #MeToo, and other anniversaries; Dr. Oz’s favorite snacks
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 143rd issue, published November 20, 2022.
Five Years Later
I’ve spent a lot of my fall thinking about #MeToo, the movement that went viral five years ago, when the New York Times published its Harvey Weinstein story. (Which also happened to be the same day that I sent the first Lady Business!) And last weekend, I saw the movie that adapted the story behind that story: She Said, based on the book by Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.
It’s a very well-acted, thoughtful, and deliberately quiet movie. I did want it to be slightly more of a story–to narrow down its focus to a couple of characters, rather than the collection of anecdotes it became on-screen. (Even though the fictional versions of Kantor and Twohey get set up as protagonists, with home lives and personal struggles, they eventually recede behind the stories of the women they’re interviewing. Rightfully so, journalistically–but a somewhat muted payoff, dramatically.)
On the other hand, there’s power in the collection of anecdotes–and in showing the ranges of how different people experience the same awful things. These nuances have often been missing from discussions of “the #MeToo movement” or “the backlash to the #MeToo movement.” So this fall, when my Fortune colleagues and I set out to assess the movement’s legacy, we also chose to do so through a collection of individual reflections by several of the women involved.
“It’s not so much about what has been done, but more so what #MeToo made possible,” activist Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase “me too” in 2006, told us for this October feature in Fortune. “I’ve had a lot of disappointment over the last five years,” she added. But “we actually live in a different world.”
Everyone I spoke with for this reporting–including Ellen Pao, dream hampton, and two of the women currently suing Wall Street banks, over allegations of sexism and harassment–expressed similar ambivalence about what’s meaningfully changed for women. “We are certainly in the backlash phase,” dream hampton, the documentary filmmaker behind Surviving R. Kelly, told me. “I just didn’t think I would live in a world where Roe would be overturned.”
Ellen Pao, whose 2012 lawsuit against her VC employer started Silicon Valley’s reckoning, was particularly pointed about how little has changed in the world of venture capital. Investors keep on backing disgraced men, she noted: “The accountability is still missing.”
(Speaking of: Who wants to bet on the first investor to fund Sam Bankman-Fried’s comeback?)
The other article that came out of this reporting was my feature on Wall Street’s long-delayed #MeToo reckoning, and some of the reasons the reasons behind it. (Mandatory arbitration clauses and nondisclosure agreements!) I interviewed Cristina Chen-Oster, the lead plaintiff in a gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit against Goldman Sachs; and Sara Tirschwell, a former TCW employee suing the company alleging sexual harassment and retaliatory firing. (Both Goldman and TCW deny the allegations in the respective lawsuits.)
What happens to women on Wall Street is a quieter story, perhaps, than Harvey Weinstein’s monstrosities, or many of the other big-name revelations that came out in the last five years. But it’s worth pointing out that it also predates everything that we now think of as #MeToo; women have been suing Wall Street over sexism and misconduct for decades, and Chen-Oster brought her first claim against Goldman in 2005, even before Burke coined the phrase “me too.”
Seventeen years later, Chen-Oster and 1,400 other current and former Goldman employees finally have a trial date, for June 2023. And Chen-Oster is just hoping that she can stop fighting before her 17-year-old case enters its third decade: “We knew at the beginning it would be a long haul,” she told me. “But I’m not sure I expected it to take this long.”
Lady Bits
–On a totally different note: For Fortune’s new issue, I wrote about the midterms results, the diminishing returns of corporate political donations–and the unlikely, failed alliance between noted “crudité” enthusiast Dr. Oz and the makers of the Bloomin’ Onion.
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