Lady Business: Sticks and stones and Sam Zell versus Sam Bee

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 thirty-first issue, published June 7, 2018.
 

Words Will Never Hurt Me?

It has been a fun few weeks for Powerful People Saying Offensive Things! Roseanne Barr finally got fired for her latest, but by no means only, racist public outburst. Samantha Bee lost advertisers after using a particularly gendered insult for Ivanka Trump. Bill Clinton, trying to sell books, is trying to have his #MeToo cake and eat it too--flailing about his culpability in the scandal that made Monica Lewinsky, not Clinton himself, the one whose future and reputation were defined by the power imbalance in their relationship.

Those offenses have gotten the big headlines. But even more insidiously, the Business Bros are getting in on all this unfettered and ill-considered free speech.

First there was Akbar Al Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways, saying that a woman couldn’t hold his job: “Of course it has to be led by a man, because it is a very challenging position,” Al Baker told a trade group that he now oversees.

Al Baker runs a company that earned $541 million in profit last year, and employs more than 43,000 people. About 44 percent of those people are women – meaning that 19,000 Qatar employees just heard their boss dismiss them and their futures at his company.

Even worse, the other 24,000 Qatar Airways employees also heard those comments. The male executives, senior managers and many other men responsible for promoting and retaining thousands of women heard their CEO calling their female colleagues second-class employees with limited professional capabilities, who probably shouldn’t be promoted into “challenging” jobs.

(Al Baker has since apologized, claiming a joke and “some lightheartedness at press conferences.” Funny!)

Or there’s good old Sam Zell, marrying offensive profanity with offensive management strategy. When asked about workplace diversity this week, he pulled the old “I don’t see gender/color! I just hire the best person for the job!” card. Then he used Donald Trump’s now-signature profanity:
 

“I never promoted a woman because she is a woman. I never demoted a woman because she is a woman. My issue is what you do, what do you produce and how do you interrelate to the rest of the business,” Mr. Zell said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a, ‘We gotta get more pussy on the block.’ ”

Zell, 76, has made (and lost) billions of dollars buying and selling real estate and newspapers. Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2008--less than a year after Zell bought it. But not before Zell's apparent attitude towards women pervaded the company, David Carr reported for The New York Times in 2010:
 

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, [Zell-appointed CEO Randy] Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

Some of that talk came courtesy of Sam Zell – to Ann Marie Lipinski, the then-editor of the Chicago Tribune:
 

In Chicago, Ms. Lipinski said, it became clear that Mr. Zell was not above using the newspaper as a tool for his other business interests. In June 2008, Mr. Zell approached her at a meeting, saying that The Chicago Tribune should be harder on Gov. Rod Blagojevich. She reminded him that the newspaper had aggressively investigated the governor and that its editorial page had already called for his resignation.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he told her. “You can always be harder on him.”

Lipinski – a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who ran the Tribune for eight years – soon resigned. She cited far bigger problems than language, like the fact that Zell was apparently trying to use the paper to help him negotiate real-estate deals. But the language, and the underlying attitude it betrays, sure sounds like a fun bonus!

Which brings us back to Samantha Bee. I don’t use the word she used to describe Ivanka Trump, and I dislike her decision to use it -- not least because it obscured an otherwise good argument about Trump’s hypocrisy as an advocate for the people that she's claiming to represent. Bee acknowledged that point last night in a smart, narrow apology that managed to be sincere and defiant by turns.

But it’s kind of weird and distressing that Bee, a comedian with a large public stage but a small workplace footprint, has been the recipient of so much frothing at the mouth and calls for resignation. It’s a lot more public outrage than I’ve seen directed at Zell or Al Baker--men who hold immediate power over many more people, and whose apparent baked-in misogyny can’t help but affect how they lead their employees. As Bee put it last night:
 

“I'm really sorry that I said that word, but you know what? Civility is just nice words. Maybe we should all worry a little bit more about the niceness of our actions.”

Lady Bits:

 
--Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was an excellent highbrow beach read this week; I loved her smart use of structure and her ability to write main characters who are both unlikeable and lovable. So a belated shout-out for Groff’s widely-circulated “By the Book” column in The New York Times, with its nice, steady drumbeat of recommending women writers:
 

“When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by — as in this very column, week after week — why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives? … Something invisible and pernicious seems to be preventing even good literary men from either reaching for books with women’s names on the spines, or from summoning women’s books to mind when asked to list their influences. I wonder what such a thing could possibly be.”

--I finally watched the Killing Eve finale, and I don’t think the show actually makes much sense if you think about it too much; too many character decisions seemed flat-out dumb coming from women who are supposed to be clever. But the show overall is still extremely entertaining, thanks to the acting and the sly sense of humor as the body count racks up.
 
--In the wake of Miss America rebranding from a “pageant” to a “scholarship competition,” shoutout to Miss Congeniality, still one of the most fun and surprisingly progressive rom-coms ever. (Well, aside from Benjamin Bratt’s pallid man-child of a love interest. “It’s not a date. But if we happen to have sex afterwards, so be it…”)
 

 
--Programming note: Lady Business will be off in Europe next week. See you in two weeks!

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