Lady Business: Stitch Fix, emojis, and world disasters; Aung San Suu Pence

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 fourth issue, published October 26, 2017.

What Does a CEO Look Like?

Clothing-on-demand company Stitch Fix, as predicted, is going public. The company looks impressive, both business-wise and lady-business-wise: It’s making almost $1 billion per year, it’s not losing much money (rare for a startup!), and it’s run largely by and for women.

Founder and CEO Katrina Lake is one of the few women, and one of two women of color, to take her startup public in recent years. Perhaps more impressive, she’s not a lone wolf (or queen bee or whatever dangerous animals ambitious women are supposed to be). Women make up 86 percent of her employees, and 55 percent of her management team, Stitch Fix said in its IPO paperwork. The latter number is especially impressive when you look at the averages: women make up only 26.5 percent of senior management teams at S&P 500 companies, according to Catalyst.
 
Of course, when you’re a lady CEO--and especially when you’re a lady CEO of color--there are all sorts of small indignities. Call them emoji-aggressions:

Apple has since apparently quietly fixed the issue. When I first saw Lake’s Tweet, I tested it and had the same results. Now I get this, which is...progress? (Are bright yellow emojis with Caucasian-looking hair really a more inclusive default setting?)

Reading the replies to Lake’s Tweet provides an amusing exercise in being female online. My favorite is this mansplain-y variation on Godwin’s law (which holds that all Internet debates eventually invoke Hitler or the Nazis):

 
“If only there was [sic] more pressing matters in the world to focus our efforts and attention on than emojis?”
 
Yes! Thank you so much for pointing that out! Just this week: China’s leader grabbed more power; 600,000 Rohingya are being killed, raped and displaced in Myanmar; North Korea really, really, really wants to set off a nuclear bomb; almost 900 Americans have died by gun violence since the Las Vegas shootings, while 91 Americans are dying every day from opioid overdoses; most of Puerto Rico still doesn’t have power; “populist” Mike Pence just screwed over you and me and anyone who might want to sue Wells Fargo or Equifax, to give more power back to Wall Street; health insurance is being sabotaged by the same administration that wants to increase the healthcare costs of any woman in this country; American Airlines is apparently trying to resurrect Jim Crow; a U.S. congresswoman is getting lynching threats after the White House lied about her record; Harvey Weinstein has spent decades trying to set a world record for serial sexual assault; and Trump is still president.
 
So yeah, there are always more pressing matters going on in the world. (I invite that gentleman to go address some of them, instead of spending his time critiquing others' Tweets.) And at least until one of those things sparks the apocalypse, people still gotta emoji, you know?

But let’s go back to some of those world events.

Power Players

Time for a comparison I’m sure both involved parties would haaaate:
 

 
 
I recently read two massive New Yorker profiles: one of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel-peace-prize-winning Myanmar leader who’s ignoring (and at least passively endorsing) her country’s aforementioned ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority; and one of Mike Pence, the aforementioned faux-populist U.S. vice president.

There were some echoes! For example, both Suu Kyi and Pence have turned their backs on the suffering of their constituents:
 

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has called the security crackdown "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing," and several of Suu Kyi’s fellow Peace Prize laureates, including Desmond Tutu and Malala Yousafzai, have urged her to condemn the violence. Instead, she has described the Rohingya insurgents as "terrorists." Her office has accused the Rohingya of setting fire to their own homes in order to provoke an outcry. In a speech last week, Suu Kyi refused to criticize the Army and offered a sustained exercise in moral equivalence. "There have been allegations and counter-allegations," she said. "We have to listen to all of them."

and
 

In an effort to quell criticism, Pence consented, against the advice of his staff, to be interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on his Sunday-morning show on ABC. Stephanopoulos asked him five times if it was now legal in Indiana for businesses to discriminate against homosexuals, and each time Pence was evasive. Pence also sidestepped when Stephanopoulos asked him if he personally supported discrimination against gays. "What killed him was his unwillingness to take a clear position," Oesterle said. "You saw the conflict between his ideology and his ambition. If he’d just said, 'Look, I think people should have the right to fire gay people,' he would have been labelled a rigid ideologue, but he wouldn’t have been mocked."

 
On separate sides of the world, both individuals come off as nakedly ambitious, to the exclusion of all else. Pence, in Jane Mayer’s reporting, is a zealot--but one who has subdued some of his (very scary!) opinions and religious beliefs in order to be Trump’s vice president. Suu Kyi, in Hannah Beech’s nuanced account, prizes personal loyalty over all else, and has spent her entire life seeking personal power rather than championing any particular democratic or human rights reforms.
 

"Once she decided to be in the student movement, and then they won the election and it was taken from her, her mind went like a laser beam to getting into power," Williams said. "That’s been her single ambition, other issues be damned."

 
Meanwhile:
 

"He was as far right as you could go without falling off the earth," Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staff member, who has become a Trump critic, told me. "But he never really put a foot wrong politically. Beneath the Bible-thumping earnestness was a calculating and ambitious pol."

I highly recommend both articles, especially if you want to depress yourself by learning even more about how dark the world currently is. 

Lady Bits:

--In other world leadership news, yay, Norway and sigh, Japan.

--I’m all for male allies and am on record with my belief that little changes for women until men exert their power to help us out. Still, maybe avoid this?

 
--And in other photos of White Bros Doing Questionable Things, this might be my favorite image of the week.
 

--Finally, props again to My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which last week got away with some of the dirtiest lines I’ve ever heard on network television as well as a detailed explanation of the clitoris. That’s not to mention a giggle-inducing parody of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” (the winning song in the three-hour emo Olympics that is Les Miserables) and a Sound of Music/Maria/Catholic joke that I’m taking as a personal shout-out. If you're thinking that that sounds like a lot of musical theater references, you're not wrong, but I maintain that the show's brilliance transcends any potential negative feelings about musicals.

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