Lady Business: Surf breaks, garden leave, and most powerful women

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 83rd issue, published October 25, 2019. 

Breaking the Waves

Hello from a bit of a hiatus, for Lady Business and for me, work-wise. It’s been a terrific and much-needed rest, even if I know I’ve missed out on some prime LB fodder. Blame it on my lady-brain, which is apparently a type of … breakfast … food? And the wrong type of breakfast food, according to a report on corporate training last year at Ernst & Young:
 

Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup, so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.

 
I just … what? I mean, there’s run-of-the-mill predictable sexism (of which the EY training had plenty, according to this HuffPost report), and then there’s really going above and beyond to find the Neurological IHOP of misogynist metaphors. (At least they didn’t get into breakfast sausages….?)
 
Anyway, I took my syrup-soaked pancake brain to Costa Rica this month, and spent the better part of a week learning the basics of how to surf. Which, it turns out, I kind of love: the ocean; the wide beaches; the complete physical and mental focus on something external, and natural, and moody, and overwhelming. I left my phone in my hotel room, turned off, for hours every day. It felt amazing.
 
But, being me, I couldn’t help but notice that all of the local surf instructors were male; most of the surfers hanging out every sunset in Santa Teresa’s waves were male; and almost all of the beginner students I was with were female. Which sent me hunting for some reading on the gender and racial dynamics of surfing, which both are and aren’t as bad as you might think:
 
--“The first commercially made surfboards sold in California, in the 1930s, had swastikas burned into their tails and were marketed as the Swastika model by Pacific System Homes of Los Angeles.” This recent New York Times piece on California’s “surf nazis” has plenty of other fun white-supremacist surfer stories.
 
--The same writer, Daniel Duane, profiled four female surfers who helped drag the World Surf League into some begrudging-sounding but still remarkable pay equity, becoming “the first global United States-based sports league ever to offer equal prize money for men and women across all events in all disciplines worldwide.”
 
--The pay-equity victory is imperfect, of course, The Atlantic points out. And professional surfing, which will make its Olympic debut in Tokyo next year, continues to have plenty of problems for women and especially women of color. This profile of a young Senegalese woman trying to make the Olympics runs through the obvious discrimination, micro-aggressions and occasional outright assault that she and other black female surfers often face -- not to mention the economic barriers:
 

According to [coach Rhonda] Harper, the biggest hurdle for talented surfers like [Khadjou] Sambe who want to surf professionally is having enough money to go to qualifying events around the world. An average surfer spends anywhere between $50,000 to $60,000 a year in travel, fees and equipment, Harper estimates.

 
Which is echoed in Duane’s NYTMag piece above about the pro women who can only dream about pulling in what their male peers do:
 

Much of their talk was about male pros who make enough to buy last-minute intercontinental plane tickets many times a year to big-wave breaks, then charter boats with catered lunches and pay still other men with Jet Skis to pull them out of danger after wipeouts. [Bianca] Valenti heard a South African pro mention that a spreadsheet helps him keep track of all the surfboards and safety vests he has stashed in storage lockers around the world. “That’s how I’ll know when I’ve succeeded,” Valenti said, “when I’ve got my own spreadsheet!”

Power Players

I took a break from my work break this week to attend some of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Washington, D.C. My future colleagues at Fortune have extensively covered the event, but I was particularly impressed by:
 
--Ariel Investments co-CEO Mellody Hobson, who’s on the board of directors of JPMorgan Chase and Starbucks, detailing the “excruciating” couple of weeks she spent as Dreamworks Animation chair, hammering out the deal to sell the company to Comcast. (Her entire panel, which included four seasoned board directors who didn’t necessarily agree on everything, was excellent.)
 
--Anita Hill pointing out that, a year post-Kavanaugh, the topic of “gender violence” somehow hasn’t made it into any questions for the Democratic presidential debates.
 
--Eva Longoria, whose remarks were generally fire-emoji, describing her futile efforts to pitch television executives on a series about the hundreds of women who dressed as men to fight in the Civil War. “No one wants to see women soldiers,” she was told, to her incredulity: “It’s history!” (Let’s hope that the intriguing new Watchmen, grounded in history a lot of white people didn’t know, makes TV executives even more receptive to these sorts of stories.)
 

Lady Bits

--I’ve been jokingly referring to these few weeks of vacation before starting at Fortune as my “garden leave,” that amazing-sounding investment-banker benefit of getting several months of forced, paid vacation between jobs. It’s essentially a noncompete clause, but a delightfully civilized and financially rewarding one, and Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has written some very funny reflections on his own experiences with it: “Eventually I got a new job and quit, and the bank chose to enforce the noncompete, and so I had to sit around for a couple of months collecting an investment-banking salary for doing nothing, and let me tell you, when I think back over the relatively short list of mild hardships I have suffered in my life, that ain’t one of them.”
 
--Lady Business will be ending its garden leave in Vienna and Budapest next week, back for real in November!
 
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