Lady Business: The limits of #MeToo; Early Hollywood heroines; Nuclear-war comedy

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 third issue, published October 19, 2017.
 

Talking to Ourselves

I’ve had some mixed emotions this week about #MeToo, and the related stories of sexual harassment and assault sweeping social media. That’s not a criticism of anyone participating: #MeToo, of course. But what next?

Aside from the relief of saying that, or the comfort of knowing we're not alone, saying it doesn’t fix anything. A hashtag doesn’t stop a predator in his tracks. And once again, our choices don't really matter here. The burden is either on him to change his behavior (ha) or, more realistically, on his employer to put firm HR policies and punishments in place; on his male bosses and employees and colleagues and friends to stop shrugging off what they hear and see of his creepiness; oh, and maybe on police departments and prosecutors to actually use the evidence they have of his criminal behavior.
 
But let’s put aside Harvey Weinstein and his parade of lesser-known mini-mes. #MeToo is also an extreme example of an ongoing existential question for women in any business setting. We’re half of the population, but only a sliver of the existing power structure. Can we survive, and excel, talking only to ourselves?
 

As recently as 2016, a study published in the Academy of Management Journal found that senior-level women who try to help other women at work are likely to face more negative performance reviews than those who don't (the same outcome resulted among nonwhite executives and employees, too). According to research by the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, men are 46 percent more likely to have professional sponsors--people who champion them at work. This is suggested, in part, because men, who still have the majority of senior roles, are often hesitant to network with women, worried that mentorship will be mistaken for a come-on. When women do have the chance to network, they are sometimes reluctant to do it, even with other women, viewing the process as inauthentic and transactional, as research from the Harvard Business Review has found.

Jessica Bennett, the author of Feminist Fight Club and the new gender editor for The New York Times, thoughtfully examines this question in Inc.’s October issue, with an essay on the rise of women-only spaces for entrepreneurs. It’s a sort of spiritual sequel to this earlier piece by my colleague Kimberly Weisul, about women who are trying to make up the venture-capital funding gap by investing only in other women.

This women-supporting-women movement has generated lots of goodwill, some tangible results, and a plethora of definite nouns: There’s The Wing! The Riveter! TheLi.st! The Helm! The View! (...wait.)

Obviously, as the author of this lady-specific newsletter and a member of several lady-focused groups, I absolutely see benefits from the friendship and professional support of other women. But I also see the risk, sometimes, of such groups becoming the work equivalent of FarmersOnly, or Sea Captain Date, or fill-in-your-favorite-hyper-targeted-mating-app.

Because in many cases, as effective as they can be, they only go so far. Or as Kimberly wrote last year, about the funding gap facing women entrepreneurs:

How much money will it take, really, to level the playing field for female entrepreneurs? With current rates of funding, to reach parity across just the angel and early-stage VC markets would require about $7.7 billion. … By Inc.'s count, there are currently about two dozen early-stage female-focused financing efforts, representing about $100 million in funding annually.

In other words: We're not even close.

Hollywood Heroines

The Weinstein fallout continues to be exhaustingly depressing, however necessary and cathartic. So here are two somewhat cheerier stories about the power held by women in Hollywood over the past century:

 

In 1916, the highest-paid director in Hollywood was a woman: The passionately political Lois Weber shot 18 films that year, including the pro-birth-control tearjerker "Where Are My Children?" During the early silent era, they wrote the majority of films. (Two-time Oscar winner Frances Marion penned a staggering 325.) Editing department jobs were "held almost entirely by women," according to a 1926 article in the Los Angeles Times. ...As the agent and screenwriter Beatrice deMille, mother of Cecil B. deMille, put it in 1912, "This is the woman’s age."

Of course it didn’t last, as Amy Nicholson writes in her Washington Post roundup of five myths about Hollywood. But it’s a good reminder that boys clubs aren’t the default state of a successful business.

(Also fascinating, from that article: Hollywood’s franchise fatigue and reliance on reboots isn't new. Which is somewhat comforting. I could die happily without ever seeing another Spider-Man origin story or Avengers installment, but 41 Tarzan films in 52 years sounds even worse.)

Meanwhile, this Pacific Standard article from a couple of years ago recounts more recent history of the women directors who fought for more work in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s:

There are women who have been fighting for the chance to direct films for decades, often at great personal and professional risk. These were women who walked into boardrooms full of men and explained how deeply unfair the hiring situation was for female directors, and then pressed for legal action when the studios wouldn't listen. Because of these six women--Susan Bay Nimoy, Nell Cox, Joelle Dobrow, Dolores Ferraro, Victoria Hochberg, and Lynne Littman--and the landmark research they pursued in 1979, the [Director's Guild of America] had sufficient evidence of gender discrimination to sue Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures in 1983. The lawsuit was dismissed ... but because of this very public legal action, along with continued pressure from the DGA, the number of women directors working in the industry started, slowly, to rise.

So, a reminder: We’ve always been there. We haven’t always been promoted, or recognized, or remembered, but we’ve always been there.
 

Lady Bits, comic relief edition:

--"Let's take one bad thing about one man/And apply it to all of them!" My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend continues to have excellent timing with its satire, so "Let's Generalize About Men!"

--When you have a regular section called "Lady Bits," and then Scandal has now-President Mellie rant about the "famine in my lady bits," you kind of have to link to it, right?
 
--"Yes, I am a woman." "Is that your job?" If you’re in New York in the next month, may I recommend Zoe Kazan’s After the Blast, a somehow-funny play about gender roles, career crises, fertility, technology, and life after the apocalypse? Full disclosure, it did make me dream about nuclear war. But there is a cute robot, and also Chidi from The Good Place:
 

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