Lady Business: VPs, map nerds, baseball GMs, and other firsts

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 115th issue, published November 15, 2020. 

Who Gets to Be… 

The next vice president is going to be a woman. The next vice president is going to be a Black, Asian-American woman. I’m still kind of processing that, along with so much of the news out of an interminable (and still ongoing!) election process. But vice president-elect Kamala Harris will at least put a crack in a glass ceiling that I had become a lot less confident, amid all the post-2016 discourse about whether a woman would ever be truly “electable,” would ever really break.
 
Anyway, like millions of Americans, I spent a lot of the election week staring at cable news maps that … didn’t ultimately tell me very much! At least not enough to justify the amount of time that I spent, over days, watching John King and Steve Kornacki break down the latest releases of votes from Maripoca County or the Philadelphia suburbs where I grew up.
 
King drew a bit of flak, early on in the never-ending week of anxiety and dread, for calling this process “a lot of fun!” But obviously it was, for him and Kornacki and the other (largely white and male) data experts who became overnight superstars and thirst traps, with exegeses devoted to their diets, sleep habits, and Gap khaki preferences.
 
Clearly these cable-news “map nerds” filled a thirst for information, distraction, and—to give King credit—the election-era equivalent of entertainment. It wasn’t fun, exactly, but watching the Kornacki-cam during a commercial break gave me the soothing reassurance that I was on top of the latest news … even if, in retrospect, all of the endless and tireless data-crunching also felt a little meaningless.
 
This was not a good election for the authority of political data nerds, after all. Polling, again, vastly failed to predict reality. Which lends a certain hollowness to the (again, largely white and male) experts claiming authority by touting their command of infinite but ultimately flawed data. As the Washington Post declared of polling gurus Nate Silver of Five­ThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of the New York Times, “It may be time to break up with the Nates.”
 
It may not be fair to conflate what King and Kornacki do with the polling missteps of the Nates, but I had a similar sensation watching the cable-news maps and seeing the New York Times try to redeem its needle. It’s akin to hearing supremely confident men spouting Moneyball stats about a baseball team that loses, or being stuck at a dinner party with day traders and crypto bros who can only talk about the potential upsides to their investments. It’s a widespread, widely-praised, and male-dominated type of performative nerding out. And while sometimes it can offer welcome distractions in chasing down shades of Gap browns, it’s all too often deeply boring—and deeply wrong.
 

Lady Bits

 
--To be fair to Moneyball and its adherents, the rise of data expertise in baseball is also partially responsible for opening the door to another big first this week: The Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng as the team’s next general manager, making her the first woman to run a major U.S. men’s sports team.
 
--I have my criticisms of The Queen’s Gambit, but loved the acting, the fashions, the spikey yet tender relationship between the main character and her adoptive mother, and the degree to which it made chess seem exciting and dramatic. It also was relatively upbeat and non-wallowing for an addiction story, a genre which is not usually my jam!
 
--Speaking of fashions: The most impressive part of last week’s Saturday Night Live, explained.

--“Say ‘Megan Follows is the best Anne of Green Gables’ or…” Yup.

--Ted Lasso, in addition to being a sweet and surprisingly anti-toxic-masculinity TV show about sports bros and the women around them, is also just very funny.
 

 
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