Lady Business: Who Wore It Better, and Other Facebook Surveys
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 twenty-fourth issue, published April 12, 2018.
Zuckerberg Style
This week contained Equal Pay Day, one more in a series of events apparently ignored by the 37 percent of men who think unequal pay isn’t a thing. (Sigh.) But let’s focus on the more breaking news story: The Congressional testimony by the man who has more money than almost every other human on earth, and who’s made a big old mess for most of them.
One of my favorite parts of the recently-ended Oscar season is the analysis of celebrity fashion choices as calculated strategy and personal #branding. That was particularly obvious this year with the Golden Globes’ #TimesUp blackout, or the Royal Family’s failure to participate in the BAFTA sequel, but it's not like making a statement with your clothes is new this year. Red-carpet choices always contain multitudes: What message is the post-pregnancy ingenue sending about her recovered sex appeal? How much glamour must drip off the actress who won last year's Academy Award for playing a fat, ugly killer? Who's carefully maintaining their DGAF, makeup-free, fashion strike--and who will give a speech to match?
A few hundred miles north of Hollywood, of course, you have Silicon Valley, home of the men who wear hoodies and "startup twinsets," and who drink rebranded SlimFast and talk about “decision fatigue.”
Mark Zuckerberg has been the leader of this tribe, showing up for Vanity Fair cover shoots in his trademark T-shirt and talking loudly about how little fashion matters, compared to his real work. (Though of course, as the New York Times points out, those grey T-shirts come from an Italian designer and cost $295 each.)
His decision to show up for his Congressional hearings this week in a suit and Facebook-blue tie yielded a flurry of fashion analyses (and funny Twitter jokes about his sweaty, vampire-pale face; but beauty was last week’s topic.)
It not particularly subtle messaging, but then again it didn’t have to be: Zuckerberg wore the clothes that would fit in most among the suit-clad senators, who painfully and visibly didn’t understand very much about Facebook’s business model or why it needs to be better regulated.
I did at least appreciate the House’s questions Wednesday about Europe’s tighter regulation of Silicon Valley companies, and whether Facebook would comply globally with those privacy laws. The European approach is explained in this recent Wall Street Journal profile of European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, "a 49-year old Dane, [who] has become the public face of Europe’s effort to rein in technology firms and the de facto global regulator for the U.S.’s tech giants. Her approach to companies such as Google and Apple Inc. is having a ripple effect around the globe."
It's a good read, if slightly strange for profiling someone without quoting her until the 20th paragraph. But my favorite bit is this:
That hasn’t made her popular in Silicon Valley, where corporate executives complain that she has unfairly singled out big, American technology firms to make examples of them. Some tech-firm officials also grumble that Ms. Vestager appears keenly interested in how her cases play in the press.
Keenly interested in public appearances? We’d never, ever see that from a Silicon Valley CEO.
Lady Bits:
--New newsletter alert: I’m saving the first issue of my friend Chelsea’s new project, Chelsea Goes Shopping, for the next time I need a new work tote.
--I really enjoyed the first episode of Killing Eve, which allows Sandra Oh to be as delightfully blunt and competent as her Christina Yang, while playing a less confident character with more to prove. I was also pleased to see the head spy played by Fiona Shaw, who I will always applaud for rocking the ugly hats in my favorite Jane Austen adaptation, Persuasion:
--A reader sent in this latest example of all-male panel "diversity," all the more delightful for where it’s occurring vs. who’s speaking. (White men: Somehow, still a majority in China.)
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