Lady Business: Women founders, fast-food workers, and Supreme Court skeletons
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 forty-third issue, published September 20, 2018.
‘Burn It Down’
"I was told I was too female, too old, even too blond: 'You do not look like a CEO.’"
--Jules Pieri, co-founder and CEO of The Grommet
Some of the work from my extremely busy summer is starting to appear, and the first thing to be published this week was this extensive survey, conducted by sister magazines Inc. and Fast Company, on the state of women and entrepreneurship.
This summer, we asked hundreds of women founders about their businesses, money, fundraising experiences, investor dealings, harassment experiences, #MeToo, economic outlooks, political sentiments, kids, spouses, work-life balances, employee benefits they provide, and mental wellness. (It was a rather long survey! Thanks to the many of you who took it.)
I went long on Twitter about it the other day, but the survey turned up some interesting data about:
--political activity: 51 percent of these women are more politically active since the 2016 elections, 22 percent are considering running for office -- and 84 percent say they won’t vote for Trump in 2020. ("I'm ready to burn it down, if women and people of color continue to have their rights curtailed," one respondent wrote.)
--economic outlook: 30 percent of these women business owners say they expect the US economy to get worse over the next 12 months. That’s a lot more pessimistic than a recent Inc. survey of mostly-male business CEOs (not online, unfortunately), in which only 10 percent said they expect the economy to worsen this year.
--The much-discussed VC funding gap: My colleague Kimberly Weisul wrote a separate article about how the growing awareness of sexual harassment has helped force some venture capital firms to finally hire some female partners.
--#MeToo: 53 percent of these women told us that they had experienced harassment in their capacity of founders. That’s actually better than the case for women generally, 60 percent of whom report some sort of workplace harassment to the EEOC.
This to me was a particularly depressing finding. Silicon Valley's boorish treatment of women has made some big, salacious headlines in recent years. But that 60 percent is another reminder that #MeToo is probably worse for women in many less glamorous or closely-watched parts of the workforce -- for auto-plant workers, for example, or fast-food employees:
In May, 10 McDonald’s workers filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that they faced pervasive sexual harassment and a climate in which women who spoke up were retaliated against or ignored. … The complaints spanned nine cities but followed a similar theme.
…Much of the conversation around the #MeToo movement has focused on celebrities and high-profile figures. But researchers have found that workers in low-wage service jobs, whose stories don’t get as much attention, are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment.
It’s a pretty depressing race to the bottom. In a week in which the tedious attempted comebacks of the #MeToo men have continued to make headlines, the McDonald’s strike is an important reminder that this problem isn’t about one CBS head, or TV news anchor, or high-profile misery comic, or Silicon Valley investor. Those are the splashiest stories -- but for almost two-thirds of women, #MeToo isn’t a headline or a change at the top. It’s just an everyday workplace hazard.
Skeletons Ringing Doorbells
As a proud alumna of an all-girls Catholic high school, I recently found myself in a conversation about whether all-boys schools are generally as beneficial to their graduates. Eg, are the benefits that girls receive from single-sex education replicated in all-male environments, or does toxic masculinity take too much hold?
Totally unrelated, here’s Supreme Court nominee and accused high school assaulter Brett Kavanaugh fondly reminiscing about his all-boys Catholic school: “What happened at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That’s been a good thing for all of us.”
(Yes, what better qualification for a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land than the ability to invoke the Vegas mantra? Roe v. Wade, Gideon v. Wainwright, Brown v. Board of Education … meet Kavanaugh v. The Hangover!)
Meanwhile, Anita Hill is powering through another turn as the undoubtedly-very-tired Cassandra of the Supreme Court, and the sexual harassers who get jobs on it. This Elle interview with Hill included this response to a question about Joe Biden, and his recent non-apology for how poorly he treated Hill during Clarence Hill’s confirmation hearings:
It’s become sort of a running joke in the household when someone rings the doorbell and we’re not expecting company. “Oh,” we say, “is that Joe Biden coming to apologize?”
Which does make me curious about how all of this -- #MeToo, Kavanaugh, the Democrats trying to capture the #Resistance wave of furious feminists running for office -- is going to affect Biden’s inevitable 2020 bid. (Not to mention that whole “Creepy Uncle Joe” reputation.)
Biden has his Obama bromance and the Trump demographics on his side -- he can talk blue collar, he’s an unthreatening white man, and boy is he old! -- but he’s also been around long enough to make some big mistakes when it comes to women, especially the women of color who are energizing his party.
There may have been a way to salvage his legacy from the Anita Hill hearings, had he genuinely apologized early on. But that didn’t happen, and it may be too late now. Twenty-five years later, Hill is becoming more and more publicly vindicated -- and her best revenge may be tanking Biden's final presidential shot.
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