Hello GFPs and welcome to your SECOND special Bank Holiday Monday edition of the Invisible Women newsletter! Don't say I never spoil you. Slightly delayed this morning because I got distracted by a staircase...So as faithful readers (or anyone who read last week's newsletter tbh) will know: the A[merican]B[eefcake] and I moved into our new home last week! Only took about eight months.
ANYWAY, this morning, we were walking up the staircase and decided to see what was under the stuff (technical term, I have no idea what it is) that was covering the staircase, but really worn away and flapping off in some parts.
This is what it looked like:
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So we go our DIY on and starting ripping it off...
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Still no idea what that stuff is[/caption]
And look what was underneath!!!
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Now extremely excited to see what's under this one...
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But because I love you all so much I decided I had better come and write to you first before getting sucked into more DIY. And I promise this newsletter will not become interior decoration themed........probably
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Anyway, this week I have some VERY PRESSING marmalade themed news to share with you, so let's get on with the show!
Gender data gap of the week
But first...
This week the internet has been ablaze over Basecamp. (And also Line of Duty, let's face it. I haven't watched the finale because season 6 has been so bloody disappointing in general -- I was actually BORED in the penultimate episode which I didn't think was actually possible for this show. But I digress.)
Basecamp is a business software company and, full disclosure, I have been an early adoptee of their email service, hey. Which makes what has been going on over there this week all the more disappointing, as it's a really great email service.
It all seems to have started, over a decade ago, with a list. Basecamp being then (and now by all accounts) as most tech companies are, staffed by white American men, there were certain customer names that were, to them, super funny. Not all the names were Asian or African in origin but...you get the picture. And what may have seemed all fun and games back in 2009 suddenly didn't seem so funny in 2021 and some employees -- a lot of employees -- started trying to have conversations at work about the "funny names" list.
I was of course not party to the conversations so can't comment on how they went, but what does seem to be in the public domain is that the conversations culminated in Basecamp's two co-founders making public statements that, among other things, banned political discussions from internal message boards:
Here is how co-founder Jason Fried put it:
1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today's social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well. And we're done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore.
I mean, sure, there is no point denying that politics is not exactly sweetness and light these days if it ever was, but there is an immediate, and what should have been an obvious, problem with this blanket ban and that is: what constitutes societal and political discussion? Is discussing paternal lead policies a political or a work-focused discussion? How about the fact that online abuse hits women and ethnic minorities more than white men, an issue which needs to be thought carefully about with all software design? Political? Or Work?
There are clues to what Fried might or might not consider to be acceptable political discussion later on in his blog-post where he announces that there will be "no more committees":
For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We're turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called "Small Council" will disband — when we need advice or counsel we'll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.
I mean, this sounds kind of ok, except...returning the entire responsibility for moral quandaries to two white guys? Look, as Fried's fellow co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson himself wrote in a short post for Inc bigging up Basecamp's work on diversity, "I have nothing against white guys, but white guys don't reflect the world at large or our customer base." Indeed. And so when considering questions of morality, or indeed any other business decision, sure, have some white guys there, they certainly exist and their perspective is valid. But if you want to avoid embarrassing and costly mistakes (arguably a bit like this one?) it might be an idea to have some other people in the room -- as I believe I conclusively demonstrated in a little book you may have heard of called Invisible Women, pp.i-419.
And in case you were in any doubt about the ideological underpinning of these decisions, Fried then clinches it by trotting out the old canard about not being "a social impact company," but a software company. This is a false distinction. If you create anything that humans interact with, you are by definition a social impact company, but this goes doubly so if you are a software and communication company, which is exactly how Fried describes Basecamp. James Damore eat your heart out quite frankly.
Shortly after Fried posted his dictum, fellow co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson muddied the waters further with a clarification: "Note that we will continue to engage in politics that directly relate to our business or products. This means topics like antitrust, privacy, employee surveillance. If you're in doubt as to whether something falls within those lines or not, please, again, reach out for guidance."
So, politics is OK, but only if it's politics the co-founders are interested in, seems to be the general theme. It was all starting to remind me a bit of this from my intro to Invisible Women:
...in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election [...] it felt you couldn’t move for tweets, speeches and op-eds by (usually) white men decrying the ills of what they called ‘identity politics’. Ten days after Donald Trump’s victory, the New York Times published an article by Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, that criticised Clinton for ‘calling out explicitly to African American, Latino, LGBT and women voters’. This left out, he said, ‘the white working class’. Lilla presented Clinton’s ‘rhetoric of diversity’ as mutually exclusive with ‘a large vision’, linking this ‘narrow’ vision (clearly, Lilla has been reading his V. S. Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’.
Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explain- ing that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’, while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism. ‘I have no tribe,’ he wrote. He could not ‘join the prevailing hysteria’. What he wanted was ‘to re-enact the glorious revolution of 1832’ – which resulted in the extension of the British franchise to a few extra hundred thousand men of property. Heady days, indeed.
These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men. Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380.89 Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeper workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820.90 So who’s the real working class?
These white men also have in common that they are white men. And I labour this point because it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.
Look, it is absolutely true that these conversations are difficult, and that finding a constructive way to navigate them is not simple. It will be a case of trial and error.
It's also true that there can be bad faith actors on all sides who make the conversations even more difficult than they need to be. But that doesn't mean that the right response is to abandoning them entirely. Abandoning them entirely suits only one group and that is the group that already has the power. And if Basecamp is serious about wanting a more diverse team having difficult conversations is part of the hard work they are going to have to do. And they should be serious about it.
As Karen Spärck-Jones (who long-term subscribers will remember from issue 7 of this most excellent newsletter) said, Computing is too important to be left to [white] men."
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Gender data gap coda
That was a long-ass section, so I'm not going to go deep into a further big thing here, but I found it striking that this pronouncement about "no more politics" "oh unless it's about politics I think is important" came from a company whose co-founders have written publicly about their efforts to increase diversity, and who "encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s exploration of the racist nature of mass incarceration."
I'm sure these efforts were genuinely meant. But I couldn't help also thinking of Helen Lewis's *excellent* essay on woke capitalism, which I recommend you all read.
Default male of the week
And now, for that PRESSING MARMALADE ISSUE you've all been waiting for.
This week, I was sent some VERY DISTURBING NEWS about Frank Cooper's marmalade.
😱HOW DID WE NEVER NOTICE THIS?!?!?! Naturally, I tweeted about it.
And since my twitter followers are the best followers....
[tweet https://twitter.com/Ciara__Bergman/status/1388024925022208001]
For those of you wondering what the big deal is, sure, it's just marmalade, but also, it's not just marmalade, because it's part of a broader historical pattern of men taking credit for women's work. From the introduction to Invisible Women:
Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny Hensel’s pieces under his own name and in 2010 another manuscript previously thought to be his was proven to be Hensel’s. For years classical scholars argued that the Roman poet Sulpicia couldn’t possibly have written the verses signed with her name – they were too good, not to mention too smutty. Judith Leyster, one of the first Dutch women to be admitted to an artists’ guild, was renowned in her time, but after her death in 1660 she was erased, her work attributed to her husband. In 2017, new works by nineteenth-century artist Caroline Louisa Daly were discovered – they had been previously attributed to men, one of whom was not even an artist.
At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill [...] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA con- sisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA.
And really, if women can't even take credit for things we do in the kitchen, you know, the place we supposedly belong, then THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD.
I can't help thinking though, that while these ad hoc measures are to be welcomed, the #justiceforsarahjane campaign should think BIGGER. And so...I found a contact page for the company that makes the marmalade formerly known as Frank's...and thought you know, maybe we could all send them a little email suggesting a 21st century re-brand may be in order?? Let me know if you get any responses!!
In related news, it turns out that the rot is deeper than we thought...
😱😱😱😱 Marmalade is the next frontier for feminism
Actually designed for women of the week
Right, I'm knackered after that marathon (this is a very funny pun fyi) Basecamp takedown, so this will be short and sweet. If you've been subscribed for a while you'll know that I'm:
a) an injury-plagued runner, and
b) was FURIOUS to discover a few newsletters ago that most shoes are designed around a DEFAULT MALE last and this is why women are more prone to all sorts of foot injuries. 🤬
c) there are some companies that only make *some* of their women's shoes using female lasts and to them I can only say
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Anyway, following the latest running-induced foot injury I decided it might be time to replace my running shoes which made by a company that "declined to comment," on whether they use a male or female last for their women's shoes. 😒
I have bought instead a pair of shoes from Altra, one of the few (and apparently the first) companies to make all of its women's shoes from female lasts.
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I haven't gone for a long run on them yet, but so far so good -- I'll keep you updated! In the meantime, I'm just happy to giving my money to a company that is actually bothering to research and design for the female body. Hurrah!
DON’T FORGET! If you know of a product that has actually been designed for the female body, hit reply and let me know! 💪
Poppy pic of the week
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In her rightful place[/caption]
That's it! Until next time, my dear GFPs, remember to fight for #justiceforSarahJane! xoxoxo
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