Malala Goes to Oxford, Megyn Kelly’s Soft Side, China’s Diversity Problem

EVERYONE'S TALKING

• Keep the pressure on. This week, we saw seven CEOs step down, one by one, from one of President Trump's business councils. The president's other CEO advisory group chose to disband entirely. What we didn't see was the months and months of social pressure applied to these leaders, even before the cataclysmic events in Charlottesville. Activist groups like Color of Change had been working behind the scenes since January to get the business community to "pick a side," the racial justice organization's senior campaign director Brandi Collins told me. The group sent letters, coordinated social media campaigns, and staged live events in order to convince CEOs to leave Trump's councils.

It's not just Washington where activists have been making themselves heard in recent days. April Reign, the woman behind the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that went viral last year, has found another target in HBO. (Remember that in the aftermath of #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy announced a goal to double the number of diverse members by 2020.) On Sunday, Reign and a group of others succeeded in getting #NoConfederate to trend during an episode of Game of Thrones. The Twitter campaign—whose aim was to stop production of a show about an alternate history in which the American South seceded and slavery remained legal—was successful in getting the network's attention. HBO responded, essentially saying, "wait and see."

These two anecdotes, while from very different spheres, show the same simple truth: that social pressure can work. While you or I may not be a CEO on Trump's advisory council or an HBO showrunner, we have the power to influence others' decisions by sharing our own beliefs, ideas, and experiences.

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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

• Malala makes it in. It's official: Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai is off to Oxford. Is there anything more fitting than seeing the girls' education advocate attending the best university in the world? Fortune

• Kelly soup for the soul? Megyn Kelly tells Vogue that her new show, which is set to debut later this month on NBC will be “newsy"—without being a news show. Moreover, "it will be a force for good; a spiritual net positive." While this might surprise viewers who know Kelly best for her prosecutorial interview style, she says, "there is a spiritual component of who I am that went completely unutilized...and over time, I found that soul-killing."  Vogue

• Burqa backlash. Australian far-right Senator Pauline Hanson wore a burqa in Parliament Thursday to call for the style of dress to be prohibited in public. The stunt drew a powerful response from Attorney General George Brandis: "To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do." Fortune

• China's diversity problem. While Silicon Valley has been rocked by a spate of sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, many in the Chinese tech industry don’t recognize either behavior as problematic (even though both are illegal in China; the laws generally aren’t enforced). Some job ads there even explicitly say that only men should apply.  Wall Street Journal

• Time for Firsts. Our sister publication Time will soon publish "Firsts," a year-long multimedia project featuring candid interviews with 45 groundbreaking women, from Oprah and Sheryl Sandberg to Madeleine Albright and Ellen DeGeneres. Watch the trailer: Time

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

• Merkel live. Angela Merkel sat down for an hour-long YouTube live interview in which she demonstrated that she’s getting serious about social media—and young voters. (German elections are coming up next month.) In the wide-ranging interview, she spoke about everything from sexism to emojis to wrestler-turned-actor The Rock. Fortune

• Shotwell's shoe-spiration. Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, Elon Musk's space exploration company, proves the old adage "You can't be what you can't see." She became interested in mechanical engineering because of a panelist she saw while a high schooler at a women's conference. "Her shoes were marvelous, her bag matched, and she just made mechanical engineering accessible to me," Shotwell recalls. "I left that event saying, 'Okay, I'll be a mechanical engineer,' because I thought she was cool." Marie Claire

• Alfred Angelo's angel. Alfred Angelo, one of the nation’s biggest bridal chains, announced it was going out of business and filing for bankruptcy last month. Patricia Redmond—the company’s bankruptcy attorney—has made it her personal mission to deliver hundreds of gowns, dresses, veils, and garters that customers had already paid for.  Wall Street Journal

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