Name: Broad Strokes for December 9, 2016: It's a Trump Cabinet Smack Down!
Uploaded: 2016-12-08
Duration: 4 min 27 s
Description: We're talking Linda McMahon, gender parity, and new pushes for diversity reports from activist investors. Tune in!

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Broad Strokes for a show we talk about the news that matter's to women. So Ann I think we should start Start this week by checking in on Donald Trump's cabinet. So on Wednesday, he appointed Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration. This is an interesting pick you may know Linda McMahon as the co- founder S 1 Under the WWE! She did also run for senate although she was not elected either time. Again another unconventional pick from the presidential elect. S 2 She is definitely unconventional. It is great in some ways You have to give Linda McMahon a lot of credit. She built that company from the ground up, it was small and now its huge. She is a woman which is nice to see. But in Connecticut when she was running for Senate the content of WWE often came up. And it was controversial because it's a very colorful. [ LAUGH ] Organization. It's hard to describe just quite how Juanchi and rockes some of the programing is, and it caught a lot of flack for being pretty misogynist. Yeah, maybe not totally off of Donald Trump's brand. I will say his cabinet is shaping up to be mostly white, mostly male as we expected. But he has appointed a few women, Nikki Haley the governor of South Carolina. Carolina is his choice for the US Ambassador to the UN. He's tapped Elaine Chao for Transportation. It's nice to see that there's a little bit of diversity sneaking in there. But I think what matters more is probably how the people that Trump is surrounding himself with are going to vote on women's issues, what positions they're going to take. That's important because women aren't always in favor of women's issues. You have a [ INAUDIBLE ] along with Jeff Sessions and Mike Pompeo who voted against women's fair pay legislation. You have Jeff Sessions and Pompeo also being historically against legislation about violence against women. It is a little tricky, it's nice to see women, but it doesn't always mean as much you might think it would. But on a brither note, also this week we should note that A bunch of CEOs came out in favor af achieving gender parity at the upper echelons of corporate America by 2030, which seems like a big step in the right direction. I agree, but also have to admit I'm always a little sceptical of these kind of pledges, probably because we've seen so many of them. Initially they were saying they were going to achieve parity by 2020 but now that we're getting close to 2020' Suddenly it's 2030. There were some interesting things about this particular pledge though. So one, they're basically saying we are gonna pay the people in our companies for what they do to the business, how they help the business, not for face time. And allowing more flexibility, Can really help women. The other really interesting thing is that they are really pushing for sponsorship. Whenever you talk to women who have actually made it to the top, they talk about sponsorship. They talk about the real power of how Having someone inside of you company whose is willing to fight for you. So I think putting more emphasis on that is a really good move. So also saw this week that a group of three activists investors was Pax, Trillium and Arjuna Came out and said, we're gonna start pushing the financial industry to do two things. We want them to tell us what their pay gap is. And we want them to share the break down of their employee's diversity and gender. These same investors Targeted technology companies previously, and they had some success. They got both Apple and Intel for instance, to reveal their pay gaps. I think this is super interesting. I think it's a different approach than we've seen before, and I think they've had some success already. There was a tracking company That hadn't had many complaints about diversity issues. They said they didn't need to do anything. But the investors in the company actually voted overwhelmingly for the proposal. And I think this is interesting because you have investors Kind of noticing this and seeing that it makes a difference for the business. It makes a difference for the bottom line if you're tapping an asset that might not be fully utilised. While I aways think more information is better than less information. this is not a magic bullet even if all of these firms decide to reveal all these information every year it's not going to Just solve their diversity problems. Right, we've known for a long time that the representation of women as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is under 10 %. It's been that way for years. It probably will be that way for years to come. Agreed, unfortunately, that's all All the time we have this week on Broad Strokes. Come back next Friday for another episode on fortune. com. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

We're talking Linda McMahon, gender parity, and new pushes for diversity reports from activist investors. Tune in!