Name: Broad Strokes for March 10, 2017: A Day Without Women
Uploaded: 2017-03-09
Duration: 4 min 17 s
Description: Was 'A Day Without Women' a success? Is Emma Watson a bad feminist? And do all workplaces have sexist policies? Find out this week on Broad Strokes!

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Broad Strokes, fortune show where we talk about the news that matters to women. So this week was International Women's Day on Wednesday, it's always Marth 8th, but I feel like this year it got a little more attention than usual. And that's because of another event that happened on the same day and this was A Day Without a Woman. It was organized by the same people behind the women's march in Washington. And they're basically calling on women to do a few things, they wanted us not to go to work, not to do any unpaid work, not to spend any money. And the idea here is that it would call attention to our role in the global economy and some of the Problems we still have in the workplace. I don't know exactly how many women participated, but this particular protest felt a little flat for me. As opposed to the Women's March on Washington, where women showed up by the millions. A lot of women just kind of couldn't afford to take the day off or maybe frankly had protest fatigue. Where in the last month we've seen the Women's March. We've seen a lot of protests against Trump's immigration ban So, for a lot of women, maybe they feel like this really wasn't worth taking the day off. Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel your point about privilege that not everybody can take this day off. And I think if you do want people to do something that dramatic, you really have to have like a real cause that people are rallying behind. A lot of people pointed to this protest in Poland that happened recently and that was about an abortion ban there You can tell this really, like, lit a fire under the women there and they came out in droves. And this protest felt like a little vague about the economy and women work, it just didn't have that one unifying issue. So another major news item this week for some reason was Emma Watson's breasts. She did a spread in Vanity Fair where you can partially see her breasts and she was being criticized for this and basically being called not the right kind of feminist. Yeah, I really thought we were over this. Particularly when you see so much like what I guess would call pop feminism these days. It's like actresses and singers, like I'm thinking about Taylor Swift, Beyonce coming out there. And really owning this title of feminist. And I feel like most people have gotten to the point where we can hold these two ideas separate. On one hand, we can watch Beyonce perform, maybe in a very skimpy outfit. On the other hand, we can take her seriously as a woman and an artist. And know that she's chosen this outfit, and she's chosen this performance for herself. It's not something that some man is forcing her to do. So, another news item that I wanted to come back to is something that you and Beth talked about last week. And this is the massive class action case against Sterling Jewelers. This is about 70, 000 women who are complaining about Basically paid disparity but there are also a lot of legal actions in this case. So the New York Times did this really interesting story where they said there are a few key policies that were happening at Sterling and that these are policies that a lot of us have in our own companies. Yeah, I mean, one of the policies they talked about was these anonymous hotlines which basically were not so anonymous in Australia because when female employees called in, sexual harassment allegations, they were basically told by HR to never call back, that they're causing problems. And, basically, proving to these women exactly what they fear which is that when they report Report these things though they will be retaliated against. Yeah, another one that got me was the tap on the shoulder promotions? Which is basically, you don't post a job when it's open. You just ask the manager, who do you want to have this job? And they tend, let's say that most managers are white and male because they are. They tend to pick people that remind them of themselves, that look like them, and that's how you end up with women and minorities not moving up the ranks. Yeah, and, finally, we had to talk about the arbitration clause, which is something we talked about when we talked about Gretchen Carlson suing Roger Ailes of Fox News, and, basically, a quarter of non- union employees Plays are bound to these arbitration agreements which basically just means that you're not allowed to sue your employer. And it also allows these companies to keep the sort of things under wraps. So in Sterling's case this case has been going on for almost a decade and we're only just hearing about it now. Yeah absolutely. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have this week for Broad Strokes. Come back next Friday for another episode on Fortune. com. [ MUSIC ]

Was 'A Day Without Women' a success? Is Emma Watson a bad feminist? And do all workplaces have sexist policies? Find out this week on Broad Strokes!