Name: Broad Strokes for March 4, 2017: Kellyanne Conway's Couch Photo Causes Controversy
Uploaded: 2017-03-02
Duration: 3 min 56 s
Description: We dive in to Uber's continued controversy, Kellyanne Conway's couch-gate , and a study about women's competitiveness.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to broad strokes, Fortune's weekly show where we talk about the news that matters to women. This week I'm joined by the wonderful Beth Coet. So Beth the first thing we have to talk about obviously is Uber, the saga continues. The big story this week was that senior vice president of engineering [ UNKNOWN ] has stepped down After reports came out that he actually left Google a year earlier because the company found sexual harassment allegations against him credible. Right I mean this was also not the only news like this that we had this week. We also heard from Tesla, we heard a major class action case from the parent company of Kay Jewelers that included thousands of women. I mean there was a lot to cover this week. Yeah I mean I don't know what's going on I mean one New York Times writer basically called the Uber case a watershed moment for women in tech. His argument was that listen because this is such a high profile company because this is such a high profile case, maybe this was a turning point where Silicon Valley finally kind of takes a long hard look at itself Self and things actually start to change. I take another approach is, I think that one thing that's happened since the election is that consumers are increasingly spending their money at companies and with services that align with their values. So I think yes we've got a culture issue but also I think more than that this is a business problem for these companies and they're going to have to address it For that reason whether they want to or not. Another topic that we should definitely talk about this week is a new study that came out about women and competition. So historically, women have been viewed as not competitive as man and actually there's been a lot of data that backs this up but this new study shows that women are actually as competitive as man when it comes to one Key component and that is self competition so when they're competing against themselves. Yeah I mean I feel this was a really interesting study and on one hand I found it really kind of totally and I how I think about myself and how I think about my friends but then on the other hand the reason that women are not as competitive with other people is a confidence issue. And this is really important data to get out there because if companies really do wanna level the playing field. Maybe they can change how they incentivize employees, to make it more aligned with how women do view competition. Another big news item this week that some people don't really think it should be news item is a photo that came out, in which Kelly Anne Conway is sitting on the couch in the Oval Office kind of looking at her phone. Now I mean this has been a really controversial photo. I was actually surprised by how much press it got. But basically the feeling was that she wasn't showing the respect that the people in the room deserved. But then others were saying listen all of this press about it it's really sexist. Would we really be talking about this if she was a man? I mean so there's kind of a lot of different layers to this story and a lot of Different opinions and reasons people were angry about it. Right, I think no matter what you think about this picture politics is optics, and the optics on this are not great. She's in this room with leaders of historically black colleges and universities, she's not really engaged with them. She's doing her own thing I mean it's not a great look. I mean a lot of woman are saying, Kelly Anne, come on you were so accomplished, you got a presence to the White House, she was a first female campaign manager that manage to get a present as far. And yet for all her successes, she just kinda of has all these gaps over and over again, kind of like You know Kelly- Ann, why does this keep happening to you? Can't you just represent women better? Right, and I do think that no matter what the answer is, we do need to ask these questions when someone's criticized for these reasons. Is this a gender issue, or is this a behavior thing? And I think in this case, it really is a behavior issue. Right, but I'm glad we're asking the question. [ MUSIC ] Unfortunately that's all the time we have for Broad Strokes today, please join us next week on fortune. com [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

We dive in to Uber's continued controversy, Kellyanne Conway's couch-gate , and a study about women's competitiveness.