Name: Broad Strokes for February 24, 2017: Milo Yiannopoulos Steps Off His Soap Box
Uploaded: 2017-02-23
Duration: 4 min 3 s
Description: We discuss Uber's latest sexual harassment claims and Milo Yiannopoulos's fall from grace. Tune in!

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Broad Strokes. Fortune's weekly show where we talk about the news that matters to women. So and the big story this week of course is Uber. Susan Fowler who is a former engineer at the company wrote an explosive blog post. It went totally viral about her You know very, very, very strange year at the company as she calls it. It starts out really crazy, and then it just gets worse. But it starts out her first week at the company, she was propositioned in writing by her manager. I know. In writing. It was that casual. It was in writing and then HR So seeing this post does absolutely nothing about it. I mean BBC said this is his first offence, he's a super high performer. So they kind of you know what, sorry, we can't really do much about it, kinda of your problem to fix. And then it just gets worse from there. There are a few other instances. Of gender discrimination but these basically never ever went anywhere and she ended up leaving Uber and kind of writing this big expos �� piece. Right. And then the New York Times this week followed up with a really interesting story. They talked with 30 employees who echoed these sentiments about this The culture of the company being sort of like an unrestrained male festival of aggression. There are three other sexual harassment suits pending against the company, at least two countries, and I think notably, Uber only has 15 % of his technical positions filled by women. Even Google is 19 %, so that's bad for the industry. Yeah, it's bad for the industry, and I mean, the company knows it, the CEO knows it, and he brought in Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington who's actually a board member for Uber to kind of come in and try to solve the problem and get to the bottom of it. But it almost seems like they call it an investigation as if they don't know what the problem is. I think everybody knows what the problem is and Arianna Huffington called it that they keep hiring these brilliant jerks. Yeah, yeah. She said, no more brilliant jerks. But I think when you have brilliant jerks running the company, it's gonna be a little hard to weed out. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. Another really big story this week that was in the Harvard Business Review was about women and flexible time off, flexible scheduling. And it was a really frustrating Piece for me to read because we kind of hold up flexible scheduling as is kind of cure off, silver bullet for all of woman's problems with actually hurting women more than it's helping them it seems. Yes, yes. One of the really deserving implications was that even if women get flexible schedules, there still paid less women flexible schedules And and when they ask for it they're perceived as less dependable and less likeable than the men who ask for the exact same thing. Again, it's like when we're not when we don't see men taking care of their kids as like an ordinary normal thing, women lose out. Yes. Exactly. Also this week, rising star Milo Yiannopoulos had a dramatic fall from grace. The former tech editor Has a step down over comments he made about pedophilia. Yeah. I mean so it's really interesting to me that it basically this was the straw that broke the camel's back I mean he's made so many racists, sex Antisemitic comments. Right, but you just can't cross the line over sex with 13 year olds. It's just that's too far. He called consent a arbitrary and oppressive concept, I believe. Yeah, I mean, he tries to be provocative. This is his whole schtick, and finally he crossed a line. And personally I'm happy that he no longer has a soapbox to stand on. But obviously this brings up this issue of free speech. And a lot of conservatives are a lot of conservatives are kind of viewing this as kind of a touchy thing. Yeah, yeah. And I think when you look at the free speech issue, I think Milo should be able to say whatever he wants, but I don't think that the book publishers or Brighton should be obligated to give him a platform. I think that, you know, if Milo wants to take a soapbox into town square and sort of yell things at people passing by, he should be able to do that But I think maybe we moving toward where Milo should be, the platform he should be given which is not much of one at all. Totally agree with you. Unfortunately that's all the time we have this week on Broad Strokes. Please join us next week on fortune. com.

We discuss Uber's latest sexual harassment claims and Milo Yiannopoulos's fall from grace. Tune in!