Name: Broad Strokes for November 18, 2016: Stephen Bannon and Trump's Transition Team
Uploaded: 2016-11-17
Duration: 4 min 15 s
Description: We discuss the controversial appointment of Stephen Bannon to Trump's transition team.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Broad Strokes, Fortune show where we talk about the news that matters to women. So Val, I think we have to start by talking about Steve. Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon was a chief executive of the Trump campaign. Donald Trump got a ton of criticism this week when he appointed him to a Senior Advisor role in the White House. So this is basically about his history as a chairman of Breitbart News. Breitbar is an alt right site where you can find as much racism, sexism, antisemitism, white nationalism as you want. To give you an idea I wanna read a couple of headlines. Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer? Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. There's no hiring bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews. So that's what we're dealing with. That is just so frustrating on so many levels. Granted, he didn't write these things, right, it was Milo Yiannopoulos of Gamer Gate fame. He's also the guy who was trolling Leslie Jones, but as the Chairman of this [ UNKNOWN ] organization, he's obviously Responsible for all of the content that it put's out. There's also the issue of him having been accused of domestic abuse? It happened 1996, his ex- wife came out and basically, you know, said that he physically assaulted her. So now, you have someone accuse for abuse and someone that is accused with sexual harassment. Both, in major positions of power in the White House. Yeah. You have to laugh or even cry. I think a lot of people who were scared after Donald Trump was elected. But then he came out and said, I wanna be your President, I wanna be everyone's President, which gave people some hope. But then he follows up with appointing Bannon. If this was how he was hoping to get women on his side I don't think it's going to work. One thing he is doing is he's bringing some women into his transition team but let's look at the kinds of women he's appointing. Rebecca Mercer who's a hedge fund heiress. She's basically credited with bringing Bannon into the mix. There's also Marsha Blackburn who is a congresswoman from Tennessee. And she is a staunch opponent of abortion. And she also leading a war [ INAUDIBLE ] against planned parenthood. I guess the question Is. Overall, these are probably people who are not gonna be fighting for the types of policies. Things like paid leave, things like equal pay, things like protecting reproductive rights that a lot of women care about. Should we still applaud him for For bringing some women into the White House and not making this an all- male Cabinet? That's a really interesting question. I mean one person who hopefully will fight for the things that we care about is Ivanka Trump. I mean she's been such a vocal advocate of paid parental leave, affordable child care Hopefully having her by Trump's side will be somewhat helpful but let's get away from the Trumps for a second and talk about paid leave. So there was a really interesting report that came out this week a non profit called paid leave for the United States attempted to Basically look at the top 60 employers and what their parental leave policies were. And so most of them basically looked like Trump's proposal. So six weeks of maternity leave and basically no or very little paternity leave. Yeah, I mean I felt this report was really interesting. Researchers set out To find out what the policies were and publish them for the top 60 employers in The US. However, less than half of those employers would actually share that information with them, which raises this question why are companies so secretive about these policies which can make huge difference in the lives of parents. I mean there are two possible reasons that these companies aren't sharing information. The first is that these companies don't have very competitive policies. So, if you have Netflix, Amazon, Apple out there with 12 weeks, 16 weeks with unpaid leave And you're only offering six weeks, you probably don't really wanna publicize that. And then, the other thing is, that some companies have different policies for salaried employees, or hourly employees, so that's another possible problem with these policies. This makes me think about the issue of What responsibilities companies have versus what responsibility the government has. I mean, I really, really hope that what we end up with is at least some level of governmental policy that applies to everyone. Unfortunately That's all the time we have this week on Broad Strokes. Come back next Friday for another episode on Fortune. com. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

We discuss the controversial appointment of Stephen Bannon to Trump's transition team.