✊Boss Betty✊End-of-Week Analysis: On #NotSoWokeDavos and #girlbossery

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Is #WokeDavos a trending hashtag yet? If not, color us surprised given the ubiquity of the phrase as the world’s elite business leaders and policy makers descended on the Swiss town earlier this week to decide how we can all be better global citizens. (Yes, we are quite obviously torn between bitter jealousy over not being invited and lip-curling disdain for the hypocrisy of it all — tbh, leaning towards the former though…)

Alright, so riddle us this, Joker: If Goldman Sachs is so committed to increasing board diversity that it’s pretty much literally yodeling it from the top of the Swiss Alps (#WokeDavos) à la Heidi — if Heidi were a white older man à la the bank’s CEO, David Solomon — why is it underwriting the imminent IPO of a company with eight male directors and zero women on its board? Goldman’s new policy will not go into effect until July of this year but it certainly seems an odd way for the bank to kick off 2020 given that Solomon told an audience at the World Economic Forum (#WokeDavos) that companies with female directors fare “significantly better” in their public debuts. Read the piece.

Oh, also, women at #WokeDavos make up just 24 percent of attendees so … #NotSoWokeDavos?

We’re also continuing to fearlessly (and exhaustively and therefore somewhat exhaustedly) track the filings of all the companies looking to go public this year. The stats from the past couple of weeks are slightly less sucky than the first week of 2020 but they’re still absolutely terrible. Give our story a read.

Lastly, this piece offers a very warranted, critical look at girlboss culture. “‘Girlboss’ is a sexist Trojan horse … it denies us agency, it diminishes us and denigrates our authority,” the author writes. We’re on board with much (maybe most) of what’s in here — particularly the idea that the approach of “sugar-coating the sexism pill” isn’t the right one and that we should not have to “make it [women’s power] more palatable by rolling it in glitter and pinkwashing it.” But it’s also true that the rise of girlboss culture has created a powerful cohort of young women who find it empowering and feed off the community it generates. This is something we think about frequently and will be revisiting. What do you think about girlbossery? Let us know at info@bossbetty.com.

Have a great weekend!