from Hacker News

Turmoil at ‘Chief’ raises the question: is empowering corporate women enough?

by tafda on 3/28/23, 1:57 PM with 52 comments

  • by neonate on 3/28/23, 4:37 PM

  • by rayiner on 3/28/23, 3:22 PM

    Not only does an organization aimed at empowering corporate women not need to tackle racial issues, they will cause harm by trying. Affluent, educated white women have interests that are fundamentally in conflict with the interests with those of most minorities, who are disproportionately working class. And their money and power makes it inevitable that, if they meddle in those issues, they will distort and disrupt organic movements by and within those minority groups.

    For example, black people are the most likely of any racial group to express the traditional view that being able to provide for a family is very important for a man: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/20/americans-s.... Among women without a college degree, which disproportionately includes racial minorities, fully 44% would prefer a homemaker role to working outside the home: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer.... There’s lots of black women who would prefer the return of good union jobs so that they wouldn’t have to work outside the home. This is not surprising—if a career that confers power and money and social status isn’t realistically an option for you (and it will never be for the majority of people) then your other options look much different!

    Whenever affluent white people parachute into stuff like this, the minorities involved inevitably become a canvas for them to project their own interests and motivations. And varying interests within those minority groups get swept aside in favor of whatever happens to line up with those of the white people with money and power. It’s bad and wrong.

  • by InTheArena on 3/28/23, 4:58 PM

    From the article:

    'The recent turmoil at Chief began on International Women’s Day, in early March, when a member of the network, Denise Conroy, declared on LinkedIn that she was leaving Chief and accused the group of sidestepping political issues and ghosting women of color who applied for membership. (Ms. Conroy, 51, later acknowledged that she had been reprimanded internally for trying to sell tickets on Chief’s platform to an external workshop she was running, which ran counter to the company’s policies.) ....

    Rachel Hassall, a supply chain executive, is one of the Chief members who chose to leave the organization this month. She had recently participated in a discussion that Ms. Conroy hosted about the book “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better"

    Seriously. Who signs up for this? Imagine paying to be called a racist all day long, just so you can feel morally superior to others.

  • by riskneutral on 3/28/23, 4:55 PM

    > For admission to Chief, a women’s leadership network, members pay up to $7,900. That gets them executive coaching, big-name speaker sessions, a Rolodex of female executives and, for an extra cost, access to five sleek clubhouses. Chief is essentially an “old boys’ club” — for the ladies. The venture capital-backed company has grown to over 20,000 members and over $1 billion in value since it started in 2019.

    So ... can we have the "old boys' clubs" back now, for the other half of the species? Somehow I don't think so.

  • by yieldcrv on 3/28/23, 3:10 PM

    501(c)4 and 501(c)5’s are the kinds of organizations that anyone can form or work for if they want their corporation to “use their platform” for social welfare in labor matters and helping marginalized people

    corporations formed for selling shares are simply not formed for these unrelated matters

    if you’re in a network for becoming executives at share selling corporations and want to be in a network for a group that does other things, then leave and go to that other network

    It seems like people who have tried (and failed) at reshaping the for-profit world are unaware of what actually exists to cater to their sentiment already, social welfare and labor groups

  • by malermeister on 3/28/23, 3:34 PM

    This is the Sheryl Sandberg school of feminism, which is more concerned with already privileged, white, rich ladies accumulating the same amount of power as their male counterparts than helping the struggling single mother working three jobs trying to make ends meet.

    Class is the true defining factor. Not gender, not race, not anything else. If we want to encourage equality, we need to address the class issue.

    Stuff like this is just more class warfare dressed up as empowerment.

  • by engineer_22 on 3/28/23, 7:14 PM

    TL;DR: Self-selecting social club wasn't selective enough.

  • by boeingUH60 on 3/28/23, 3:04 PM

    Of course, country clubs for privileged people never refrain from eating themselves when they throw politics into the mix.

    $7,900 a year and these folks acting like they're the saviours of the world, lol. To paraphrase the CEO, "We're a club for rich women and will like to remain that way..." which is fine by me.