Elizabeth Holmes documentary proves lean femininity is toxic – Rolling Stone

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In recent years, the world of business has given birth to a new figure: the Ladyboss. The Ladyboss is usually white. She is usually young. She is usually pretty. It promotes diversity and equality in the workplace, although it is hard not to notice that very few people of color are promoted to management positions and that Maternity in an office is a shit (even if it takes one to start). with). Perhaps she will face a protégé, or a series of protégés, who, despite the fact that they live in a state of constant terror, are afraid to be in his presence. None of them will last more than a few months.

Perhaps most of all, the Ladyboss does not want to be asked to react to her behavior. Whatever the form of her punitive and selfish behavior – calculating passive aggression, squealing anger, forcing her employees to clean her improvised salad utensils – she will not exonerate her because being a Ladyboss means never have to tell you are sorry. Instead, it will justify it by invoking an argument that in almost any other context would probably be correct: that if a man behaved in the same way, he would not be called upon to criticize it.

The rise of the Ladyboss stems from the popularization of what has been called "skinny feminism," inspired by Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, work and the will to lead. When it was published in 2013, To lean on was widely applauded for encouraging women to "lean" on the workplace to achieve professional empowerment and success; since then, he has been strongly criticized for promoting a clean-up and sustained vision by women's empowerment businesses, in which women had to follow the rules of the game set by wealthy white men to advance their careers. The book has also been criticized for ignoring many of the structural hurdles in place preventing low-income women or women of color from being hired in leadership roles. Subsequent reports on Sandberg 's unethical leadership on Facebook have also contributed to our retrospective understanding of the fact that she may be far from the female feminist worker hero that we hoped for.

Yet, since feminism has entered the popular movement, feminism has spawned a craft industry of rah-rah girl power messages, which promote the message that women can do and be and realize just about anything. , provided the system is already integrated your favors to start: Ivanka Trump's Working women, the TV series Netflix Girlboss, Rachel Hollis's Girl, wash your face, Gynecological start-ups with vertiginous copays, extremely expensive millennial co-working spaces and brands without a maternity leave policy tweeting about #InternationalWomensDay as evidenced by Amy Klobuchar's presidential campaign in 2020 and her advocates, or Sarah Sanders' claim that any feminist who did not support the first woman director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, would be a "hypocrite".

And more than anything else, Lean In feminism also gave birth to Elizabeth Holmes.

Holmes, CEO and founder of Theranos, a health start-up, at the center of HBO's new documentary The inventor: looking for blood in Silicon Valley, captured the public's imagination for several reasons: his baritone of unsettling (and supposedly fictional) depth, his predilection for Issey Miyake's black turtlenecks, his apparent compulsion to lie to people about minor details, including the breed of his dog, Balto.

But perhaps above all, Holmes is a fascinating figure because she is so impenetrable (or, as New Yorker she says, it is an "exaggeratedly sphinxous figure"). Since the end of her career, she has given few interviews, so we can not know anything about her motives. In the absence of such ideas, L & # 39; inventor provides some theories: more specifically, Holmes was an idealist turned bad, a well-meaning entrepreneur who believed in her business and vision so much that she thought that the end would justify the fraudulent means. All this seems to conceal what seems to be the truth itself: she was a scammer, and a very good at it.

It's not like Holmes was the only young, white and educated person in the world who understood that all these traits could give him access to a world that would otherwise have been banned. As many have already noted, there is actually a long list of scammers who have made headlines over the past year and who have fallen into this category, ranging from the founder of Fyre Fest to Billy MacFarland. , from crime novelist Daniel Mallory, to fraudster Rick Hud Singer, men whose scandalously outrageous behavior (including, in the case of Mallory, leaving urine cups on the desk of a colleague) got a pass for years, if not decades. The only difference is that Holmes was a woman and, although it does not make her less guilty than the names mentioned previously, it does mean that she was able to hide behind the traps of a relatively recent archetype – the Silicon Valley Ladyboss – hide his fraudulent behavior.

As one of the few women leaders in Silicon Valley (according to a 2014 report, only 11% of Silicon Valley leaders are women), Holmes' sex played to her advantage to attract the attention of women. media. As Alex Gibney, the director of L & # 39; inventor, told Time"She looks at us and says," Support me because I'm a woman in male-dominated Silicon Valley and I'm doing something awesome for the world. And we want to say, "Yes, we are behind you. 100 per cent."It has also attracted the attention of venture capitalists and powerful, wealthy, old white men, many of whom eventually joined the Theranos board. "She's lined up with very powerful, older men who seemed to succumb to some charm. And these powerful men could influence the members of the government, "said Phyllis Gardner, former Holmes professor at Stanford, in L & # 39; inventor.

The choice of Margaret Thatcher as a feminist totem should perhaps have made us understand the motives of Holmes.

Holmes was hyper aware of this fact, although in the interviews she often presented it as a disadvantage, saying: Bloomberg: "When you enter the room and you are a 19 year old girl, people interact with you in a certain way. (It's apparently why she adopted her famous baritone in favor of her natural voice.) Perhaps it's true that Holmes had to fight to be taken seriously in a male dominated field, that underscores the immense privilege she's had as a pretty young white woman in Silicon Valley – a privilege that totally contrasts with the myth of the self-taught and hardscrabble creator she's been trying to build for herself- even. (The fact that his father was a former Enron executive and that his pension fund allowed him to start his business probably did not hurt him either.) "Holmes performed a sleight of hand that the women have not often realized in public life. She did not have to prove her ideas to be rewarded, "Friedman wrote in She. "She was a kind of anti-Hillary: under-prepared, underqualified and loved by men."

Despite the immense privilege and exceptional circumstances that allowed him to get in the door, Holmes gave a brief overview of the importance of women's solidarity in Silicon Valley, by launching a summit five-week mentorship for women in the field of science. and a Twitter campaign, #IronSisters. However, the symbol of female solidarity Holmes chose was the "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, the radical neo-conservative British, who is particularly known for putting the kibosh on the program that gave free milk to British schoolchildren. "Whenever you see a glass ceiling, there is an" iron woman "underneath," Holmes told the women at the summit, according to Fortune. What she failed to mention is that, as the Thatcher career shows, some of the Iron Women who break that glass ceiling are morons.

If Thatcher's choice as a feminist totem should perhaps have explained Holmes's motives, her employees respected her anyway. "In a way, I idolized it, relying on the little that I'd read – to be a woman in the field of science, a woman in the tech sector , the fact that she founded her own business – it really excited me "a former employee of Theranos who later became known as a corporate whistleblower, L & # 39; inventor. "She was a very good idol to have." Of course, nothing in Holmes' management skills nor in his leadership qualities deserved to be revered: according to the podcast of ABC News The stallshe was prone to tantrums and lashing out at employees she considered unfair, especially in the last days of the business. But the truth is simple: why would Cheung have been attracted to her as a mentor: first billionaire woman in Silicon Valley and one of the few women CEOs, Holmes was one of the few options actually offered in Cheung.

Holmes did not realize that hiding in feminism only works if you actively advocate for women's rights other than yourself.

After John Carreyrou's bomb the Wall Street newspaper Holmes was ready to use her sex as a strategic advantage to defend herself, just as she did during her rapid rise. And as Amy Klobuchar after her, who angrily recounted her abusive behavior during the election campaign for a diverse sexism, Holmes hinted in interviews that she was unjustly targeted because she was a woman . "Until what's been going on for four weeks, I did not understand what it means to be a woman in this space," she said in an interview with Bloomberg Business Week. "Every article starting with" A young woman ", is not it? Someone came to see me the other day and they said to me, "I have never read an article about Mark Zuckerberg that starts with" A Young Man ". What Holmes did not understand, is that hiding in feminism only works if defending the rights of women other than yourself.

When it became clear that Theranos was going to dissolve and Holmes started pouring in, people – especially women – immediately began to fear that she had set a terrible example for future women CEOs and that She finally repressed feminism. "Holmes has been considered a model for what happens when ambitious business women earn an unprecedented level of investment and trust. To our great prejudice, because of the accusations against her, the world can have an answer: they simulate it. And now it will be a lot harder for the rest of us, Friedman wrote.

But the story of Elizabeth Holmes is instructive for women in the business world, it only shows how extreme privileges can blind the rest of the world to your failings, as well as the dangers of buying from a slippery speech benefits a very small handful of women. And just as the loss of a powerful woman's grace does not mean that all powerful women will share the same fate, the Holmes story is proof that the fact that a woman Working hard enough to get this power does not mean that she has worked to earn our respect.

Elizabeth Holmes became important because our culture will always give a place to the table for rich, young, beautiful and ambitious white women, so that we can present them as examples for women who may not be not all or part see, look at it, you too can have everything. She was able to sit down at the table because she was available and wanted it. because, unfortunately, no one else has so much adhered to the prototype of what a successful business leader should be. But that does not mean that this seat will no longer be available, and that does not mean that women should not try to succeed where Elizabeth Holmes failed. It simply means that we need to re-examine what this prototype looks like.

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