In May 2020, after many meetings providing detailed feedback, I posted the following essay about my disturbing experience at the previous year’s Women in Management banquet at Stanford’s business school. Despite prior approval to post, I was asked to take down the essay which I agreed to do temporarily in order to work though new feedback. Months of painful conversation yielded important learnings I will share separately; for now, here is the essay again.
Although her relationship to the Kushners didn’t come up, having learned of it, an image of the brothers and their wives flashed in my mind. I wondered if looking similar to Ivanka helped Karlie feel like she fit in with a group that, unlike her, had been born billionaires. I know my own short, brown body would have felt out of place in that family portrait.
There’s no doubt the most powerful man in the country particularly values tall, White women. He’s probably not the first in his role to do so but he is the most recent to foment hate against those who don’t match that template. He inspires rage against refugees for being from Somalia, not Norway. He enacts policies specifically against ‘the advancement of…women and…underrepresented minorities’ in spheres spanning reproductive rights to education to family welfare.
I only had one job at that banquet: to enjoy myself, and I failed at it. Or, rather, Stanford failed me. My early joy descended from concern into alarm, then alienation by the end. Below are five simple ways Stanford could have avoided the hypocrisy of its banquet. While minorities were unrepresented in Stanford’s fireside chat, they were certainly in the room. A business school student in attendance had even written a New York Times op-ed on “healing mentally from the daily anxieties of being a member of a racial minority group”.
We’re excited to get more scholars into Kode for Klossy but learning to code is just their first challenge for a STEM career. They need unbiased hiring practices and inclusive work environments. They need mentors and sponsors. We can’t make enough gains at the pipeline end to offset attrition. We need you out there building empowering, inclusive organizations. What will you do as emerging leaders?4. Amplify the power of community and diminish pure individualism.
Supermodels, whose job is literally to be a superlative body, play a role in this. The beauty industry constructs an image then selects people whose bodies can be molded to it, often using children to pose as adult women. These models’ bodies become a standard that mediates between society’s idea of beauty and any individual woman — or, worse, between a woman and her own self-worth. By manufacturing beauty as a rare commodity, the industry weaponizes it against women.
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