"Twitter-Chef liefert sich Twitter-Krieg mit Feministinnen"

Verschiedene Medien, darunter das Wall Street Journal berichten über Scharmützel, die sich der Twitter-Chef Dick Costolo wegen des Mangels an weiblichen Führungskräften bei Twitter mit Feministinnen lieferte. Ein Auszug aus dem Artikel:

Nur eine Frau – Chefjuristin Vijaya Gadde – ist im Top-Management von Twitter vertreten, geht aus den am Donnerstag eingereichten IPO-Unterlagen hervor. (...) Costolo nahm Anstoß an einigen Bemerkungen von Vivek Wadhwa, ein Mitglied des Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance (...). "Das ist die elitäre Arroganz der Silicon-Valley-Mafia, der Twitter-Mafia", sagte Wadhwa laut dem Artikel. "Das ist dasselbe männliche chauvinistische Denken. Die Tatsache allein, dass sie einen Börsengang ohne eine einzige Frau im Board durchführen – wie können sie es wagen?"

Wie immer, wenn sich irgendein Macker als besonders feministischer Frauenfreund inszenieren will, freut es einen, wenn er die passende Antwort von einer Frau bekommt, die keine Lust hat, sich auf diesen Unsinn einzulassen. In diesem Fall erledigt den Job Sarah Lacy, preisgekrönte Journalistin und Chefredakteurin des Nachrichtenportals PandoDaily, mit dem Kommentar Twitter’s female "problem": This is why mobs don’t appoint public company boards - einem Kommentar, der auch in die deutsche Debatte über die Frauenquote passt. Lacy befindet:

I can’t believe this debate about whether Twitter is an awful company simply because everyone on its board has a Y-chromosome is still going on.

Memo to the press: It’s no longer August. It’s not particularly a slow news month. There are so many interesting conversations to be having about Twitter’s impending IPO. Really – a three-day freak out about no women being on the board is one of them?

It’s not like there are 40 people on said-board. It’s a small handful. And the company has been very thoughtful about who they are, even rotating out some of its earliest and most loyal backers. Furthermore, Twitter has long been a company priced at perfection with no wiggle room for operational error. The board is a carefully picked group that CEO Dick Costolo felt he could trust when he accepted the challenge of fixing a valuable but highly dysfunctional company. Trust was particularly important given his rejiggering of the board was in part due to leaks that were damaging the company.

…And we seriously think that amid all that, his fiduciary duty to Twitter’s shareholders and employees should have been to stop and think: "Wait, it’s not enough that these are the people I trust who are qualified, willing to do this, and who can help me make this into a public company….they aren’t diverse enough…Well let’s tear up this list and go get binders of women…"

Do we honestly think that any of the women that the New York Times proposes as women who could add value to Twitter’s board would want to be on the board just because Costolo needed a woman? Most successful women I know would be insulted by that kind of tokenism.

And why stop at a woman? I don’t see an African American or Latino on Twitter’s board. Why aren’t we outraged by that?

It’s not a surprise that many of the people complaining are the people who literally wake up everyday looking for a woman’s issue to be outraged about. Don’t take it from me. When they invariably slam this piece, go look at their Twitter feeds.

Vivek Wadhwa has been banging this drum for a while, delighted that it gets so much attention. I used to be friends with Vivek. I first convinced him to write for TechCrunch, and even traveled to India with him on a trip for my second book. I’ve always liked him personally and respected his intellect. And I finally had to block him on social media, because I found his continual comments about gender so offensive. Particularly one Twitter screed that said I only successfully raised venture capital for Pando because of how I look and who I know.

Couldn’t possibly be that I was qualified, Vivek? As I told him at the time, in a stretch to prove the Valley’s sexism, he actually alleged something far more sexist than anything anyone else has ever said to me in a business setting.

Hier geht es weiter. Und da Sarah Lacy eine zupackende Frau ist und keine lamentierende Feministin (in Lacys Worten: "women waking up everyday and trying to manufacture some new feminist outrage") landet sie bei einem Fazit, das sich mit der Einschätzung deckt, die Alexander Ulfig dieser Tage online gestellt hat. Denn hinter den Kritikern des radikalen Feminismus findet man inzwischen die Menschen, die Frauen wirklich ernst nehmen, während man unter den Männern, die sich als Bannerträger des Feminismus in die Brust werfen, die tatsächlichen Sexisten findet. Starke Frauen und Männer aber finden diese "weißen Ritter" nur noch peinlich.