In case you’ve not heard, Elon Musk has just hired a new female CEO called Linda Yaccarino. Tweeting to his 139 million followers on Friday, he said he was "excited" to welcome Yaccarino, to the role, adding that he was "looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app".
Musk, who bought Twitter in October and has been running it since, has long insisted that he would step down as top executive at the company, which is now called X Corp, and has said that Yaccarino’s focus will be on business operations ‘while I focus on product design & new technology.’
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Musk initially teased the news of a female CEO last week and following the announcement, Tesla's shares jumped more than 2 per cent, in a sign that investors were pretty pleased about the move. The question is, just how much can Yaccarino actually change the sexist culture at Twitter and is it just some kind of hiring-a-female-boss box-ticking exercise by Musk in last-minute attempts to change the company’s dwindling reputation?
Do we care more about trauma or the performance of trauma?
Only last month were there reports that Musk had cut the company’s maternity and parental leave from 20 weeks to just two, according to internal company documents.
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The San Francisco-based social media platform altered its previous policy to “whatever is required by law in the region where the employees work, along with a ‘top up’ of two weeks of leave,” wrote New York Times reporter Kate Conger, who cited the internal memo.
There is no national policy for paid family leave in the US. However, the Family and Medical Leave Act gives certain employees “unpaid, job-protected leave for specified family and medical reasons” for a period of up to 12 weeks.
Musk’s change in policy puts Twitter workers seeking additional paid leave at the mercy of the state in which they live.
England and Wales watchdog has found Police officers with links to organised crime, sex offenders and domestic abuse have made it through vetting procedures in recent months.
Then, of course, there’s the on-going sex discrimination cases being filed against Twitter after Elon sacked thousands of staff. In December, two former female staff members filed an unfair dismissal claim against the tech company, arguing that more women were laid off than men. They claim that 57 per cent of female staff were laid off during Twitter’s mass sackings on November 4, compared to 47 per cent of men.
In a court filing, the former staff claimed Musk had unfairly demanded staff commit to “extremely hardcore” working hours, despite knowing this would force mothers and female caregivers to quit.
The former Twitter workers stated that some staff were told they would need to work “24/7” to meet Mr Musk’s product demands and sleep in the office.
Yaccarino herself is a mother of two who has built her career as an advertising executive, starting out in media sales before working her way up to becoming an executive vice president and chief operating officer, before joining NBCUniversal - one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies - as chairman for global advertising and partnerships.
We need to rewrite the script.
She was described as "a marketer's leader" by Mark DiMassimo, founder and creative chief of ad agency DiGo, who added: "She understands what marketers need." However, will she have enough power to make a U-turn on some of these awful policies that do nothing to support women and parents in the workplace and overhaul Twitter’s image and - more importantly, Elon Musk’s?
After all, his sexist, misogynist comments are all over the internet. Let’s not forget the time when he proposed opening a school with the acronyms TITS or when he called Senator Elizabeth Warren sexist things because she said he should pay more in taxes. Or what about running a company (Tesla), where a female worker claims that sexual harassment was “rampant,” alleging “nightmarish conditions” and a factory that “more resembles a crude, archaic construction site or frat house than a cutting-edge company in the heart of the progressive San Francisco Bay area." Tesla denies allegations and tried to push the case aside, claiming the female worker signed an arbitration agreement that meant terminating her rights to sue but last May a California judge denied this and said the case could resume in court.
“Being a Mom is one of the biggest blessings of my life,” Yaccarino wrote on Twitter on Mother’s Day (in the US) yesterday.
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Let’s hope this female CEO has the power to overhaul everything that Musk’s Twitter has become and actually empower the women and parents who choose to work there.
There’s a helluva lot of work to do.
