Arianna Huffington

I was talking to a friend the other day trying to describe to him how I notice, as a bookkeeping consultant working with a number of small businesses, that male business owners get a lot more, as I put it, “help” than female business owners. Comparatively, male business owners have piles of resources at their disposal: multiple sources of financing and credit, access to substantive information regarding their industry, unsolicited tips and advice from professionals not directly related to the daily operations of their business, and, most significantly, the enthusiastic contribution of their employees. Employees working for male bosses think hard, problem solve creatively, act autonomously on behalf of the company, log a lot of overtime and are eager to impress the boss.

Female owners, on the other hand, have to ask for these same things. Their phones don’t ring with the latest industry gossip from colleagues, they don’t get early information from financial consultants or tips on how to save money on their insurance policies from their brokers, if they need advice they search for it on their own most of the time not even aware that other (male) business owners don’t have to. Employees who work for women often treat their jobs as a hobby or a stepping-stone to another career, barely concealing distain for the job at hand. “Can you do me a favor?” is the way women business owners ask me to do a task they hired me to do. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that just 15% of Fortune 500 companies have a female execs at the top (NOW Women in Media Fact Sheet) when the smart, hard working women I work with can’t get their basic business needs met.

My friend didn’t get it and, I think, doubted that my perception was true, happening in real time, in the regular world. I wondered myself what it was I was seeing and if, perhaps, I was misinterpreting some of it, or even all of it, until I read what 12 year old Leah had to say in Barbara Wiener’s article Highlighting Girls in Youth Media, (Youth Media Reporter) “Everyone will have different ideas and if a girl has an idea, the boys will just sort of withdraw. They’ll let her do her idea but they won’t be much help or engage much. (However), if a boy has an idea, the girl will drop her idea and work real hard to make his idea work.(my italics) You might be disappointed at first but you learn real fast that to fit in, you don’t push your ideas.” Here it is. The seed, the beginning, of what I see in business everyday. The girls (and boys) drop their idea and “work real hard” to move a boy’s desire forward; but not a girl’s. Later, as adults, we don’t work hard for women. As women we doubt we should be worked for.

Wiener goes on to say that “girls need opportunities to see how their work-or final product-connect with others and how making a media project can have an impact.” Rebecca Richards Bullen (Youth Media Reporter). suggests giving girls the tools of media to use to tear down current media and rebuild images of themselves, as they would like to be seen. As media is about seeing it is vital that women are represented in all media as the three dimensional, multi-faceted, fully human and valuable beings they are. It is vital that the Majority is no longer invisible. (The Women's Media Center). It is true that we will never be truly equal until we are fully and fairly represented in the media.

People like Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Connie Chung and Katie Courac helped us to see women who are intelligent and hard-hitting televised journalists. Gloria Steinem contributed the same in print with Ms. Magazine. In 2005 Arianna Huffington blended the formidable intelligent journalist role with new media and a significant element of media ownership when she and partners launched Huffington Post.

Covering topics from politics to celebrity gossip Huffington Post is a liberal tone newspaper in every sense. Its appealing online design has always resembled a newspaper albeit one that is interactive. Because it is a news aggregate, reading the Huffington Post can be a little bit like being in a room with all of the smartest and loudest people you know. Comments posted by readers from around the world can easily be as educational and insightful as any item published on any news source. I can sign up for email notices when journalists I learned from or think are off their rocker post new pieces and I can easily navigate through the threads and sections I want to read.

The best thing or worst thing about Huffington Post has often been Arianna Huffington. Accused of killing other media and media sources via the practice of aggregation and accused of unfair use of copy she and Huffpo came under fire early. Although, or perhaps because, she is journalist and enthusiastic advocate for free news and information and open forum Huffington has been negatively painted as overly aspiring and ambitious. Her dedication to liberal alternative media was doubted due to her former conservativism and personal wealth. Like Steinem and other female journalists she was suspect for being beautiful, the suggestion being she was merely a puppet for men behind the Post. Simultaneously thrilled by a powerful, beautiful, passionate and intelligent woman on the news scene media consumers were simultaneously drawn to and freaked out by Arianna Huffington. (as I write this Word monitors the her name, correctly spelling out “Arianna”.)

Today AOL owns Huffington Post and Huffington is at the reins of something called Huffington Post Media Group at AOL. This step into the back ground is, no doubt, important in some ways but the heady rush of seeing her, hearing her, reading what seemed to be her personal curated creation everyday is missing these days.