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Is The Backlash Against Facebook A Backlash Against Women?

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More Than Cheer

As a cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens, Brittany Rose did mind-boggling flips and spins on national television, putting in long days of practice, and smiled the whole way through.

Nevertheless, she got paid minimum wage.

Having had enough of that, she focused on a business. “I had to decide between spending my time and energy building someone else’s brand or building my own,” said Rose, who had also cheered for Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rose now runs a more than $350,000 cheerleading business in Loudoun, Va., teaching girls confidence. She is preparing to franchise More Than Cheer.

“You learn what self-talk is when you teach yourself to get over what seems like an unsurmountable obstacle, like learning how to flip yourself backwards,” she said. “You don’t learn that by kicking a ball.”

“And it’s a whole different level when you’re responsible for throwing a girl two stories in the air.”

Facebook has been a key part of the company’s success. Rose estimates that she gets about 75% of her customers through Facebook marketing, spending $700-$1,000 a month.

Many feminists have been watching for the backlash against the sexual harassment scandals and the MeToo movement. Remember the now-debunked Newsweek cover, “Too Late for Prince Charming?”, which came at the end of the 1970s and 1980s women’s lib movement? There is always a backlash, though we don’t always recognize it at the time.

The current backlash against social media and Facebook could be in part a backlash against women. Americans have been shocked, shocked to discover that an addiction to empty online praise is bad for society and one’s own mental health. As it becomes clearer the many ways social media platforms can be manipulated by evildoers, the distaste for social media, and maybe technology in general, is growing.

Yet, in ways not widely recognized, social media has empowered women – and the vitriol directed at social media now may be partly driven by discomfort at the way it is upending traditional power structures in business, marketing and finance.

Women’s power – all power, perhaps – is about choice. And social media, by lowering some of the traditional barriers to starting a business and women’s economic power, has widened women’s choices.

  • Social media has lowered marketing costs, disproportionately helping women-owned businesses. Marketing is a capital-intensive part of business building; many a good startup has foundered for lack of capital for marketing when it came time to scale up. But women have had a historic lack of access to capital. It’s hard to imagine a bank loan officer approving a $100,000 loan for Brittany Rose. Facebook allowed her to bootstrap the business with low-cost trial and error. Now, she is serving 150 girls a week with camps and classes. (It’s interesting that this story is playing out all over the world, such as in the case of Nigerian entrepreneur, Sadat Salami). This is perhaps why women are more likely than men to use digital tools to growth their businesses, according to a report by the OECD and Facebook.
  • Social media is also playing a key role in helping women get financing. Many new alternative lenders use social media to make connections in peer-to-peer lending. They also use it to glean information that helps them make loans to people who otherwise might not be served by the traditional banking system. On one hand, data-driven and remote lending could remove some discrimination from the system; on the other, financing methods that rely on, say, social networks as an indicator of the likelihood to repay rather than collateral could tend to favor women. There is evidence that some of these platforms are used disproportionately by women. More than half of the lenders on Kiva’s platform are women, and 81% of Kiva borrowers are women, for instance.
  • At the most basic level of all, social media removes barriers to disseminating information. If a girl who can’t go to school has access to a Facebook group or a community that offers her role models and a place to ask questions, how much is that worth? What are the effects? When I started writing about Facebook six months ago, I talked to Peyton Young, a Johns Hopkins University economist, about how social media might be changing societal norms. That question is still open for debate, and probably will be for a long time. But he pointed out that social media is undoubtedly changing access to information. The people that disproportionately affects worldwide are women, who overall have less access to information.
  • Social media also allows women to organize. Women are at a disadvantage when it comes to one of the keys to organizing a business or a movement, which is travel. Not only do they have less money, they have less time. It’s not a coincidence that the #MeToo movement evolved across a wide geography. Nor is this the only women’s led movement that has evolved on social media. Take Mothers Demand Action, a gun control organization. Mother Jones reported on this, quoting Kristin Goss, a political scientist and author of DisarmedThe Missing Movement for Gun Control in America.  Second Amendment activists have long relied on gun shows, stores, and ranges to rally their faithful, she said, “but for supporters of gun regulations, what’s that space—the emergency room? It’s Facebook.”
  • Using social media, omen are reshaping the very fundamental question of who gets money at all. Women are slightly more likely to use crowdfunding platforms – which arguably wouldn’t exist without social media – but significantly more likely than men to give people in need, versus people with an idea.

What it means to cheer

Cheerleading isn’t all that it seems, as I learned from talking to Rose, who made a compelling case for how it empowers girls. Her company has about 15 employees.

“We have an opportunity to teach our girls skills that will them leaders in our community,” she said. “Cheerleading gave me confidence, speaking skills. It allowed me to learn how to turn on my performance face.“

Nor is it particularly unsafe. I’d seen a few stories a decade ago about cheerleading’s dangers, but those, too, have been exaggerated.

Cheerleaders, meanwhile, have been suing for fair pay after reports that they make less than hot dog vendors. Cheerleaders are an integral part of football brands, which makes their value hard to calculate. But if you based their compensation on the revenue they bring in, some people have estimated they ought to be paid in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year for the part-time job. That’s far more than minimum wage.

Cheerleading looks on the surface to be something that demeans women. Under the surface, is it?

What does a backlash against women look like?

The backlash against social media is more than it seems, too. The (mostly) men who created social media have been indulging in what looks like a paroxysm of guilt over the damage they’ve wrought. But when I consider the ways women are able to access power through social media, I see a second strand of emotion in those confessionals: Regret. Traditional economic power structures are being upended by technology; where that ends is anybody’s guess.

It’s tempting now, as we’ve seen the damage social media is doing, to turn it off. My guess is that 2018 will see campaigns that encourage us to do just that.

But turning social media off means turning off a new source of power and money for women. Turning it off might be the backlash that was inevitably coming.

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