Cage Match: Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Wojcicki to Rumble

By Jennifer Cloer

Ok, so that headline is absurd. And untrue (misinformation label inserted here).

Unfortunately, the Elon Musk / Mark Zuckerberg cage match is a real discussion point happening in tech right now. It’s real enough that Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), has been brought into the fold.

When we change the primary characters in this narrative to women, it immediately becomes, as I mentioned, absurd. Because we can’t imagine women in our industry behaving this way. Because we wouldn’t be taken seriously, and because we’d be ridiculed for such a crude stunt. Our bodies would immediately become the subject of the conversation, and it would devolve into another scary lesson about harassment. It’s also likely we’d lose our jobs or be written off as ‘crazy.’

This cage match fiasco is perhaps one of the grossest examples of tech bro culture to date, with threats of physical violence and lots of shit talking to settle market competition. I’m really disappointed that Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s antics (a PR stunt) have dominated so many headlines. 

That’s why the work we do - all of us, not just Story Changes Culture - the work we collectively do to elevate women’s voices across tech is so important. Perhaps more important than ever.

Jennifer Cloer

Part of our mission at Story Changes Culture is to elevate women across tech to advance their businesses and technologies and to create a more inclusive industry-wide conversation.

Women have unique contributions to make to the tech industry. When more diversity is represented across media channels, the industry-wide conversations become more inclusive, more interesting and take us all further.

I’m encouraged by the increasing number of inquiries here at Story Changes Culture from companies that want to elevate both up-and-coming women and established executives (part of our Ideas Leadership Program designed for women). From AI and security to tech policy and data privacy and so much more, we need to hear from the women among us. 

Let’s tell these stories, let’s increase the volume of these voices and let’s create more interesting, constructive and productive conversations across our industry.