Corporate culture gets rough

Seems like a wave designed to systematically push women

It’s been a very macho fortnight. A whole bunch of gents have recently said or done some very manly things, starting with Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO, who has been doing a lot of mixed martial arts and hunting, and visiting with Donald Trump in November ’24, is now calling for a more ‘masculine’ company culture and leadership style.

To be fair, he did get famous by creating Facemash (a site that sourced photographs of female Harvard undergraduates without permission from the university’s online directories, then presented users with pairs of women and asked them to rank who was hotter. The homepage stated, “Were we admitted for our looks? No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.”) So he’s just reverting to type, really.

Anyway, Meta is loosening restrictions on discussions of contentious social issues, such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It has scrapped its fact-checking programme aimed at curbing misinformation, placing the onus on users to police falsehoods. And it will insert more political content into people’s feeds, after previously de-emphasising that very material. So, things are starting to smell pretty Musky at Facebook.

Imaging: Deni Lal Imaging: Deni Lal

In another development, the chairman of Larsen & Toubro has been seen browbeating employees in an internal video. He was telling them to work a 90-hour week, including Sundays, because “how long can you stare at your wife?” This is problematic on multiple levels.

First, the chairman has said this in spite of having a sizeable human resource team (led by a woman, who is, as we speak, posting on LinkedIn to clean up the mess which he is too macho to clean up himself) to educate him on the importance of a work-life balance in building a culture of healthy, sustainable (not short-term, use-and-throw) excellence.

Second, the chairman directly links employees’ patriotism to their working hours, citing China as the ultimate ‘Sharmaji ka beta’ we should all be aspiring to be; or else be considered anti-nationals.

Third, Glassdoor and Reddit users have been quick to point out the staggering difference between L&T’s measly starting salaries of Rs5 lakh per annum, compared to the chairman’s own Rs51 crore per annum. Many have pointed out they would be quite happy to work on Sundays if they could have what the chairman is having.

Fourth, the man has been caught saying ‘wife’, and not ‘spouse’, which demonstrates that women at his company are invisible to him.

Finally, his remarks also seem to be a macho-upping-of-the-ante reaction to the statement made recently by Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy, where he asked young people to work a 70-hour week because “we are poor and need to make India number one”.

Basically, it’s a classic (and very-male) competitive game of mine’s bigger than yours. The sort that Zuckerberg is getting nostalgic for. In fact, prior to his ‘masculine’ statement, he just shut down Meta’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) operations worldwide. (Apple is under pressure to scrap its DEI programme as well, but is resisting.)

Call me alarmist, but it seems to me that corporate culture worldwide is mutating into a more and more rough and tough, ‘masculine’ affair—employees are expected to work brutally long hours, and put up with aggressively sexist and racist cooler talk while doing so—both things that women, given our status as child-bearers and primary care-givers, as well as the physically weaker, less-aggressive sex—are ill-equipped to do. Seen against the backdrop of the Pelicot case in France (the fact that so many men could prefer an inert ragdoll as a ‘partner’), and the rise of self-objectifying, domestic goddess tradwife trends on Meta, it seems like a wave designed to systematically push women (and minorities) completely out of the workplace.

editor@theweek.in