Feminists Need to Stop Sounding False Alarms About Sexism

Last week, in his first-ever public Q&A, Mark Zuckerberg was asked why he wears plain gray t-shirts apparently every waking moment of his life. “I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life,” the Facebook CEO replied.

Sounds innocuous enough, right? Not to some feminist critics.

“Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work?”wrote New York magazine’s Allison Davis in an essay titled, “Zuckerberg Explains His Gray T-Shirts, Sounds Pretty Sexist.” “Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as 'silly' or 'frivolous' as dressing professionally—they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.” Mic's Ellie Krupnick, meanwhile, claimed Zuckerberg’s comment “reinforces a sexist double standard.” His use of the word “frivolous” suggested “that women's focus on ‘unserious’ things such as fashion preclude them from focusing on more important things.”

Seriously? Zuckerberg did not explicitly—or, I'd argue, implicitly—contrast himself with women, but merely stated that he finds fashion concerns to be "silly" and "frivolous." If anything, he was referring to his fellow male tech CEOs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and his Prada suits; after all, only 6 percentof Silicon Valley CEOs are female. But in criticizing Zuckerberg, Davis and Krupnick relied on a stereotype that he himself did not—that only women care about clothes—and perhaps even reinforced that stereotype in sounding the feminist alarm.

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