SQUARE LEADS THE WAY AND NANCY PELOSI APPLAUDS
Want to know how to break down barriers to female advancement? Ask a woman who’s busted through every glass ceiling around to reach the pinnacle of national politics.
Square employees, female merchants, and Square CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (and Women 2.0!) gathered at Square headquarters yesterday to discuss initiatives to encourage women’s participation in the workplace and tech sphere with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The group of female Square employees and women small business owners shared brief stories on some of the hardships they’ve faced while being a woman in tech, while House minority leader Pelosi and the Square executives highlighted their efforts to battle back against these problems.
How to Mint More Coders Square additionally used the opportunity to announce their first year of Code Camp for high school girls and their second year of Code Camp for college women. The initiative, led by Square employees Rachel Constable and Vanessa Slavich, is aimed at strengthening young women’s coding and leadership skills. The high school Code Camp has the additional goal of helping prep girls for the AP Computer Science exam (though frustratingly, the number of US high schools teaching the subject is declining).
“Today, 18% of computing jobs in the U.S. are held by women,” Square CFO Sarah Friar said in an official statement. “We created Code Camp to encourage more women to enter careers in technology and empower a new generation of entrepreneurs.”
The Strange Reason Why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Was "Bounced" From The Trump Meeting
However, one prominent tech CEO was missing: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whose absence puzzled pundits. Twitter's omission was all the more striking because of Trump's heavy dependence on the Twitter platform. With some 17.3 million followers of his account, the president-elect has made Twitter into the de facto press channel of his transition operation.
We now know the answer why Dorsey was MIA: according to Politico, Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation.
Trump has had public beefs with other tech execs at the sit-down. He's criticized Cook over Apple's refusal to decrypt a cellphone whose owner was implicated in a terrorist incident, for example, and Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post. But, it seems, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's role in what the Trump operation saw as the breaching of a deal was a step too far for those close to Trump.
The incident at issue was detailed in a Medium post last month by Gary Coby, director of digital advertising and fundraising for the Trump campaign. According to Coby, Dorsey personally intervened to block the Trump operation from deploying — as part of a $5 million deal between the social media company and the campaign — an emoji showing, in various renderings, small bags of money being given away or stolen. That emoji would have been offered to users as a replacement for the hashtag #CrookedHillary, a preferred Trump insult for his Democratic opponent."
We told them it was BS and what they were doing with a public platform was incredibly reckless and dangerous," wrote Coby of the back-and-forth between the Trump operation and Twitter.
I WANT A CROOKED HILLARY EMOJI! LOL
