Good morning! Trump's Cabinet picks head into confirmation hearings, FTC chair Lina Khan shares reflections, and Mark Zuckerberg brings Meta into its "masculine" era.
- Masculinity at Meta. Donald Trump is set to take office next week, and if anyone's prepared, it's Meta, which spent the past week announcing a sweeping set of policy changes that seem to ready the tech and social media giant for Trump 2.0.
It all started on Jan. 7, when Meta announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program and overarching changes to its speech policies, which were quietly executed by a secretive, small team within the $135 billion company. Less "censorship," as Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in a video, allows Facebook and Instagram users to call LGBTQ people "mentally ill," describe women as "household objects" and otherwise demean groups that have become politicized by the right, like transgender people. Former U.K. deputy prime minister and Meta global affairs head Nick Clegg was replaced by Joel Kaplan, Zuckerberg's longtime emissary to the American right, whose name was on Meta's blog post announcing these changes.
Meta's makeover continued on Friday, when the company told employees it would end its diversity, equity, and inclusion work, including eliminating the role of chief diversity officer, according to the New York Times. (Longtime chief diversity officer Maxine Williams has a new role "focused on accessibility and engagement.") The company will no longer abide by diversity goals that set targets for hiring women and people of color and prioritized diverse businesses as vendors, the Times reported.
Then Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast, where the pair had a long exchange about gender roles and corporate America. Ultimately, Zuckerberg said that corporate America has gone "too far" in embracing "feminine energy" and become "culturally neutered"—and that companies have lacked "masculine energy."
The conversation started when Rogan asked Zuckerberg how his newfound passion for MMA and jiu jitsu has affected his view of corporate culture. Martial arts seem to be central to how Zuckerberg is defining "masculine energy:" "a culture that celebrates aggression a bit more." He said that after a lifetime surrounded by women—his three sisters and three daughters—getting into martial arts "turned on a part of [his] brain that had been missing." He said: "It's one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and it's another to basically say masculinity is bad. We swung culturally to that part of the spectrum—masculinity is toxic, we have to get rid of it."
He considered the female perspective, before shifting back into corporate mode for a moment: "If you’re a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it’s too masculine...It probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. You want women to be able to succeed and have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender.”
Let's consider Zuckerberg's definition of "masculine energy." It seems to be wrapped up in the idea of "aggression"—which is a limited view of masculinity. If you look around corporate America, masculine energy is distinctly not lacking—it's at the top of 89% of Fortune 500 companies today. It dominated the business world for centuries, before the decade or two in which women's leadership has influenced how businesses operate at scale.
If anything, this entire exchange is a sign of just how far the culture has shifted. Zuckerberg felt comfortable, as a Fortune 500 CEO, having this conversation in public. It's certainly far from the days when the best known export of Facebook's corporate culture was Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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