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Newsweek's controversial Silicon Valley sexism cover

Courtesy Newsweek

The designer of the newest controversial Newsweek cover said he was trying to illustrate the sexism that goes on in Silicon Valley. Missouri School of Journalism professors Earnest Perry, Mike McKean and Amy Simons discuss the issue on KBIA-FM’s media criticism program, “Views of the News.” 

For more, follow Views of the News on  Facebook ,  Twitter, and  YouTube.  

When the cover first came out, there was a lot of criticism. Perry points out that when you start talking about sexism, you can find it all around us.

"I think part of this is when you start talking about sexism you can find it anywhere. And I think what he was trying to do, and maybe what Newsweek was trying to do, is get eyeballs into that article."

The article is about how entrenched sexism is in Silicon Valley. McKean said he sees how women could see this as sexism in service of exposing sexism, but thinks the cover really says it all.

http://youtu.be/9JZ5SZNvKUA

"And the cover really says it all. Here’s a cursor looking up the skirt of a young woman carrying a laptop."

Since this article, a conversation has started in Silicon Valley about what is going on with sexism and how much truth there is to the Newsweek article. Some women have come out and said that the level of sexism this article portrays is not exactly true. Perry discusses that conversations like these are when you can really start talking about the issues at hand.

"So now you've got these conversations going on, and I think that's when you can really start talking about the issue, and maybe that can lead to some substantive change in what is going on out there."

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