As Facebook dominates the news with its initial public offering, activists a

游客2024-10-08 28

问题 As Facebook dominates the news with its initial public offering, activists are seizing the moment to pressure the company to add some estrogen and ethnicity to its white-male board.
A women’s rights group called Ultraviolet, which has been running an online petition that claims to have attracted more than 50,000 signatures, is escalating its push, posting a new You-Tube video called "Do Women Have a Future at Facebook?". The video shows photos of successful women such as Hillary Clinton getting their heads cropped off and replaced with the smiling face of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
"Facebook has grown off the backs of women, who make up the majority of its users and are responsible for the majority of sharing and fan activity on the site," the group says in a blurb accompanying the video. An all-male board, the group says, is "not just wrong, it’s bad for business".
A related campaign, called Face It, criticizes the lack of ethnic diversity on the seven-member board. "Seven white men: That’s ridiculous," the group says on its homepage, alongside headshots of the men. The campaign, which lists dozens of human-rights groups and corporate executives as supporters, also has its own YouTube video. Called "Face It, Facebook," the video cites a recent Zuckerberg letter to investors that says: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."
That message is at odds with the pale-faced board, activists say.
Susan Stautberg, co-chairwoman of Women Corporate Directors, an organization for female corporate board members, says Zuckerberg’s thinking is flawed. "If you’re trying to expand a company globally, then you want someone on the board who has built a global brand," she says. "Most of these guys on Facebook’s board all have the same skills—they’re mostly from Silicon Valley and Washington. You want someone who has worked in China and India and rising markets. You want someone who has marketed to women. When you’re putting together a board, you don’t want your best friends, you want the best people."
Having zero female directors does not appear to be a good business plan, research shows. Companies with women on the board perform substantially better than companies with all-male boards, according to a 2011 study of Fortune 500 companies conducted by the research group Catalyst. The study showed that over the course of four to five years, companies with three or more female board members, on average, outperformed companies with no female board members by 84 percent when it came to return on sales and by 60 percent when it came to return on invested capital.
Facebook may secretly be on the lookout for a female board member, according to a recent Bloomberg report. Citing unnamed sources, Bloomberg said Facebook had enlisted the corporate-recruitment firm Spencer Stuart to help seek some diversity. Spencer Stuart says it does not comment on clients due to confidentiality agreements.
From The Daily beast, May 23, 2012 [br] The phrase "at odds with" in the fifth paragraph has the closest meaning of______.

选项 A、against all odds
B、supported by
C、at variance with
D、waifs and strays

答案 C

解析本题为语义题。at odds with意为”意见不一致，分歧”，A、B、D几项都没有此意。因此选C。

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