There's no hiding from the culture wars | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 20th May 2022
When culture war issues rear their heads, the first instinct of many corporate executives is to duck theirs.
No matter which way you land on an emotive argument about people's rights and freedoms, it's going to be bad for business in some regard; some group of people is going to be mad at you, someone on the Internet is going to try to arrange a boycott of you, maybe some politicians are going to take cheap shots at you in the media.
In the face of that, well, perhaps it's not the most vertebrate of responses, but muttering something about the importance of shareholder value while lowering your head well below the parapet and keeping your lips firmly sealed seems like a tempting option. If you just stay out of the fray, nobody can get mad at you, right?
Well... No.
This week it's been Sony's turn to rediscover how badly wrong that approach can go, with an attempt to dodge and weave through the issues raised by the United States' reopening of an acrimonious debate on abortion rights turning into a damaging farce that's resulted in pretty much everyone being mad at the company. Most major corporations have understood -- often with a bit of unsubtle prompting and poking from their employees -- that they have some responsibility to stand up for employees' rights in this situation, and Sony is no exception; but it also desperately wanted not to make itself into a target for culture warriors in the process.
Commitment to diversity has to mean something when the chips are down, and the decisions are tougher than whether to put a rainbow flag in your Twitter avatars during Pride Month
The solution it hit upon is inelegant at best; it quietly made a $100,000 donation to the Women's
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