girls just wanna have fund$

am i rite, ladies?

You are cordially invited to this week’s brew of High Tea, your dispatch of 🔥 internet culture served piping hot. This week: celebrating the womxn we love Doing Bits™ for the culture on International Women’s Day. 

Drink up. 🐸☕️

what we’ve been sipping on:

📖Invisible Women gets illustrated. You all remember Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez OBE right? Her revelatory exposé shed light on the fact that British women are 50% more likely to get misdiagnosed after a heart attack and that Google’s speech recognition software is 70% more likely to recognise a male voice, among many other startling data deep dives. CCP is also the woman behind campaigns that include getting a woman on Bank of England banknotes and forcing Twitter to revise its policies for dealing with abuse 👏. If you don’t know...get to know and make sure Invisible Women is next in line at your feminist book club. We love data acrobatics here at High Tea, so can’t help but be the tiniest bit mesmerized by Mona Chalabi’s data visualions and illustrations (aka “trying to take the numb out of numbers”) on the cost of living, dying and just about everything in between. 

🎵BENEE. That’s the tweet. Looks like the kids are doing alright these days, as the 20 year old Kiwi pop visionary has soundtracked not one, but two TikTok anthems of 2020 already. Although the top comment on Glitter (anthem status ✅) reads “like if you did not come from TikTok”, BENEE’s lyricism couldn’t encapsulate teen angst more if it tried: “I know I fucked up, I'm just a loser / Shouldn't be with ya, guess I'm a critter / While you're out there drinkin', I'm just here thinkin' / 'Bout where I should've been / I've been lonely”. Regardless of whether you’re fluent in the international TikTok lexicon, don’t sleep on BENEE’s latest - Supalonely - which gets the 🐸☕️certified bop of approval. We’re calling New Zealand’s breakout up-and-comer for song of the summer wistfulness already. 

🎶Thee best. We couldn’t make it through this dispatch without a tip of the hat to Megan Thee Stallion, who took 2019 by storm (we’re still practicing our daily mantra of “Yeah I’m in my bag, but I’m in his too”). On Friday she got the green light to drop her latest project Suga in the midst of legal troubles with her label (which saw #FREEMEGAN trending) over the increasingly common “360 deal”, where artists share profits from sectors that labels aren’t traditionally involved in. It’s no secret that the biz is dominated by male execs, but ‘Inclusion in the Recording Studio’, a 2019 study from USC Annenberg, found that just 2.1% of producers were female and of these, only four were women of colour. Time for an industry reset? Now that’s real hot girl shit. 

♀ Show me the (hor)mone$. Think 23andMe but for your ovaries. We relish Modern Fertility’s straight-talking, no nonsense approach to women’s health. Let’s face it, if women had a hand in healthcare from day 1, we’d already have vending machines for feminine products, fertility tests for free and gyno visits on 🔒. Modern Fertility is, as the name suggests, the new classic we’ve been waiting for, inviting all womxn to have autonomy over their own health and be informed on their hormone levels through a simple at-home fertility test. No docs, no $$$$ price tag. Plus, this #IWD the team are offering $15 credit towards a test to gift to a woman in your life. You can thank us later 🐸☕️

Libby Brittain @libbybrittain

This product from Modern Fertility hits a lot of notes for me. I recently went to my OBGYN to replace my IUD, but I also asked to talk before about fertility planning. (Thinking ahead!) She brushed me off, saying I was going in “two different directions.”

modernfertility.comWhy (and how) we built our new fertility planning toolThinking about kids now? Still on the fence? Considering egg freezing? We’ve got you covered. With our new fertility planning tool, find out everything you need to know to get proactive about your reproductive health.

🎙Take me to ur leader. ALL HAIL! This poddy has been a staple in our lives since 2k16. Regularly a top charter, Deborah Frances-White, former Jehovah’s Witness turned comedian, turned guilty feminist leader, turned refugee activist, leads her guilty fem to societal victory; with heaps of laughs and “bloody hell”s along the way. Starting every podcast with “I’m a feminist but…”, a line that conjures up an all manner of scenarios for aspiring feminists to relate to, DFW injects humor while exploring “the noble goals of 21st century women and the hypocrisies and insecurities which undermine them.” Say it again louder for the people at the back! 💁‍♀️

💹The Visa of Bitcoin? Show me the money. SF based Lightning Labs, aka the company that is “building the next generation of decentralized, resilient financial infrastructure”, raises $10m in Series A financing (led by Craft Ventures) as it gears up to launch its first paid service for merchants looking to accept $BTC payments. Co-founded by Elizabeth Stark, who currently sits as its CEO, is the 30-something described by Fortune as “well poised to solve Bitcoin's most chronic problem: a sluggish network that takes at least 10 minutes to process a transaction”. The crypto gender gap is real (only 5% of crypto coders are women) which is why it’s so exciting to see Stark Doing Bits™ in the blockchain space. We’re all in for anything that enables direct payments between peers instead of a third-party that monetizes user data. Watch this space. 👀

elizabeth stark @starkness

Today we're one step closer to bringing #bitcoin to a billion people. Lightning is making this a reality. ⚡️ Can't believe how far our community has come building new use cases and bringing financial freedom to the world. 🌍�Bz

Lightning Labs⚡️ @lightning

Lightning Labs is scaling! Announcing our $10M Series A to fuel LN development, and the Lightning Loop beta release, a product making it easier send/receive #bitcoin instantly. With 4000 developers and 30+ startups, the next decade of Lightning is on 🔥https://t.co/3P4gVm89OV

🎁 Make up for lost time. Cosmetics are big business. But it’s only recently that members of the trans and non-binary community have really started to get the recognition they deserve in this space. Brands have notoriously only perpetuated a homogenous and westernised beauty ideal, which at best has reinforced impossible beauty standards and worst reverently excluded marginalized communities and POC. That’s changing now, *tg*. Up and coming gender-neutral brands such as Jecca Blac Makeup and Fluide prioritise inclusivity and individuality and have caught the eyes of beauty giant L’Oreal. At long last 🙃.

🖥️Sophia Smith Galer check. If you’re not familiar with journalism’s TikTok rising star, wyd? The BBC World Service faith and ethics video journalist is currently killing the game as a twenty-something sharing her experiences across media spaces, as well as hopping on TikTok trends to provide insights learning Arabic as a non-native speaker - which have, of course, gone viral. If that wasn’t enough, SSG also shares her dulcet tones as a soprano through duets with her nonna, which will have you ringing your grandma faster than you can say ق. Is there anything she can’t do? We have to stan. 

Okay, you made it. Now remember, if your feminism isn’t intersectional...it’s bullshit! Happy IWD. 

ttyl,

Alice & Faye

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