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Nearly a decade after the #MeToo movement burst into public consciousness, the upheaval at Nvidia may be a lesson in how little CEOs seem to have learned.
Nvidia’s embattled CEO Jensen Huang has resigned, following a New York Times report on …
When Jensen Huang told Nvidia employees on November 8 that he had been “unfaithful” to his wife, there’s a phrase that quickly became omnipresent in the media: Huang had been the victim of a “honey trap”, laid by Alice Huang (no relation), a Singapore-based tech executive identified as a Chinese spy by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Honey trap,” seriously?
The story behind the phrase is that a good, hardworking man was minding his own business when a serpent of a woman lured him off the righteous path by dishonest means and propositions he, being a man, simply couldn’t refuse. It is assumed that male sex drive is some kind of force of nature that no adult can reasonably be expected to control. So there’s a double sexist stereotype here. Can a 63-year-old billionaire CEO really be supposed to have no say over his sex life? Like a bear wouldn’t be able to resist honey?
Anyone who, like me, grew up in the 1980s knows a close relative of this idea: the “homewrecker,” a word aimed at the other woman and never at the husband who cheated. One of the decade’s most successful films, Fatal Attraction (1987), tells the story of a married man (Michael Douglas) whose affair turns into a nightmare when the woman (Glenn Close) refuses to stay discreet and starts asking for more. The film portrays the mistress as mentally unstable and dangerous. The film ends with the wife killing the mistress and family values restored. The husband’s betrayal is never really an issue. I’m ashamed to admit that when I first watched it, some time in the 1990s, I sided completely with the poor husband, hounded by a woman the film had led me to see as a witch.
Both ideas have their roots in Genesis, where Adam, asked why he ate the forbidden fruit, answers that the woman gave it to him. It is easy scapegoating: powerful men keep their reputation for rationality while some snake of a woman takes the blame for their lapses of judgment. There’s a paradox that I find difficult to swallow. For centuries, women were judged too foolish to vote or hold office, yet the same culture credits them with enough cunning to bring down kings and CEOs. Men, meanwhile, are supposed to be fit to lead nations and markets while being too weak to resist the first temptation that comes their way.
Deadly clichés
The term comes from spy fiction: dictionaries credit John le Carré with popularizing “honey trap” in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in 1974. Espionage has long been a man’s world, and in its novels a female spy is very often a seductress. Real Cold War espionage looked quite different, since East Germany’s best-known seduction program used men, so-called “Romeo” agents sent west to seduce secretaries with access to government files.
In the Nvidia story, much of the coverage of Alice Huang also draws on images Western culture has attached to Asian women for more than a century: the mysterious seductress, the Dragon Lady. In the U.S., they go back at least to the Page Act of 1875, the country’s first restrictive federal immigration law, which was enforced on the presumption that Chinese women were prostitutes. Any woman arriving from Asia had to prove she wasn’t one.
In March 2021, a white man killed eight people at three Atlanta-area spas, six of them Asian women, and police relayed his description of his victims as “sources of temptation.” Asian women end up being blamed for men’s desire. And Atlanta showed that this cliché can be deadly. Coverage casting Alice Huang as a seductress is anything but harmless.
Nobody trapped the CEO
A CEO’s sexual relationship with someone working for one of his company’s biggest customers is a clear conflict of interest. Alice Huang’s employer, Megaspeed, is said to have bought about $4.8 billion of Nvidia hardware over the past two years. In most companies, a sales manager sleeping with a key client’s buyer would be expected to disclose it and hand the account to a colleague. Nobody would describe that sales manager as “trapped,” and the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies, who has far more power, deserves no more indulgence.
The phrase also shrinks Alice Huang: if she is only “honey,” she cannot be much of a professional. Yet she ran a business that bought chips at enormous scale, and if the allegations hold, she will have to answer for export violations and espionage, serious crimes committed with the very agency the word denies her.
Call it what it is
The honey trap trope has consequences in the workplace. In 2019, a LeanIn.Org and SurveyMonkey survey found that 60% of male managers in the U.S. were uncomfortable mentoring, working one-on-one with, or socializing with a woman, and 36% of men said they had avoided doing so for fear of how it would look. A woman alone with a powerful man is seen as a danger to him, even though she is far more likely to be the one harassed. She also pays in lost dinners, business trips and sponsorship, the informal moments that decide who gets promoted.
Other words would be more honest. A CEO had an affair with an executive at one of his largest customers, a woman U.S. officials reportedly believe was working for Chinese intelligence, and his board is now examining whether the relationship compromised the company. It is less catchy than “honey trap,” but it treats both people as adults responsible for their choices. Isn’t that the standard any employee would expect?
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