How a Woman Disappears from the History Books

Ross was disappointed when she read Confessore’s story this week and saw her role—which had been documented in previous news coverage, including the Times’ own—erased, but she wasn’t completely surprised. In the final months before getting the bill passed, her working relationship with MacTaggart had soured because, she says, he wanted her to take a less active role in the press and in fundraising from tech notables. In the final stretch, Ross wasn’t as eager as MacTaggart and Arney to drop their ballot initiative in favor of a bill passed by lawmakers; she worried the bill was weaker than the law they’d drafted and that it will be weakened further by lobbyists before going into effect in 2020.

Because Ross was an official proponent of the ballot initiative, MacTaggart needed her signature to withdraw it once lawmakers passed the bill; she did so reluctantly at the end of June after a tense email exchange. The bill passed on Thursday, June 28. That Sunday, on July 1, MacTaggart emailed Ross thanking her for her work; he told her the campaign was over, that her email account would be shut down on Friday and that she should get her expenses in by then. But when she tried to log into her work email that Monday morning, she was locked out. Her name and bio were removed from the group’s website.

“The piece that’s missing from the #MeToo movement is that it’s not just sexual harassment,” said Ross in a phone call. “These men can change the narrative and rewrite history to write me out of it.”

MacTaggart characterizes it differently. He said that the article is focused on how the law got passed as bill AB-375, and that because Ross wasn’t supportive of the bill, she wasn’t as key to the narrative. (The main differences between the ballot initiative and the bill are that the latter allows companies to charge consumers more for privacy and doesn’t give consumers a private right to action, meaning they can’t sue companies that break the law, except in the case of a data breach.) Because Ross was less inclined to pass the bill through the legislature, she wasn’t included in the meeting with a lawmaker in Sacramento that Confessore attended while trailing MacTaggart for a day for the story. (Ross contends that she was still supportive of a legislative solution at that point.)

“I’ve been negotiating deals for 25 years. This is what I do,” said MacTaggart by phone. “The problem in this country right now is that no one wants to compromise.”

MacTaggart also suggested that Ross’s early contributions weren’t as crucial as she thinks, that she was a paid employee doing a job to support an idea he came up with, and that he was devoting most of his time to this over the last two years. He said that she’d originally been the official proponent of the ballot initiative to buy the group some extra months of invisibility before their opponents attacked, that it would have drawn more attention if a multimillionaire’s name was attached to it.

“People have told me this happens all the time on political campaigns, that people disagree about how they should go,” MacTaggart told me by phone. “I’m sad the whole thing didn’t end well, just personally.”

“She was so instrumental all along the way. She was leading the train. It seemed bizarre she wasn’t in the story.”

Personality conflicts inevitably happen in almost any workplace, including those of feel-good activists. Ross’s erasure from the lore of the law’s passage isn’t necessarily nefarious or a deliberate attempt to avoid giving a woman credit for her accomplishments. Those involved may have genuinely felt like she didn’t need to be mentioned because she didn’t support the compromise they’d made and wasn’t going to be part of the group moving forward.

“Mary Ross was an important part of the campaign team when we were all working full steam ahead to pass a ballot measure,” Robin Swanson, the campaign consultant for the group, told me by email. “Roles shifted when she made it clear she did not support a legislative compromise because she felt it wouldn’t go far enough.”

Plus, Ross’s contributions had been as “paid staff” as opposed to an “ideas person” who first helped to dream the ballot initiative up. The article likely doesn’t mention numerous other consultants, lawyers, and outside advisors who contributed to the effort—it isn’t like a film where you can include every single person involved in the credits at the end—but that’s how women’s roles can get erased from big projects. Their contribution of ideas gets overlooked, and they are said to have just done the “grunt work,” or responsibilities that are perceived as less crucial. But Ross was more than just the fifth Beatle, according to one outside advisor to the project.

“She was so instrumental all along the way. She was leading the train,” said a tech entrepreneur who advised the group on possible sources of funding and didn’t want to be named. “It seemed bizarre she wasn’t in the story.”

Ross wrote an email the night the story came out to Nicholas Confessore and various editors at The New York Times. “In the so-called year of the woman, it is astounding to me that the New York Times could publish an extensive article giving three men credit for my work, while eliminating my role entirely,” wrote Ross in the email, which also included a list of what she said were inaccuracies in the piece.

Steven Stern, the deputy research chief for the New York Times Magazine, reviewed the piece with everyone who worked on it, including the fact checkers, at her request. “I certainly understand your issues with the way the story was told and your frustrations that the work you did on the initiative was not acknowledged,” he wrote back. “However, after reviewing your concerns with Nicholas and the fact-checkers and editors who worked on the piece, we feel that none of the points you raise are factual errors meriting correction.”

To use the lingo of politics, she was a staffer, not a principal

I reached out to Nicholas Confessore directly to ask about Ross’s omission from the story. “I think it’s always fair to examine the question of inclusion when writing a narrative, perhaps especially when reporting on male-dominated industries such as tech or politics,” he wrote in a lengthy email that explained the narrative choices he made. He said that he didn’t correspond much with Ross nor spend time with her on the ground and that she “did not emerge as a major character—in the sense of planning or executing strategy or shaping the policy content—in my discussions with Robin, Alastair, or any of their allies and critics along the way. That may simply reflect the same problem you are concerned about.”

“To use the lingo of politics, she was a staffer, not a principal,” he added.

Storytelling is complicated. We journalists want to write stories for you, the readers, that you want to read and that will give you information you really need. That means we include details that make a story come alive—“[MacTaggart] is the kind of man who wears chinos with a braided belt; it is easy to picture him on a sailboat,” from Confessore’s story, for example—but omit details about process, bureaucracy or scientific exactitude that we (or our editors) determine to weigh the story down without contributing greatly to the readers’ canon of knowledge. We do this because, while we have endless words in the infinite scroll of the internet age, you, the reader, have limited attention and time. So we elide. We generalize. We cut “characters” who are important but who are not critical, and we often try to focus a story on one person, profile-style, rather than a cast of characters. My own story on the ballot initiative focused almost entirely on MacTaggart. This is why experts on a topic who read a journalist’s take on it are often disappointed; they know that there’s stuff missing.

Plus, unless they live through it themselves, journalists are dependent on sources to tell them what happened and who was important. We get snapshots in time; my snapshot was taken when Mary Ross was part of the gang of three while Confessore’s snapshot was taken while she was on the outs. If you really want to know what it’s like to be a journalist, watch Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a film in which you see a murder from the perspective of four different characters.

Absent Ross’s absence, Nicholas Confessore’s story is impressively comprehensive. It covers the activists’ two-year journey to create a privacy law in California in excruciating detail, as well as the under-regulation of data generally in the United States, the rapid rise of political lobbying by the tech giants in the last decade, the failure of the Obama Administration’s “Consumer Bill of Rights,” the Snowden and Cambridge Analytica scandals, Facebook’s attempt to weaken a biometric privacy bill in Illinois, and all the back-room dealings with tech lobbyists, lawmakers, and privacy advocacy groups that went into brokering a law that will go into effect in 2020.

It’s incredibly thorough. That’s why it’s so bizarre that it’s missing Mary Ross. She at least warranted a mention.