Survey Says…Its all your fault

Many women's first work experiences read the same–the low pay, the demeaning tasks, men with half their education and work-experience getting hired at double their salaries. My own Harvard degree mocked me from its gilded frame on the wall of my micro mini apartment. It was a golden ticket alright, but I was not playing the part of Charlie Bucket. During those grueling experiences, many women long for a break in the storm, for someone to just play by the “rules” – they long for an answer to why things are so unfair.

It turns out the answer was right before us all along…the problem, it seems, is us.

In “Girl Power at School, but Not at the Office,” Hannah Seligson narrates an early job experience that reads eerily familiar to many women. She writes of unequal pay and highly qualified women becoming “‘assistant-ized’—saddled with all the coffee runs and photocopying.” She chronicles female/female job sabotage and pay discrimination. But ultimately, her focus is on the “young women…getting in the way of their own success.”

How do women get in the way of their own success, according to Seligson? By carrying an unsuccessful toolkit of resources into the work world. In fact, she argues that “we need to build a new arsenal of skills to mitigate some of our more 'feminine' tendencies.” No. No! NO!!!

The answer is not to conform to the status quo, but to bring change to the work world. It is not to learn how to “grab a beer” with the guys, but to forge new ways of building networks. It is not to scrap “the more traditionally ‘feminine’ trait of sensitivity” (whatever that means), for hard-nosed terseness. And, contrary to popular misinformation about what women have been up to for the past eons of history, it is not sitting around isolated on their own personal domestic islands.

“Women don’t have as much of a tradition of business networking,” Seligson asserts. Oh yeah, says who? Women have been networking amongst themselves and with men, for centuries. The interpersonal skills garnered from these encounters are just as valuable as those gained in a smoking club.

We need to honor our history, honor the invaluable work that we have already brought to humanity, and the networks forged by women. We need to bring our presence into the light that it deserves and demand that conditions improve for women in the here and now. Are there things that each person can improve on individually? Yes. But, the unfair experiences that women face in the work world should not be cause to denigrate that which we deem different in ourselves as of no account. It has its dignity too, and should be respected, not repressed.

I was born around the same time as Seligson, in the early 1980s, but I had a different experience. I saw women discriminated against, left and right. I understood the struggle that was before me. Perhaps being both African American and female highlighted that struggle and the existence of glass ceilings even more, but one thing that has been imprinted on me during my brief tenure on the planet is that there are still many fights to be waged in the battle for equality. Now is not the time for conformity, but for courage.

Women's Dreams May Come

With the whole hullabaloo about Sarah Palin, I find myself compelled to throw in my oar. There has been a flurry of discussion about Palin’s daughter, Bristol, and Palin’s views on abortion. Frankly the whole conversation has become quite predictable. There is the one side that says that women should have the right to choose, reproductive education should be frank and birth control products widespread. This side looks at Palin’s daughter and scoffs…this is the fruits of so-called “abstinence only” initiatives, pipe dreams at best, and at worst, social pollutants just as potent as greenhouse gases. The other side says that there is no choice at all – to be or not to be, that is the question – and that is a question that can only be answered by the Almighty. Abortion is just a portion – the most murderous portion – of a culture of death of which condoms, birth control pills and permissive educational programs are an integral part. Bristol should be lauded for keeping her unborn child and planning to marry the father.

But at the heart of both arguments lies the question – how can what makes women different fit seamlessly into a society designed for men? In the recent Domestic Disturbances column in the New York Times, “The Mirrored Ceiling," Judith Warner laments that, to some women Palin “seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes.” Why does Palin, Warner writes, “deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so 'real'?"

Warner further questions, “Shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating?”

And why is that?

Let’s imagine another world, governed by the cycles of womanhood. One where at the turn of the nineteenth century men slowly abandoned military schools in order to pursue midwifery. In 1920, the first male midwife was accepted into the most prominent circle of female midwives. In 1960, the first male hormone pill came on the market, which mimicked PMS symptoms in males, allowing them to partially participate in what had long been a girls only club – monthly hormonal cycles. This innovation allowed men to more easily incorporate into the overarching female world. In 1973, medical procedures which gave men full control over their physical reproductive capacities were legalized, so that men could now shorten or completely curtail the amount of time they were virile each month, a province long enjoyed by women who, since the dawn of humanity were only fertile for a short window of time in the middle of their cycles. The twentieth century witnessed droves of men starting to pour into housework, midwifery and child care, even though they were still not held in equal esteem with women in these same fields. After the recent nomination to public office of a man with a military background and limited care-giving experience, a male rights advocate protested,

“Shouldn’t a man who wants to be trusted with the reigns of society prove himself to be unintimidating – a consummate diplomat in the home?”

There are some who may read this counter factual history and recoil. They recoil because things that were traditionally “female” seem today obviously inferior (the graduate student "ack" reflex compels me to post the disclaimer that "traditionally female" is not a fixture but is itself a function of historical moment). Women’s cycles are something to be controlled or stopped altogether, by any means necessary, and housework is where women’s spirits go to die. Pregnancy, that capability that connects women at once to the future and the past is something that is best planned out carefully or rejected out of hand. Why are our life goals dominated only by male physiology, male psychology, and male dreams?

Let’s dream bigger.