Awhile back -- not too long ago -- I predicted the Women's March would be lost in the noise of Inauguration Day, that between more-obnoxious protesters and happy celebrations, they'd be lucky to get any screen time at all.
Was I ever wrong! They read the media waters correctly and I did not. I'm still not a fan of the hats and as for the issues-- There's a lot of specious stuff thrown about. Nevertheless, problems persist; I still sit in engineering meetings at work, make the same suggestion three times and find it ignored until one of the boys makes the exact same suggestion, at which point it is suddenly worthy of consideration! But I've never seen how marching with a sign, or even more fancy laws, was going to fix that. Having a seat at the table, speaking up, getting the lads used to seeing a woman there doing the same kind and level of work does help move things and I have high hopes for the next generation of women. In fact, there's a woman thirty years younger than me bossing a major construction project at work. She works for the general contractor, but even my bosses have to take her seriously, and they do. She doesn't seem to find it remarkable.
You don't sink any but the smallest nail with a single hammerblow, and then only if it doesn't matter how the finished product looks. Nope, you take a heavy swing or two to send it nearly down -- voting rights, property rights, etc. -- and then you take up a nail set and tap, tap, tap, sink the thing home. Then it looks as if it was always there, and passes without adverse notice.
We're gettin' there.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
10 comments:
Progress is being made, however slowly.
I remember JB's story about being asked to fetch coffee - when she was the guest speaker!
Hang in there!
Glad you aren't out there marching with the leftists...
gfa
Yeah, I had a class full of dudes a couple years back who made my life somewhat miserable because they apparently didn't believe a woman - and a woman that presents as fairly "girly" (I like wearing pastels) at that - was able to teach them that particular subject. (I had a long talk with a male colleague about "should I change how I dress and act" and his suggestion was "No, they need to suck it up and learn some respect.")
I just kept on keepin' on, kept my head up, didn't respond to the stupid jokes. Haters gonna hate and all of that. Still, it should not be that way - and some of those guys are going to wind up with a woman as their boss; I assume they will adjust their behavior or they'll be looking for a new job.
There are a lot of stupid men out there. I'm sorry you have to experience the assumption that you are not competent.
Sadly, there are many women in the workforce that aren't though. They are often promoted beyond their experience level and they make real professional women who ARE worthy look bad. The smart men know the difference, the fools only see the girl and not the intelligent professional behind the face and boobs. They fail to give her the chance they'd give a male counterpart to prove her worth.
And sadly, there are women who can't get out of high school and make other women look very bad.
I don't know how to fix the issue though. There is blame to be had on both sides.
I blame it on evolution. Men have been working together for millennia. Women have, other that outliers, not been in the work force heavily till after wwii. after that in the 60's as inflation got more in vogue it took two wage earners to keep even in the race of life. Now we have a generation of dilatants' that have been raised by care givers in the work force.
I fear all we have built will be torn down by these heathens.
There are a lot of people who are in the work force whose ideas are not given weight regardless of sex of the ideas proponent.
All you can do it keep pitching. Sooner or later you will hit the strike zone.
As far as the "womyn's" marches, do they have anything substantial to say other than "Hey, look, we're a bunch of womyn who don't like Trump!"? As Dana Loesch has pointed out, a lot of the current progressive "rights" movements don't actually have any particular goal in mind. "Black lives Matter" and the "Occupy" movements seem to be all about throwing a temper tantrum with no particular end state in mind.
I, too, often have to say a thing three or four times, until someone else repeats what I said, before my idea gets any hearing. Obviously not because of my plumbing arrangements. (Although we did go through a period where a woman was put in charge and she told everyone she was sent here to break the glass ceiling. Then, my plumbing was important. Unfortunately, any ceiling breakage was based more on sycophancy and political connectedness than competence. Counterproductive.)
Drang nailed it in his top paragraph. What was the end goal? If I ask ten women what the march was about, I'll get at least six different answers. Some of those will be mutually exclusive (e.g. I have been told that it wasn't about abortion and that it was only about abortion). Several will be the generic "women's rights." If there is a purpose, their strategic messaging is severely lacking.
It can be difficult to explain, and I'm not sure I'm the right person, but sometime such marches -- and I'm specifically addressing *peaceful* protest here -- are simply about showing up and being visible (which explain why excluded subgroups get irked; ask the pro-life women's would-be marchers about that for one example). This serves two purposes: one is to let the folks in power know that they're there and are sufficiently organized to, oh, help motivate voters; the other is to let like-minded people learn that they are not alone.
It's easy to scoff at this, especially if you're white, male and at least lower-middle-class, but the reality is that many people who aren't feel overlooked, underappreciated or invisible.
Are they really any of those things? Flip it around: have we indeed achieved a perfectly level society, in which individuals are free to follow their inclinations as to education, job-seeking and general "pursuit of happiness" as their abilities and aptitudes allow or are people still constrained to narrow their choices by accident of birth? Ignore the edge cases for the moment; any protest movement (or counterprotest) attracts an undue share of yammerheads and nutjobs who have never been of much real use to themselves or anyone else. Society is much better that way these days than it has ever been, but I think we still have a ways to go. YMMV -- but we're not seeing it from the same angle. And, yes, a lot of the legislation and regulation intended to aim things that way is pure BS, or leans way over the other way: it's an attempt to repairs a stopwatch with a sledgehammer. That doesn't mean the "watch" wasn't broken.
B: there are a dammned lot of stupid, incompetent men in the workforce, too, and yet, somehow, their lack of ability doesn't hold other men back -- it doesn't even hold *them* back. So, sorry, your tale of Those Stupid Overpromoted Chicks doesn't hold much water with me.
I have personal experience with this. It's the difference between bacon and eggs: the pig's committed, the chicken is only involved.
Oh, No question that you are right. But women are often (or were, at least, been out of that field for 10 years) promoted many steps beyond where they should have been in order to cause equality. Sadly, this make most women in the field be judged as if they all had small abilities , but good connections. Same thing happened early on with men of color in the 70's and 80's. No one knew whether that person had earned their spot or been moved into it to level things out or meet a quota. This is, however, a significant reason as to why your original statement is true.
Doesn't make it right, doesn't make it fair. But it *IS* a part of the reasons.
THe lack of women is the STEM fields has always been a problem for those women who do enter the field.
Another difference: many men don't know when to shut up.
Post a Comment