meghan-maternie

I'm not surprised you don't think you've seen any evidence...because women AREN'T AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF BUSINESS IN ANYWHERE NEAR A NUMBER THAT IS REPRESENTATIONAL OF THE POPULATION!!!!!

This is like Trump saying climate change isn't happening because it's really cold in the United States.

Also re: being contradictory...I am beyond asking for equality. The fact that that was even a debate at one point speaks to how fucked up things truly were.

What I am yelling about is that people like you need to stop for a second and consider that even though the world has slowly awoken over the past 30-40 years to the idea that women can be smart and have careers and might want to do things beyond take care of your home/kids, we still have nowhere near the number of women achieving at the highest levels of business. A good scientist would wonder why that is.

If you just think it's because women aren't smart enough or aren't trying hard enough...you are being lazy.

Lastly on the topic of femininity and intrinsic value, please take that up with Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”

Some data for you: 100 years ago, I couldn't vote in the United States. 50 years ago, my best shot at not living in poverty would've been marrying well. 25 years ago, starting and running a company would've been preposterous.

100 years ago, could you vote? 50 years ago, could you pursue a career and succeed on your own merits versus seeking a spouse? 25 years ago, were men starting companies?

Do you think perhaps that history contributes to the "failure with inclusions"? Do you think women ended up dominating careers like midwifery and nursing because they all just happened to realllllllly like that? Or because that was available to them to have some agency over their lives?

p.s. I'm glad we agree about that experiment

In a perfect world people would succeed based on merits and not identity, their parents, how much money they have growing up, etc.

We do not live in that world. We have clear structural challenges to having women succeed at the highest levels of business in the United States, and the tech industry is particularly disappointing because it grew up as women supposedly had equal access to the idea that they could have a career, as opposed to being their spouse's property.

If you think the answer to that is just continuing as is to maintain unimpeachable fairness for you...I disagree.

Yeah you know what is not a great body of objective evidence? 40 years of women being told we have an equal chance of success at anything we want to do, and yet, in October 2017 discovering that actually the vast majority of us have encountered some gross shit from men we work with.

Please, for a moment, imagine the time and energy it might take to fend that off. How it might make you timid about taking meetings, asking for more, it might just wear you out.

TLDR I’d like to see the study that controls for sexual harassment, that many male partners expect women who work to also be the primary caregiver for children when home, the fact that being incompetent but confident is not viewed kindly in women as it is in men, etc.

Okay how about this needmoretea: Close your eyes. Now imagine every male coworker you have is actually female. They are used to only working with mostly women, so you are an oddity. Kind of entertaining. They just hope you can be cool and be “one of the girls”, you know?

Does that help expand your universe?

To all the men saying/thinking “hey this isn’t equal and maybe women just aren’t as good at tech,” I invite you on a journey with me back to my first basketball game in the 4th grade.

I had seen sports my whole life but had never played them, and was also very good at being a good little girl. So while I got that sports was a competition (duh), in my first game I was dumbfounded as to how I was supposed to compete, because I was supposed to be nice and kind and not cause trouble. I literally passed the ball back to my teammates every time.

After the game, my Dad pulled me aside and said what would become a catchphrase of his and would change my life: “Meghan, be aggressive.”

This was mind blowing. No person, no movie, no tv show had told me in the 90s that I could (and should!) be aggressive. And still be a good girl.

Two years later, I was the kid on the team that came close to fouling out bc I would use the box out very enthusiastically. My dad never stopped telling me to be aggressive. I ended up an all state field hockey athlete in high school, primarily because of my skills as a defender who was not afraid to get in the way.

For those who say women are predisposed biologically to not be good at things: Do you think my biology changed? Was I always born an aggressive woman, or was it a learned behavior? This example is a microcosm of thousands of other examples from a life where the messages one absorbs can shape action. (Others: Had I never been sexually propositioned by sources as a reporter, would I have been more aggressive about who i invited to drinks? Or in tech world, if a woman wasn’t the only woman on their team/division/whatever for the past few decades, would they have stayed longer?) If you want to measure my testosterone, fine, but please also control for the fact that I never got any sort of message about how it could be a good thing if I was aggressive until I was 10 (plus a million other things like that.)

On the topic of bring more gender parity to nursing and teaching, please do. I would love to see more male engineers give up six figure salaries to learn what it takes to be a nurse or a teacher and wonder why they make so much less in return. Perhaps it’s because things considered “women’s work” was never highly valued to start?