I'm a feminist because I care about equal rights, equal pay, and equal respect for women. And it isn't green envy that you men are physically stronger than us meek and mild females. It goes so far beyond that it's like I took a baseball here in California, went into an awesome pitchers stance, and hurled that ball so hard and so high it disappeared around the curvature of the earth, to come in for a strike over home plate in Maine. And yes, it was a fastball, because everyone knows a ball with movement could only fly as far as Iowa. Duh.
Hell, what I should really say, is that I'm a humanist (def: a person having a strong interest in or concern for human welfare, values, and dignity) but for the sake of brevity and clarity I will stick with my feministic bent for this post. I'd be writing a novel if I let loose my humanistic feelings.
I don't hate men, let me say that right off. A lot of people think feminists hate men, and should just give up and join the other team already. Feminist: advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men. So a man could be a feminist, too. Easily. Any man who cares about the rights of their mothers, sisters, or significant others should be an active, card carrying feminist. And I will even narrow the focus of this post down even further, from general feminism, to equal pay for women, because that subject has been on my mind this morning. Yes, when I'm up, and the house is quiet (save for the cats, who are noisier than people without cats could imagine) I think about things like equal pay for equal work. I'm a geek, so these things happen before breakfast.
When I was 5 years old, my best friend forever was a boy named Matthew. He lived 3 houses down, and we played together all the time. I watched Star Wars for the first time in the mid-80's because of him. It worked out so well because he was a huge fan of He-Man, and I was obsessed with She-Ra, so we had tons of fun with the little 800 gazillion little figurines we had between us. One day, we decided amongst ourselves that we would be married when we were old enough. We didn't really know when "old enough" would be, but it sounded like an excellent idea to me an Matthew. When we told the grown-ups, of course they thought that this was the most gosh-darn cutest thing that they had ever seen. His mom even took pictures of us, me in a veil, he in a vest holding a bubble-gun cigar. Before we agreed to marry, though, we made a deal that I would be the one who went out into the world and worked; he would be the one who stayed at home and took care of our future house and future kids. And no, I wasn't raised by a single mom, both my parents worked then and still work now. From a very early age, having a career and making a living was very important to me. Fast-forward to when I was in my 20's: I was working 20+ hours a week and taking 13 units a semester in college (on the Dean's List, thankyouverymuch!), well on my way to a master's and then a doctorate in meteorology. One day my life and dreams came to a screeching halt; my anxiety tiger awakened from its 21 year nap, and has never gone back to dream-land since. I lost my job, I had to drop out of college, and anxiety has stalked my every step from then on. But my dream of a successful career has never diminished. I have the smarts, I have the drive, but I no longer have the ability.
So it drives me crazy(-er) to know that a successful woman, who knows her stuff and has vast amounts of experience is paid, on average, 18%-22% less in the US than a man in the same job. And I'm not talking about a job where physical prowess is king. I'm talking about a job where mental prowess is all, and because one mind is "female", that "female" mind is automatically paid less. How is this even fair? Shouldn't everyone get paid for the quality of one's work?
I want to leave you with two things:
- My mom started out in her first real job as a filing assistant. Most of what she did every single day was file all sorts of files. Fun times, there. Over the course of many, many years, she worked her way up from filing assistant, to customer service representative, to a sales representative, until the business she worked at was bought out by another and most everyone was laid-off. She made her rise in the company by being good at her job, by completing her work on time, and by impressing her bosses by the quality of her work, and she did this all in the 70's and 80's, a time when women were still relegated to the so important and very satisfying roles secretary or assistant. One of her bosses actually told her during her tenure at this business, "Too bad you weren't born with balls." First of all, why the hell should having or not having testicles make any difference in office work? Secondly, he was basically saying she was awesome in everything except for the fact that she was born with ovaries, not testicles; balls are an important part of the job, too bad you don't have those, you silly-billy wench! I am flabbergasted, honestly. Please pause here for a second while I slam my forehead into the table in an effort to restart my brain. I think it had a seizure at the "too bad you weren't born with balls," mile marker.
- This article I found on the New York Times that talks about how Icelandic women left work 14% early to protest a 14% gender wage gap. They left work at 2:38 pm, 86% through an 8 hour work day, because from that time through to the end of the day, only men would be getting paid. That would burn anyone's behind, to know that but for a quirk of fate, humans with ovaries would stop making money every day at 2:38 pm, but their co-workers with balls would get paid for a full day of work...all for the same quality of work.
As a humanist, I believe everyone should be paid for the level of work they can do. If I worked in the most lavish and gigantic library ever imagined shelving books and someone else was faster, more accurate, and handled the books in a more loving way, be they a man, woman, cat, martian, whatever, I feel as if they should be paid more. Why? Because they are better than I am at the job we were assigned to do. Not because they have green skin, or a luxuriously fabulous pelt, or have bigger boobs than I do, or because they have balls. None of this makes sense, don't you agree?
