Man Up in the work place

"Stop being such a dude!"... "Stop being so girly!" Both of these statements have been said to me many times, used in their respective context. If I act aggressively or utter a curse word, I am often told I should act more lady-like. If I become emotional, I'm told to "man up." While it may be obvious that I would be offended by statements of this nature, I recently read an article by Sharon Meers in which she suggested that to have a better and more efficient working environment, women should act more like "men."

In her article, Meers explains that women, including tenured professors and leaders in business, medicine, and law, have a tendency to follow societal standards, which put them in positions where they are overlooked or dismissed. Meers explains, women professionals tend to:

... tilt our heads and smile encouragingly because we've been socialized to think this is the polite thing to do. And we wait patiently for our turn to speak. And don't retaliate when interrupted.

As a result, we lose our voices in the discussion and the value which comes with a different perspective or, in some cases, the correct analysis. Thus, it is we women who perpetuate the norms which cause unhappiness and tension between men and women and cause inefficiency in the work place, when women cannot forcefully offer their opinions and solutions. To alleviate this tension, Meers suggests that women act more like men by being aggressive and taking control.

Meers article offers compelling ideas and solutions to women being overlooked in the workplace, including the idea that to be heard you have to demand an audience and the idea that to change a stereotype you have to act in its opposition. However, I find Meers' analysis and solution incomplete. There is a clear discrepancy in the way males and females are treated in professional environments, but should the solution really be for women to act more like men?

I acknowledge that to be heard you must demand an audience. But Meers suggestion that women resort to "male" tactics, which include behavior like interrupting and having no shame in expressing your opinion, even when you are ill-prepared for the discussion, ignores a bigger issue: that even when women bring compelling arguments and opinions they must resort to "male" tactics to be heard.

I can appreciate the argument that, to destroy gender stereotypes, females must adopt traits that are often associated with men, so that it becomes a gender neutral trait. However, I don't agree that becoming a man in a "man's world" will help produce a better and more efficient working environment. This solution not only perpetuates the value we place on the male opinion and character traits, but completely overlooks the problem we are trying to solve.

We want women to be heard, not simply because we are women, but because we are intelligent people and can offer valuable perspectives, opinions, and solutions. Aggressive or not, we should be concerned that being an expert in your field is not good enough and you can and often will be ignored because of your gender.

Although Meers' solution may offer a more immediate response to women feeling overlooked and dismissed, another solution may be to revamp working environments so that well-reasoned opinions and substantive arguments are highly valued, regardless of whether they are presented by a woman or man. When it comes to efficiency, especially when it comes to the bottom-line in businesses, it may be better to shift the focus away from gender. The problem isn't that women aren't aggressive enough, but that businesses and our society are willing to ignore well-reasoned opinions and solutions to maintain gender-based societal expectations.

Men's Place in the Abortion Movement

Originally I intended to write this blog about queering domesticity, and using queer models to revisit gender based domestic roles. I aimed to ultimately steer the conversation towards unlearning masculinity and the responsibilities of feminist men in redefining gender power structures. However, this morning prior to posting, I was witness to (yet again) an anti-abortion demonstration, of the variety with incredibly graphic billboard sized photos. So, still with the aim of addressing men's roles in restructuring the gender hierarchy, I will be using abortion rights as my vehicle.

I will be clear from the beginning, I think there is only one place for men in the abortion rights movement, and that is as supporters of people's rights(namely women) to make their own reproductive choices about their bodies. I realize that this is a heavily politicized position, but it is my deep and genuine value none the less. As a feminist man, it is my responsibility to encourage other men towards valuing what I visualize as actions working to eradicate, or in the least address, misogyny in their lives. One of those crucial steps towards addressing oppression is asking men to step out of the abortion rights debate except as passive supporters. Unless you are a transgendered man who can become pregnant, or an otherwise man identified person who would possibly need to seek an abortion, I do not believe you should have an active voice in the rights debate about abortion.

This morning, the overwhelming majority (9 of 10) of the persons protesting against abortion were white men over 50, people very incredibly unlikely to have ever had to make reproductive choices about their body regarding abortion. I was completely frustrated by this expression of misogyny. I protested back to the men holding the graphic signs that men have no place the reproductive rights struggle.

The last abortion rights action I was involved in was a pro choice queer response to a large nationwide pro life rally that was happening in San Francisco in 2007. People often question why queer people should have a voice in the reproductive rights struggle, just as I challenge the way that men take up space in the abortion rights debate. I counter with a reminder that many queer people can and do become pregnant, and many have and will seek abortions. Most men however, can not become pregnant and should not be participating in deciding the rights of those who can.

People with more rights, or more access to rights, decide the privileges of others with less rights all the time. This is one of the foundations, though I realize a heavily generalized one, of social and political oppression. I hope this is one of the injustices we all seek to remedy as we become lawyers. An important key to dismantling the effects of the patriarchy, or other oppressive social power imbalances, is to ask those who have unfairly had power to step away from those processes that do not affect them and allow those whose bodies, privileges, etc,are affected to have autonomous governing of their identities.

I realize asking the government to allow only those who can become pregnant to control legal access to abortion is incredibly impractical if not actually impossible. But what I do think is right and responsible and possible to actualize everyday is to ask men to remove themselves from the frontline of the abortion debate. Even though we can not change the gendered political structures of legal abortion controls, we as men can practice feminist ideals in our personal political choices by allowing those who would need abortions to have the privilege and the responsibility of being the primary vehicle of the movement for those reproductive rights.

Working Moms

The desire to stay at home to raise the kids, to cook and clean, and to be a good wife has never appealed to me. Needless to say, I judged any friend or family member who decided to “waste” their education and careers to become stay-at-home moms. My friend recently told me that she was no longer applying to medical school because her fiancé was recently accepted into a medical program and “they” decided that it would be best for one of them to stay home and raise their children. I nearly fainted (they don’t even have children). Couldn’t she balance being a mom and having a career? Isn’t that what women of the 21^st century do?

Of course, it is easy for me to say that balancing a family and a career would be an easy task. My mom made it seem easy. She worked full time as a social worker. But she was always there in the morning to wake me up and always there in the evening to tuck me in. She attended every school play and back-to-school event, and she helped me build every science project. Needless to say, I assumed it was normal for a woman to have a career and have a family. (But I really don’t know anything about balancing a career and being a mother.) Until recently, I hadn’t had the opportunity to appreciate the difficulties that come with being a working mom.

This summer I had the privilege to work with a solo practitioner. She is assertive, eloquent, respected, capable, and great at her job. She graduated at the top of her law school class and now owns her own law firm. She is respected amongst her colleagues and is often asked to talk on radio shows to discuss emerging issues in her field. Although she is busy, because her office is close to her family’s home, she frequently sees her children either by driving them to and from school or them spending time in the office. She is able to balance a high-pressured career and have a family. At least it seems on the surface.

One day, after a busy but successful day in court, I asked her what is one thing that she knows now that she wish she had known before becoming an attorney. Her response, “I wish I didn’t go to law school. I wish I was a stay-at-home mom.” At first her response didn’t shock me. Grass is always greener on the other side. But as I let the words sink in, I thought to myself: Why do I think being a stay-at-home mom is such a bad idea?

The role of a woman has changed drastically over the last few generations. When my mom first applied to graduate school my grandmother cried for a week and asked if she would ever get married (which also could be because of cultural differences). But when I applied to law school, my grandmother told me to finish school first, then “talk” to guys. My grandmother has clearly made a dramatic shift, and she does represents the change and belief that women are and should be educated and valued highly.

We are educated. We work hard. We can do and be anything we want. But if this is true, why do I have a negative stigma with being a stay-at-home mother? Does being a modern day woman mean you cannot or should not take on roles that have traditional been viewed for women? The simple answer is to cut off all gender related roles, but how can we do that if we ourselves hold on to them?

The N-word vs. the B-word.

At the height of the 2008 presidential elections, a recurring debate I came across on many of my bookmarked, tongue-in-cheek, Huffington Post-esque political blogs was the pressing question of whether or not this country was more racist, aka if you were anti-Obama, or more sexist, aka if you were anti-Clinton. I began contemplating this ad nauseum. That contemplation bled into my everyday observations and resulted in me being hyper-aware of how I reacted to comments that may have been tinged with covert (or overt) racism or sexism.

I noticed when I had blood-curdling moments of anger if a racist slur was used in casual conversation, if white privilege was apparent when people spoke to me, or if someone was just blatantly ignorant about my culture, without any desire or genuine curiosity to learn or care. Then I made note of every instance where male chauvinistic behavior was displayed amongst my male friends – whether it was completely in good fun or meant remotely seriously, if obviously misogynistic males were making inappropriate comments about my skirt, my shoes, or my makeup. With our law school’s OCI program in full swing, the best example I can conjure up to succinctly articulate all of this was this: if an objectively attractive male friend of mine was hired over a Plain-Jane looking girlfriend of mine, I would not be as offended. If that same male friend was an Anglo-Saxon white guy and the girl was of Middle Eastern descent . . . it would garner a much more passionate reaction from me.

The general consensus that seems to be out there is that racism is more offensive than sexism. But if so, the pressing question is: why?

Both race and gender are stemmed with their respectively oppressive history. Both aspects are pressing issues in this day and age still, because they are rooted in serious issues of inequality and disproportionate justice in the way different people are treated because of their anatomical structure or because of their ethnic makeup. If you call someone Black the N-word or an Asian person “Oriental,” you are essentially dehumanizing them, marking them as inferior to the rest of humanity, and namely you. There is no doubt about the fact that racism is wrong. Because at the very core of it, the injustice lies in the fact that they are being viewed as an unequal based on an inherent quality of theirs.

But, the same is definitely said about sexism. When you call a female the B-word, you’re essentially chalking them up to the same level as a dog. In other words, the word is, by definition, dehumanizing as well. When males instinctively assume they have a one-up over a female when it comes to applying for jobs, schmoozing at the bar with a female bartender, or in offering to help move a heavy box for a girl in a way that suggests that you instantly assume they don’t want to, on top of being incapable of such, and not just because of their biological makeup that lends to a more fragile bone structure and/or physical build. The latter is often not even really considered so much as the whole “damsel-in-distress” image conjured up from the get-go when it comes to certain males.

In all of the situations described above, and if you brought them up with me hypothetically, I would obviously adamantly agree that they are all offensive to me, as a female of color. But I know that realistically, if they were to play out, the racist scenarios would speak to me much more personally. Why is this? Does societal influence or the fact that sexism is a much more universally accepted prejudice have anything to do with it? Are the radical feminists working on what is a dulled-out injustice that is tapering off or just falling by the wayside? Or is it something else altogether than I’m missing?

A Letter To My Fellow Women

"I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves." - Mary Wollstonecraft

Dear Ladies,

I write to you tonight to ask you to join me in a movement, to come together, empower each other, and agree on a set of goals to establish a permanent equality for ourselves and for our children. Our unity is needed to implement great change.

Let us agree to be supporters of one another. Members of a single team. Let us help each other become masters of ourselves. Let us never tear each other down, in secret or in public. Let us stand up for one another, and never expose each other. Let us evolve, and laugh, and create, and explore. Let us love each other completely for our common responsibility.

Let us not be fooled by our cultures, our religions, the media, our families claiming our place is in the home, inferior to that of a man's. Let us never lose sight that women are equal to men. Let us remind each other of our strengths, of our intelligence, of our talents, of our creativity, of our progressiveness. Let us work together to prevent men from believing we are nothing more than their sexual playthings, and let us never be the ones to promote this illusion.

Let us change society's rigid rules by not changing our last names, or by showing the world our loud sense of humor, or having our men be stay-at-home-dads. Let us change the channel on the radio when we hear a song that is degrading to women and let us speak up and defend each other if someone tries to put one of us down.

Lets work harder in our education and our careers to show ourselves and our men that we can do anything a man can do. Let us raise our daughters to believe they can and should pursue any career they desire. Professor, doctor, judge, teacher, writer, athlete, engineer. Let us raise our sons to respect women and their careers, and to believe them to be their equals. Let us be sisters to each other.

We need each other greatly, and the world needs our unity.

If we can somehow do this, maybe then the men will follow.

"Woman must not accept; she must challenge.
She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her;
she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression." -Margaret Sangar

Why I didn't challenge our naming conventions when I had the chance to do so

Recently, I had to explain to my 7-year-old daughter why she was to address her new teacher as Ms. White (not her real name).  We were sitting around the dinner table discussing Back to School Night, and my husband was praising "Mrs. White."  I corrected him politely, "I think she should be called Ms. White."  He looked at me puzzled.  After all, I had no trouble in taking his name when we got married, right?  And I don't object vehemently when people address me as Mrs. Vanegas.  That's right, I don't.  But I would prefer to be called Ms.  He raised an eyebrow.

In our decade-long marriage I never mentioned to him that I thought Mrs. Vanegas was strictly reserved for his mother (she, by the way, prefers to be referred to as such).  Oh, well.  He knows quite well of my feminist views, so there should be no surprises there.  He was still perplexed, because to him it seemed I had no problem wearing his beautiful Latin last name as if I were born with it.  But my decision in abandoning my maiden name had little to do with abandoning the old honorific "Missus." 

The alternatives before women are, as you know, few: you may keep your maiden name, take your husband's last name, hyphenate, use your maiden name as a middle name, and couples may even make up an entirely new last name from their two unmarried names.  I have heard of couples who both decided to hyphenate their names, and salute them for this choice, although, in the end, it would yield ridiculously long last names.  There is something endearing in taking our husbands' name, abandoning our fathers' last name and tribe, and joining the new tribe, a new life, as a new entity.  It is quite an accomplishment to find a life-long partner, and we all love to celebrate weddings and anniversaries.  Being called a member of his family was especially important for me, because I moved to this country to spend the rest of my life with him.  So, there: I had plenty of justification in taking his last name (and I didn't have any to keep my maiden name, which I never particularly liked).

Still, I crave to be remembered as my own self, not as somebody's wife or mother.  My mom, a professional woman, and second-generation feminist, never took my dad's name, and was quite annoyed when they called her the wrong name in my school.  I wanted it to be easy for my children's teachera, yet I would, in exchange, expect them to address me as Ms., and not Mrs.  If our name is a matter of our identity, that is where I definitely draw the line.

I am not alone: even in traditional societies, for example, in Italy, women are remembered and memorialized by their maiden names on their tombstones. Scottish women, when widowed, reverted to their maiden name, as this article tells us.  And, according to The Emily Post Institute, Ms. is the default form of address for women, regardless of marital status, in the U.S.  I rest my case.