Let's Ruin Everything!

I just learned that I’ve been ruining workplaces since I got my first job at 13 selling hot dogs and popcorn at the college basketball games. Wow. That’s decades of ruined restaurants, preschools, businesses, government and legislative offices, and even whole law firms.

I AM SO POWERFUL!!

I also need to start a regular column called “Jess Von Bank got me going again.” Jess Von Bank is an extraordinary human and one of my favorite thinkers and writers. Read her work. This time, it was her post Sorry I’m Late, I’m Out Ruining Things, where she talks about a recent NY Times opinion called, Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? Jess nailed it when she says:

Women didn’t ruin the workplace, we exposed it by entering it. When women tell the truth about work, care, and exhaustion, we’re not being emotional. We’re being accurate.

I grew up during the women’s rights movement. My favorite t-shirt said, “A woman’s place is in the house. And in the senate.” (There was one about fish and bicycles too, but we won’t go there.)

We were told we could do anything. But there was no one to show us how to do it because there were so few women who had. So we started by trying to out-man the men to prove we were worthy.

We worked harder and longer. We were more prepared. We learned quickly and became really good at the things we tried. We dressed like men in our little suits, and shoulder pads. We wore power red.

But we still had to be pretty. So our shirts had pleats and ruffles (not mine). And we still had to wear skirts and heels and other things that made it hard to run.

Here I am in law school making fun of the photos of guys on the classroom walls and as a lawyer sometime in the early 90’s.

But no matter how hard we worked and how great we were, merit didn’t overcome power and control over resources. In fact, contrary to common opinion and current rhetoric, merit and power are only loosely related. Often, they are completely untethered. (If you need evidence, read the news.)

Women also saw access to power as a limited opportunity. It was. We had to compete with other women for the few slots available. But this backfired because we saw other women as threats instead of allies.

In the last 20 years or so, we’ve figured out how to be effective. We’ve learned to manage people with power, get the resources we need, route around obstacles, and make amazing stuff happen.

We’re really just getting started to lift as we climb and hold and share power in our own ways.

It turns out that gender has nothing to do with talent, ability, leadership, or profit. Women have made tremendous progress and proved ourselves again and again. We’re not going back.

We’ve also come to understand that discrimination in any flavor is fundamentally about misusing power to protect a system that has never worked. Denying opportunity to someone because of what they look like, who they love, where they’re from, whom they pray to, or what’s in their pants is wrong. (And usually illegal.) That’s because discrimination in any form denies people’s fundamental humanity, dignity, and basic rights to be treated equally and fairly.

Dicks are not destiny.

To women who want to and can afford to stay home, especially when their kids are little, do it. Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done, including quitting drugs, alcohol, smoking and only quitting being a lawyer a couple times in over 30 years. I have tremendous respect and admiration for all parents and caregivers. We do not understand or appreciate how difficult and complex their work truly is, nor the real value they bring to all of us.

But don’t even start with me about how women ruin anything.

Let’s ruin everything!