You can fight
for equality every day, in big ways and small.
By
Across the U.S. women just pulled off the largest protest in American history.
They were joined by sister marches around the world — in Europe, Africa, and
even Antarctica.
But before we get carried away with euphoria, we should heed
some wise words from a former Obama
White House staffer: “I worry it will give too many people license
to congratulate themselves for their activism and move on with their daily
lives.”
In other words, don’t use the Women’s March as a reason to pat
yourself on the back and stop fighting. Consider this march just the beginning
of your struggle.
You can join an organization, get involved locally in politics,
or donate to groups like Planned Parenthood. But you can also take smaller and
more manageable steps in your every day life.
Consider these gender disparities in schools and workplaces.
One study found that male students tend to think their mediocre male classmates perform
better in classes than top-performing female students. The dynamic in the
classroom continues in the workplace.
In my own field of academia, the value of publications is
measured in part by how many times other researchers cite them. One way to
boost your own citation count is to cite yourself — which men do far more than women.
Even when they aren’t citing themselves, men are more likely to
cite other men, while women cite both women and men. This provides an automatic
advantage to men in academia over women, since it helps their papers appear
more influential.
The same is true when it comes to panels presenting at conferences,
another staple of academic life. Often the panelists are all male, because the
groups who select the panelists are also often all male.
The end result is that a woman and a man in the same field,
perhaps with the same brilliance, won’t have the same resumes: The man will
have more presentations and citations to his name.
This sort of problem is also found in other workplaces.
Women who ask for a pay raise are less likely to get it than men, for
example. And there’s the common phenomenon where a woman who speaks up isn’t
listened to, whereas a man who repeats the same thing gets credit for making a
brilliant point.
The women of the Obama White House made headlines last fall for
their strategy of combating this problem, which they called amplification. When a
woman colleague made a good point in a White House meeting, other women
repeated the point and gave credit to its author.
Whether you’re a woman or an equality-minded man, you might not
have opportunities to march in your pink hat every day, but you can resolve to
practice amplification in your own workplace.
Last year, scientists made an impact by publicly shaming and
boycotting a biomedical conference that mostly featured white men as speakers — not because the speakers
themselves were lousy, but because other candidates had obviously been
overlooked.
If, like me, you don’t have a biomedical conference to boycott,
you can still take positive steps in your day-to-day life — like how you parent
your children. Consider what message they’re getting about gender from the
media they consume and the books you read them.
Think about what you say to them regularly. Do you constantly
tell your daughter she’s pretty, as though that were the only thing that
mattered? Or tell your son to “be a man” if he cries?
If you’re a woman, do you gripe about hating your body in front
of your kids?
No matter what you do, consider the Women’s March step one in
the fight, and not an end in itself. Find a way — or several — you feel
comfortable taking action on, and then do it.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our
Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
