Women Up

Happy International Women's Day. The organizers of the successful January Women's March intended today to be a "Day Without A Woman," helping to demonstrate the enormous impact women have on our economy and our society. Participation was encouraged by women taking the day off of paid and unpaid work, avoiding making purchases unless from women or minority-led businesses, and wearing red in solidarity with the day and movement. 

I'm at work today but I am rocking the red. What's remarkable to me is that every single female member of our staff is doing the same. The men? Not so much. It says a lot about the power of women and the idea that for many people, these inequities are not inequities.

My interest in women's issues and gender equity is relatively new, likely simmering for awhile but spurred on as a result of the implicit (and explicit) bias that played such a large role in the Presidential election. And the policies cropping up as a result of who was elected. And the misogynistic, disrespectful attitude of the elected (and millions of his followers) towards women. And the continuing unfairness of this country's attitude toward family leave and its disproportionate impact on women. And the idea that we're still, after all this time, supposed to be skinny, nurturing, independent, dependent, pretty, career-driven, happy, honest, tactful, quiet, assertive, faithful, and motherly creatures who shoulder it all and shut up. And the idea that so many people, including women, reacted with disgust when millions marched together in January, fully believing that there was no cause for such a display since there is nothing unequal, nothing anyone doesn't have simply because they are female.

So I'm wearing red, both for myself and for those people. It's nothing really, but when I looked around the table at our staff meeting today and saw all my fellow women also in red, it felt like everything.