2-0-2 GO.
Sports, Cars, and Outer Space: stupid gender stereotypes
2 Steps forward:
Gender parity on the field of play will be achieved at the Paris Olympics. For the first time EVER, there are equal numbers of female and male athletes competing in the Olympics this summer. Women competed for the first time at the Olympic Games in 1900 (also in Paris). In 1900, women represented 2.2% of all participants and this summer they will represent 50% of the athletes. As the Committee says, “Let’s celebrate the moment but not stop the journey.”
Craig Sneesby, Managing Director at u&u Recruitment Partners, a top recruiting firm in Australia, announced the first of its kind Childcare subsidy for their staff in an effort to help reduce the gender pay gap. Sneeby notes in his LinkedIn announcement “Childcare costs in Australia are officially out of control and forcing many families to make the difficult decision to not return to work.” The company will make a contribution of $10,000 per child per year to help ease the financial burden of childcare and make it easier for women to return to the workforce if they choose to do so.
O noooo he didn’t:
On one level, what I am about to delve into is petty, nonsense, and gossip. On another level, it is a supremely important conversation about what we value, protect, hold sacred, and reward in our society. About who and what we are willing to stand up for.
Fucking Tom Brady. Amirite? We thought it fitting to teach an American football player proper yellow card technique in our inaugural newsletter issue. In case you missed it, Tom Brady agreed to participate on a roast on Netflix live. He allowed comedians to mock the two women with whom he co-parents his kids. But, when a fellow roaster made a joke about Robert Kraft (the owner of New England Patriots) getting an er…. “massage”….. Brady approached the stage and yellow carded the speaker. Perfectly fine use of yellow card EXCEPT that he extraordinarily used it to protect his old, white guy business partner while letting belittling jokes about his exes go unchecked. Here is the real kicker – in interviews after the roast, Brady expressed surprise and regret as to how the jokes affected his kids. For real? Tom Brady can play out the strategy of an entire football season in his head on any given day but can’t connect public, demoralizing shaming of the mother of his children to the wellbeing of those same children? Seriously?
Do I really care about Tom Brady’s roast? No. Do I care that men – in very public ways value, protect, and defend their coaches/manager/teammates while enabling the demeaning of their female life partners/co-parents? For a paycheck? Yes. Very much so. In this case, 13.8 million viewers were just informed that these social norms are just fine. Fuck that. Tom Brady – that’s a yellow card.
2 kick ass people driving change:
Patricia Banks: Talk about driving change. Um. Literally. If you find yourself in Upper Darby Pennsylvania, just outside Philly and you are in need of auto repair – check out Girls Auto Clinic. Patrice Banks left her lucrative job at DuPont to bust down a few stereotypes. She learned how to fix cars (the only woman in an otherwise male all male class) and then she opened an autoshop. Fuck yes she did! Catering to women - clients get free WiFi access, snacks and beverages, an ample supply of books and magazines to peruse and they can get their nails done while they wait. When the car is assessed clients are not only told what is wrong with their vehicle but how the diagnosis was made – what the mechanics were looking for in order to diagnosis the problem etc… Its’s the first time I have ever been wishful that a franchise might come to a town near us…
Aisha Bowe: In high school, Aisha Bowe, was advised by her counselor to become a cosmetologist. For real tho. Aisha had other plans (let’s pause here and yellow card that counselor #genderstereotype) At community college Aisha discovered her love for math and science. Fast forward a few years, Aisha became an aerospace engineer at NASA and the first black woman in space. She then founded STEMBoard, a tech company that creates smart systems for federal and commercial clients. Paying it forward, she also founded LINGO, to make STEM education accessible for kids around the world, especially those kids from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM. Her non-traditional path is redefining the typical narrative of how engineers build and advance their careers. So that’s all awesome but why are we talking about Aisha today? Because that “little” tech company that Aisha founded? It recently received a nearly billion-dollar contract (billion with a B). Um. Oh hell yes.
GO:
"We are the ones we have been waiting for." ~ June Jordan
Bonus:
If you are interested in a little more context for this quote from June Jordan….here you go!
June Jordan was a Jamaican-American writer, poet, playwright and essayist; a fierce human rights and political activist. She taught at Yale, Stony Brook, and the University of California-Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People.
This quote is an excerpt from a poem written to commemorate the 40,000 women and children who protested apartheid on August 9, 1956 in South Africa. The poem was presented to the UN on August 9, 1978.
Poem for South African Women
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world
The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire
And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for