This is not an IWD post
In 1949 in her introduction to the second sex, Simone De Beauvoir wrote, “I hesitated for a long time before writing a book about women. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore.”
I am glad she went on to contradict herself! Here we are in 2021 and we are going backwards again, with women taking the brunt of unemployment through the pandemic and bearing the burden of juggling the family and working from home (not withstanding all the cute photos of men with babies on zoom, posted on LinkedIn).
The brilliant comedian/not comedian Hannah Gadsby said, ‘the men named all the things’ and goes on to show how funny that is. Jokes are funny because we feel the truth of them.
Also this from an unnamed interior designer on Florence Given’s (Women don’t owe you pretty) Instagram feed “I think about gendered space a lot and if you unpick our streets , clubs, restaurants, however many hundreds of years ago these were designed by men- so even in 2021 we can’t break the system fully because the space in which we wandered is embedded by those who designed it…..it’s like trying to imagine a different colour, you can’t , because you have never experienced it.”
Not only did men name all the things but they also designed the buildings, the things inside the buildings, the structures and systems and importantly the marketing that sells it all. Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts of ‘Pretty Little Heads’ have just released their brilliant book ‘Brandsplaining‘ in which they lay out how our marketing is still sneakily sexist and call time on ‘femvertising’ which uses feminist narratives to replace out and out sexism.
We need a vision, and that vision is not ‘what would it look like if women named all the things?’ Our vision needs to be ‘what might it look like if we all named the things and designed the buildings and the ways of functioning in the buildings (or not in the buildings)?’ Even the working week is not that suitable for many women, what about a working month, with a way to flex which week we take off each month?’
Organisations are listening to women more (although still not enough), but we are trained to respond from inside the structures that we have grown up in. we are often asked to run women’s leadership programmes that are really aimed at helping women cope even better within these unsuitable structures. We are too focussed on fixing the women and not enough on the spaces we are in and the ancient habits of those spaces. If we can undo this (un-tame ourselves as Glennon Doyle has named it in her latest book Untamed) and get creative we could recreate our organisations not just for women but for all who find them sometimes crazy places to work. Can we re-focus and turn this tide? What do you think?
#womeneverydammday
