The Pulse on Gender Equity in Seattle & Beyond
If you’re a supporter of gender equality, I bet you also support LGBTQ rights.
This is true for me, but I’ve never been quite able to articulate why.
It just seemed right. It just seemed to make sense.
As the first post in the “It’s All Connected” series, I explored this topic with David Ward, an attorney at Legal Voice, who has worked to pass laws in Washington State addressing both the fight for LGBT equality and gender equality.
“I’ve been taking copious notes!” smiled Washington State Senator Karen Kaiser.
On July 8, I was at a “salon,” a panel with a small audience, about economic security for women in Washington State, and it appeared the panelists were learning as much from each other as the audience was learning from them.
The easy thing to do is to get defensive. To shut down, ignore it, to say “it’s not my fault!” It’s tougher to take it as an opportunity to learn. To say “help me understand what you mean.”
Shortly after I posted a blog last month critiquing Seattle City Council Member Mike O’Brien’s comments on gender and childcare, I received a message on Twitter: “I’d love to chat about your recent post. Maybe we could talk on the phone?”
In a blog post in June, I discussed recent comments made by Seattle City Council Member Mike O’Brien when he was addressing the issue of unaffordable childcare. He had said on a recent panel:
“It was within our generation that we switched the way we lived as human beings for eons, where one parent worked […] to support a family, to now it’s just expected that you have two workers and you have to have childcare. You know, that is a choice we make as a society, and if we don’t think that’s working for us, we can choose something else.” *
This well-meaning phrase, with a little bit of context, takes on a different feel, because looking back over the past century, the father is the parent that traditionally has worked in a heterosexual relationship. And said with a tone of nostalgia, this statement hints that we should “go back” to a time when only men were breadwinners.
It’s hard to see the world from the perspective of someone else. Really hard. Even people who have been in relationships for years have trouble with this. But we especially struggle to imagine what it’s like to be someone from a different background, who’s life experiences look nothing like yours.
As a white, middle class woman, I’m privileged to only have to worry about one main form of discrimination, based on my gender. Knowing this, I’ve worked to better understand other types of oppression, from what I studied at university, to traveling and volunteering long-term in developing countries like Guatemala, to working in a nonprofit with team members from 9 countries.