Rants and Raves, October 2018
This week, I will shamelessly copy one of my favorite podcast hosts, Jon Lovett. On his weekly show, Lovett has a segment called the Rant Wheel, in which he spins the wheel and rants about whatever topic it lands on. In my modified version, I would like to rant about some of the infuriating or inspiring things we’ve seen in the news in the last couple weeks.
Rant #1: A School Official is “Sorry”…
A few weeks ago, some of you may have seen in the news a story out of Tennessee. A high school athletic director and assistant principal was quoted as blaming girls for the school’s ban on athletic shorts. He said, “blame the girls, because they pretty much ruin everything.” When the internet and the school community understandably went bananas, the AD/AP was suspended without pay for 10 days and will be required to attend professional development, presumably about how to not say ridiculous things in a professional setting.
Let’s unpack this a little bit. In the larger quote, the AD/AP blames girls for ruining not just the dress code, but seemingly the larger world. He even references Adam and Eve as an example of girls ruining everything. Horrifying, right? What is worse, some in his school community, including one School Board member, lamented that people couldn’t take a joke anymore and stated that they had bigger things to worry about than this. Bigger things than blaming an entire gender for a dress code system that is designed to punish them? Bigger than making girls and women in your school and community feel shamed and belittled? It is also worth noting that some in the school community came to the defense of the AD/AP, stating that he wasn’t a sexist guy and that he really cares about the school. While I’m sure he does, I can’t help but wonder if this is the perfect example of the “benign sexist”? As is: Sure, he’s a little sexist, but we like him as a person, right, so let’s look the other way. Seems like the time for that has passed and I hope it passes in this Tennessee high school as well.
Rant #2: Amazon might be conspiring against women getting jobs…
According to the article, in 2014 Amazon started working on a program that would identify and match job candidates for tech and engineering jobs. But whoops! There was a problem! Turns out that the program didn’t actually want to hire women. It disadvantaged or eliminated women through the schools they went to or other characteristics, all based on whether Amazon’s current workforce had those same characteristics. In other words, it not only didn’t want to hire women, but it also highlighted the fact that Amazon does not currently have a gender diverse workforce. Obviously, this sort of discrimination in hiring is illegal (and just gross). Amazon has stopped using the software because they determined that, no matter how much they tried, they couldn’t make it stop being discriminatory. So this rant ends on a more positive note than the first one.
Rant #3: So many women running for office!
In the spirit of ending on a positive note, I want to take a moment to celebrate how many women are running for office in 2018. Emily’s List, an organization devoted to helping recruit and support women candidates, said that nearly 40,000 women have expressed an interest in running, more than at any time in history. The change could be attributed to a convergence of factors centered around women’s marches, the election of Trump, the #metoo movement, and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. This surge in female candidates is similar to the one that happened after the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the Anita Hill testimony, and brought us many competent and bright women in the government. Whatever the reason, whatever the party, we are thrilled to see more women getting involved in campaigns and running for elected office and we hope that we will see many of them walking into Senate, Congress, and House offices in the very near future.
I’ll end my positivity in this section with a quote from one of my favorites, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”... Justice Ginsburg, we couldn’t agree more.
Is there something that you would like to hear me rant about? Or rave about? Leave it in the comments and I will make it happen!
-Amy