Why #YesAllWomen Is, And Should, Be Trending
#YesAllWomen are a part of the wage gap.
#YesAllWomen need to align themselves with their sisters in the workplace and promote, support and praise one another.
#YesAllWomen should use the female gender as a criteria because most women and nearly all men are already using gender as a determinant. That is, they are applying the "default" straight white guy as a first choice and then judging among those men on their merits. They . . . we . . . often don't even think about women because we still don't picture women as leaders or professionals, as executives, CEOs, scientists, astronauts, welders, plumbers or jet fighter pilots. So we exclude them without even knowing we're doing it.
Research has proven over and over again (if anecdote is not enough for you) that everything being equal, men and women will tend to favor men over women in the workforce.
Why?
There are lots of reasons. One that I hear repeatedly from men who get walked to the edge of implicit bias denial is "because women get pregnant." In other words, "I don't judge women on a stereotype; I judge them on fact, i.e., that they tend to get pregnant and so are not as reliable as a man with the identical qualifications."
"All Jews Are Irritating"
I heard this sort of reasoning from my mother's 88 year old boyfriend shortly before my mother died. It was not, he said, anti-Semitic, to say Jews were "irritating" because it was a fact, not a bias. And he had at least one self-hating 88-year old Jewish friend who, he insisted, could back him up on that. Not to mention the fact that he had a Jewish friend which was proof positive he wasn't anti-Semitic.
I reminded him that my husband and step-children were Jewish, as would be my grand-children. I had the chutzpah to take offense. The next day my mother called, in tears, begging me to apologize for taking offense, which I somehow managed to do because I loved my mother. A loving daughter doesn't upset her loving mother at a time of life when the daughter can't expect parental attitudes, formed in an entirely different world, to change.
#Yes It's About All Women
#YesAllWomen is trending because a horrifically rational person with apparent paranoid ideation and probable affective-schizoid and narcissistic personality disorders committed mass murder using the language of PUAs and anti-PUAs (pick up and anti-pick up "artists") because beautiful blond girls wouldn't have sex with him.
I know. There were a lot of other reasons. Rodgers was mentally ill and emotionally disturbed.
But what mass murderer is not?
To have any hope of making the fringes more civilized, we must consider how supposedly low-level daily racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, religious fanaticism and the like will affect the logical extreme. An extreme that delivers to us Eliot Rodgers, Rwanda, Fraizer Glenn Cross, death camps, and. Wade Michael Page.
#YesAllWomen
If you're wondering why #YesAllWomen is trending on Twitter, here's a good explanation from Gina Denny's Blog:
Every time there is a heavily publicized act of violence against women just for being women, there is an inevitable backlash of "Hey, come on. Not all men..."
"Not all men are jerks."
"Not all men treat women that way."
"Not all men are violent psychopaths."
And the resounding answer is always: DUH.
We all know that NOT ALL MEN ARE ______________. We know. But the reason we need to talk about violence against women is because even though not all men are violent psychopaths, all women have to learn the difference between a violent psychopath and a regular guy.
That's how the #YesAllWomen hashtag started. It tells the story of how every woman has been subjected to the actions of this small, minority group of men. Those who are jerks, those who do treat women that way, and those who are violent psychopaths.
Hashtag Slacktivism rarely accomplishes anything. In fact, it almost always accomplishes nothing. But in this particular case, it accomplished exactly the thing it set out to accomplish.
It shared our stories.
Because every woman has a story about being a victim. Every woman has a story of a time when she needed to decide between fight and flight. The statistics on sexual violence are disturbing, but the biggest problem is that (to some people) they are still shocking.
There are still people who DON'T BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.
There are still people who don't believe that one out of six women
ONE OUT OF SIX WOMEN
Why #YesAllWomen Is Here At She Negotiates
We all want to live in a just society. Heck, researchers at Yale have proven that monkeys want to live in a just society and will have the type of tantrums Eliot Rodgers recounts when they believe they are being treated unfairly.
Because we yearn so for justice, we have a "just world" bias in our thinking. We tend to attribute poverty, for instance, to the people who suffer for it ("they deserve it"). Some people go so far as to attribute natural disasters to sinful conduct. We tend to attribute success to hard work.
This cognitive bias or common universal tendency of human thought gives rise to the many justifications we hear whenever anyone suggests that sexism is a retardant to the success of women, racism a barrier to success for African-Americans and nationalism an obstacle to the well-being of immigrants.
We want to believe we live in a meritocratic system, that we have more control over our success or failure than random circumstance or chance of birth, and that everyone has the same opportunities to achieve as everyone else.
We'd like to believe that. But it is patently untrue.
So, #YesAllWomen experience obstacles to economic success that they would not experience if they were men. This does not mean that all men have better opportunities than all women. It means that similarly situated men are playing the success game at a lower level of difficulty than similarly situated women.
Because we're a woman-owned business whose mission is to close the gender wage and leadership gaps, we embrace the #YesAllWomen meme and hope you will too.