Shit, this feminism stuff is hard.

Things we know:

• women are paid way less than men for the same work
• that’s not right
• we should fix it

Things that are surprising:

• putting a male name on a CV elicits a very different response than putting a female name on a CV
• the norm in Germany is to put not just a name on the CV BUT A PICTURE AS WELL
• women who have children see their immediate earnings, opportunities for advancement, and therefor long-term earnings, drop; men who have children see theirs rise

Something both shocking and embarrassing:

• when assigning work to contractors this week, I did not offer a project to a person because she recently gave birth. I assumed that she would be busy, maybe overwhelmed, that the work would make her feel guilty, that maybe just receiving an email would interrupt precious bonding time with her baby. If she had not recently given birth, I would have sent her the project. Because she gave birth, I didn’t. She didn’t get the work because she’s a woman who gave birth.

Shit, you guys, I am the problem! And I have a women’s studies concentration from a school that’s waaaaay too PC! And then I spent over a decade working for one of the most feminist organizations on the planet! Imagine the poor slobs who didn’t spend hours and hours and hours and years talking about how to fight institutionalized sexism? If you can go to marches about this stuff and then literally deny economic parity to a person based solely on their maternal status, you should spend a little more time appreciating how often your husband (whose engineering training definitely did not include gender studies, or many girls at all, actually,) gets this stuff right. Yeah, he might say things like ‘Putzfrau’ and ‘Feuermann’, but he’s a believer in equality and he thinks that women are smart and capable and he thinks that Angela Merkel is a great role model for our daughter AND our son.

So, let’s take a minute to remember how complicated this stuff is and how easy it is to want to do the right thing but get it a little bit wrong, and let’s celebrate our progress while we keep working to change both the system and ourselves.

Here’s what I ended up writing to that contractor (once I unsent the email that offered the project to someone else,)

Here is a project. If this is too much too fast, please let me know – I appreciate that schedules at this stage can be a bit unpredictable, but I want to make sure that you have the option to take this one if it works for you.

And here’s how she responded, 4 minutes later:

That’s all good, happy to take this!!

Note the multiple exclamation marks, telling me that offering economic opportunities to people without regard to their reproductive equipment and what it might have been doing lately is the right thing to do.