A long way

As I mentioned yesterday, there’s been an International Women’s Day since 1908, but the reasons for considering the contributions women make to society have often been forgotten. I mean, aside from providing generations of men with socially acceptable sex and making sandwiches.

For some time after the Soviet Union led the way in extending the vote to women (in 1917), the notion of an entire day to celebrate women-in-the-world (as opposed to the little lady hidden away in domesticity) manifested itself predominantly in socialist countries until what you might call Women’s Movement 2.0—Women’s Liberation—inspired the United Nations to affirm it in 1975.

That would have been around the time that products and advertising were trying to capitalize on the new-fangled idea of the independent woman (kind of a 1970’s flapper) with more than an allowance from a husband to spend. So you got this campaign:

(Interestingly, only when I when hunting for images of these ads did I realize that all the models are anorectic. Way to drive home the brand, Phillip Morris.)

What that slogan trivialized was how much women had earned the right to more than a lady-cigarette that’s thinner than what the blokes smoke. (You’d think Pepsico might have taken that aboard when they announced their plans earlier this year to market lady-chips—Doritos that don’t make that oh-so masculine crunching sound. But that would be ascribing more perspicacity to junk food manufacturers.)

Since I’m a New Military historian, I’m going to skip over contributions like business acumen, scientific research and sandwich making, and consider how they supported the defeat of Germany and her allies in World War I, and the fight against global fascism in World War II.

The 1914-18 war saw them entering factories and taking over farm work in astonishing numbers. Women’s labor not only freed men to enter the meat-grinder of trench warfare, it provided them with the armaments, the equipment and the provisions to carry it on. And while they for the most part stayed away from the front lines (some extraordinary women did serve in field dressing stations, and many more drove ambulances, were nurses and even ran military hospitals) their work was not without danger.

Munitions workers were not only killed in factory explosions; they also died from inhaling the toxic fumes that surrounded them during their long shifts.

Uniformed services in the First World War dipped their feet into accepting women into their ranks (in addition to nursing), in very limited and strictly temporary programs. The instant the Armistice was declared, they were chucked out, although, in fairness, the services demobbed the men almost as quickly.

Come about 20 years later, we had to do it all over again. This time, women went into the offices, the farms and the factories in much greater numbers.

In the United States, women pilots weren’t allowed to join the uniformed services, so they performed “lesser” tasks—they ferried planes around the country and across the Atlantic, test flew new aircraft, performed training. One particularly dangerous job was towing targets behind them across the sky for anti-aircraft gunner training.

Think about that one.

(Women in the Soviet Union did not face those kinds of restrictions. They served in combat both on the ground and in the air.)

Women who did join our armed services mostly did administrative work here in the states. Except for nurses, they were forbidden to leave the continental United States; naturally there was no question of combat for them.

Some numbers were recruited from women’s and teachers’ colleges for incredibly stressful and very critical work in secret squirrel activities here in the District: they were instrumental in breaking German and Japanese military and diplomatic codes, both as civilians and in the Army and the Navy. Their work contributed to turning the progress of the war in both theatres.

The government chose women for cryptanalysis for a number of reasons: with very few exceptions, all able-bodied men were needed for combat; it was grueling, tedious attention-to-detail labor that people thought women excelled at; the education at the Seven Sisters and similar schools turned out intelligent women across a range of disciplines—mathematicians, scientists, linguists, logicians—that were all key to breaking codes; graduates of teaching colleges—i.e., teachers—were used to backbreaking work for low pay.

After V-J Day, once again the women in the factories were sent home and their jobs given to returning GIs. Those in the military were told to resign and the female units were reduced to barely-there numbers.

These days, we’ve got women flying combat missions, performing critical functions on warships and serving in combat units on the ground, with many more in support functions so close to the fighting that they’re getting shot at regardless of their designation. And—as of a year ago there’s a woman in the Rangers. Much more of this and we’ll catch up to the Soviets of 75 years ago.

You have come a long way, baby

We're not going away

International Women’s Day first emerged during the height of the pre-World War I women suffrage movement. It was quite the radical proposition, that women should have rights, and that people (albeit mostly women) should talk about them. Publicly.

And 110 years on, it’s kind of surprising how many people still think this is genie can be jammed back into the bottle.

At the women’s marches held around the globe since the Kleptocrat was inaugurated, we shouted in our millions, “Women’s rights are human rights.” And that appears to have scared the bejesus out of those who believe it’s their God-given destiny to rule everything and everyone—from computer code to natural resources, to religion, to women and children and everyone not white. The backlash from that crowd has been as virulent as it is ugly.

In the past year we’ve seen the veneer covering those who consider themselves masters of the universe by virtue of an XY chromosome configuration start to peel. The first crack was probably the blog post by Susan Fowler, the Uber engineer who recounted the miserable year she spent there dodging sexual demands from her manager and documenting the company’s efforts to put her in the wrong for wanting to do her job without having to fend off advances or take on lesser professional challenges because her manager’s sensibilities might be affronted. Because: high performer.

(I’m only going back a year, but Fowler’s exposé was built on the background of the seriously vile turmoil of Gamergate a few years ago. Those opposed to women in tech, women having opinions, women expressing opinions and any combination of the above deployed classic shut-down techniques, including rape threats, death threats and doxing to get the women to shut up.

(Another pre-Fowler case was the suit filed by Ellen Pao against VC firm Kleiner Perkins for discrimination—being passed over for promotion, being excluded from the bro-events, being told she was less-than. Throughout the trial, she was subjected to disgusting vituperation on every social media platform out there—she was a slut, she was incompetent, she didn’t have the stones to be a VC (irony not being fully understood in these circles). Pao’s suit was unsuccessful, and that may have been taken by other VCs as license to continue business as usual; in the past year many of them have been exposed as sexual predators holding out the possibility of investments in exchange for “dates” from female founders. If you’re an Asian female founder, you’re in even greater danger of being groped in a Sand Hill Road or SoMa restaurant.)

The Uber case was interesting, because its bro-culture was/is pervasive and a subset of its overall cowboy/anything goes/win at all costs mindset fostered from the top by its co-founder and now ex-CEO Travis Kalanick. But it went all the way up to the board, where at a public meeting following the exposure of this rotten core, board member David Bonderman told board member Arianna Huffington that women talk too much. Bonderman resigned, as did Kalanick (eventually; he still holds something like 29% of the stock), but there are plenty more under the rock from which those two slithered.

And then we had Harvey Weinstein. And Louis C.K. And Mario Batali. And James Franco. And Dustin Hoffman. And Matt Lauer. And Charlie Rose. And… Women you’d think must be sitting in the catbird seat—some even with their names above the titles—subjected to blatant or subtle quid pro quo demands for sex in exchange for not having their careers ruined. Some of them did lose work; all felt slimed and degraded. And on SoMe the women who came forward were vilified as being no better than they should be—because if they’d been virtuous, or talented, or some other thing, they’d have waved off the lechers (who, after all, are just doing what guys do) and continued on their merry way.

I won’t go into what women in the military or first responder services go through, other than to mention that barely two years ago a female firefighter with Fairfax County (right here in the DC suburbs) hanged herself after a campaign of lewd and harassing comments on a social media site. Do I need to specify that the comments were from her (male) comrades? They were.

What we’ve seen in the wake of all these revelations is the backlash from (mostly white) men: oh, gee—you chicks can’t take a joke! Such snowflakes! This is proof you don’t belong out in the big, bad business world. Women are biologically unsuited for [writing code, running a business, holding office, making films, having opinions] anything, basically, that doesn’t involve bearing children and making sandwiches.

To a certain extent, many of this ilk are taking their cue from the orange slimeball whose fat arse fidgets in the Oval Office whenever he’s required to pay attention to anything not focused on his own pathetic and inadequate self for longer than 23 seconds. They see him bragging about his ability to grab pussy whenever he wants, they metaphorically high five each other and they are outraged that they—or any of their ilk—should be thwarted in their God-given right to fuck anything they fancy whenever they fancy. And then get sandwiches.

(Affair with a porn star? Overlapping with another affair with a Playboy Playmate? While your third trophy wife is recovering from giving birth to your fifth kid? Dear sweet baby Jesus, yes—gimme some of that!)

It’s my belief that the #metoo, #timesup and other public movements calling attention to the fact that women are basically mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more, have stirred up the hornets’ nests of punctured (largely white) male privilege. They feel like the world was ordained as theirs by God, and they are utterly outraged that we’re claiming part of it. So all the pushback is their version of an extended Kleptocratic tweetstorm: vicious, violent flailing about and screaming that IT'S NOT FAIIIIIIRRRRRRR!!!

I also believe that it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. What we saw with Gamergate; with Pao v Kleiner Perkins; with Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayak exposing Weinstein; with Susan Fowler and Uber—those were the opening salvos. We’re working on Women’s Rights 3.0 (1.0 being the initial suffrage movement, and 2.0 being the Women’s Lib of the 60s and 70s), and there are more releases in this roadmap.

On International Women’s Day 2018, we need to celebrate how far we’ve come, but remember that progress is not linear. We go two steps forward, one to the side, one backward and one forward, like a dance. It's going to be a long, long dance.

And that genie? It’s never going back in the bottle.

Destination nowhere

When I was taking the course on innovation—meant to break down people’s barriers to coming up with ideas for new products and services—one of my go-to sources of inspiration was Metro. My oft-repeated dictum was that if you can’t come up with at least three ideas within two Metro stops, you’re just not trying.

A lot of my ideas had to do with communication, which Metro is frankly crap at. Partly it’s down to the aging infrastructure. Thinking about the clapped-out PA systems both at stations and on trains; God only knows what those announcements are about, but no humans can make them out.

And then there are the signs.

Tbf, since the end of SafeTrack, this sort of thing is seen less often.

But you still don’t know what to make of it. Except that it invariably means that the no-name train is not taking any passengers.

El coche no va

This fairly clapped-out Chevy was parked in the neighborhood:

What caused me to shoot this was wondering how it is that a model that’s less than 40 years old gets classified as “antique”?

Gratitude Monday: safety in the storm

We on the East Coast had a Nor’easter on Friday. Well—it started overnight on Thursday and continued in some places through the weekend. In many places, there were rains, floods and big snowfalls. Here in the District They Call Columbia, it was mostly on Friday, with really strong winds.

I heard it some during the night, but when I got up at 0415, it seemed pretty calm, so I suited up and went to work. I’d have loved to WFH, but I had a meeting that got rescheduled a couple of times due to people’s calendars, so I felt I couldn’t bag it. Around my neighborhood there was a lot of arboreal debris—mostly twigs and branches; no limbs or treed down, so it didn’t seem so bad.

Even when it’s not particularly windy, right when you get to the high rise next to the Metro station, it tends to blow. So I prepared myself for a bit of a gale, and I got it. One of the Do-Not-Enter signs over the garage exit was hanging by a single chain, and it and the other sign were flapping back and forth. I scooted past on my way to the train.

I got into the office before 0600, logged in and started my daily routine. WAMU reported that a lot of school districts were closed, VRE and MARC commuter trains weren’t running, Metro was going at slower speeds on above-ground tracks, and the Federal government was also closed. (I had noticed a lot of slow-and-go on the inbound journey, but tbh that’s not anything remarkable WRT Metro.) I was just about to make my first cup of coffee when an email came round from the COO announcing that, since the Feds were closed, so were we. (We follow their guidelines.) Welp, okay.

I cancelled the meeting, suited up again and headed back to Metro. Brief convo with the security guard and building manager in the lobby—they hadn’t heard about the office being closed, so the latter checked in with the facilities manager, who also hadn’t heard about it. But I figure that if the COO has said a thing, it’s a thing.

As we pulled into the station, I called a friend to see if she was available for breakfast. She was. By this time, the winds around the station were fierce, and there were snowflakes shooting around. As I walked past the garage exit, I could see that the hanging sign was now on the ground.

 I made it safely to Panera Bread and was half a cup of coffee in when my friend arrived. We hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks, so we had a good, long chatty session—almost three hours by the time we left. It was very good to catch up in time that wasn’t earmarked for errands. Kind of like a snow day, without having to shovel snow. (There were those few flakes, but we never even reached the flurry stage.)

On my way home, I did see signs of must more damage. Viz.: this completely uprooted tree at Reston Town Center:

And then this tree snapped off just above the ground, about a block from my house:

That tree hadn’t been there when I went out at 0430; so it had come down somewhere between then and 1100 when I was driving home. There was a strong scent of injured pine (like when you bring the Christmas tree inside). At home I did some research work, cranked up the heat and drank tea.

Saturday I was driving around Northern Virginia—Vienna, McLean, Falls Church—and had to make several detours as roads were still blocked off. Power was still out for thousands in the area, which I hadn’t even thought about, because it was on here.

So here’s my big thanks for today: that in the Nor’easter of March 2018, all of the very large trees around me remained upright; my power and Internet service were not interrupted; I got an unexpected and uncharacteristically extended chat with my friend; and no heavy objects fell on my car.