Oh My

It is pretty obvious from my photo that I am a woman.  I have tried throughout my life to just be a person, but I am undeniably a woman.

As a woman who worked in Environmental, Health and Safety in the Petrochemical Industry, it was not uncommon for me to be the only woman in a room, or one of two or three out of ten or twenty.  Just the way it was.

I tried as hard as I could to not call attention to gender differences, and to stay away from succumbing to feeling like a victim because of some of the inequity in the workplace.  I recognized that as a woman, there was a different set of expectations and behaviors that I had to conform to so as to not be viewed as too assertive, too aggressive, or willing to use my femininity to gain advantage.

I don't like to get into conversations that focus on our differences, I prefer to find common ground and work from there.  Sigh.

I'm afraid that because a woman is one of the major party candidates for President of the United States, the man-woman tension that has always existed is going to be worse than ever.

And I have to tell you.  It is distressing.

There are characteristics that are more dominant in men, and characteristics that are more dominant in women.  But there are also outliers to those dominant characteristics.  What I see happening as the man-woman tension increases, is that we turn each other into caricatures.

Yes, there is such a thing as mansplaining - Wikipedia describes it this way "to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing".  And to be honest, as a woman with technical expertise in my field, I had to learn to be very careful in how I presented my expertise in the workplace because many people (but predominantly men) heard my expertise as condescending or patronizing.    Everyone has the capacity to explain something to someone else in a condescending manner,  we should all police ourselves to not do that, but when I am honest with myself, as much as I want to find common ground, my life experience tells me that more men are going to explain things to women in a condescending or patronizing manner, and more men are going to hear any explanation from a woman about something they do not understand as condescending or patronizing.

And that is why it is so distressing.  I know how hard I try to stay out of falling into the trap of believing I know something about you by looking at you.  And yet when the man-woman tension ratchets up, the catalog of bad experiences I have had gains prominence in my thoughts.

And I remind myself that the majority of people that I have interacted with are wonderful people.  People who try very hard to make certain that everyone is treated with dignity and respect.  People who think carefully about the words they use so as to not cause harm.

And I tell myself to not let the outliers that contributed to the catalog of bad experiences matter so much, and color my thoughts and perceptions so much.

But it is hard.  Because there were nights after a long day of meetings with predominantly men, where the frustration at being disregarded, the hurt from the casual comments of superiority, the anger at the self-censoring that I had to do left me in tears.

And those people at those meetings probably never knew.  Because they weren't consciously doing anything wrong.  They were just behaving inside the societal and workplace norms that exist.

Having a woman as the candidate of a major party in the United States Presidential election is breaking a societal norm that has existed since the inception of the United States of America.

The candidate in question absolutely has more to provoke animosity than just any woman, as she has been in politics for the best part of her life and was a First Lady of the United States, a United States Senator, and the United States Secretary of State.   But I'm afraid the animosity would exist for many just because she is a woman, just because a norm is being broken.

And as we have seen many times, there is a lot of ugliness simmering beneath the surface of our norms.  And when those norms are challenged or broken, there is a lot of anger that causes great harm.

I'm going to try my best to not get sucked into the downward spiral.  I know that men and women are more alike than different, and that you simply don't know anything about what kind of person someone is because you know their gender.

And I'm going to remind myself over and over again that it is easy to be casually cruel when you don't think about your words and actions.

And I'm going to hope that as society continues to evolve past the artificial separations we have created, that we can do so with more love than hate, more compassion than anger, and more listening than shouting.