Here is a dredge from last year’s draft posts (September?). Be warned, it is just a rant and a request for your thoughts. Please see the question at the end.
I had clicked into this link 8 Tips for Being a Successful Remote Worker – The Community Roundtable. It provoked a reaction as a woman, a mom, a parenting grandmother: the dang veneer of what working SHOULD look like for women versus our realities. Now let me be clear – the article was not telling me to put on a veneer, and in some cases the opposite – thanks Shannon. (The shoe thing cracked me up!) It did bring up how much women have to look and act a certain way in the workforce to achieve or even maintain professional credibility. How many freaking articles have you read about how to “look professional on Zoom?”
At first we were all in our sweats and yoga pants. Then I saw more women putting on makeup and making sure their setting was “professional.” The masks were going back on. Snapback!
We need this veneer for what? Because it is important for credibility? To show we could both parent and work? What about performance?
I would have thought COVID-era WFM would have freed us from the superwoman expectations. That the reality exposed on video calls in our homes (closets, living rooms, kitchens, bedroom corners…) would have created more slack, not less.
Silly me. We should all be on equal footing right? No, over time I just saw snapback to the old ways.
When men had their kids wander in, it was somehow adorable. For us? Not so adorable. Did anyone else notice that there was more exasperation at women as their children intruded? Or the scheduling hassles when there was no child care options? I didn’t see many memes of moms looking cute as chaos erupted around them.
How many women have lost their jobs or have had to quit because there was no one else available or willing to care for their children? How many women have worked themselves sick trying to make “everything all right” for their families, their coworkers, their bosses. It boggles my mind. And work that is so invisible.
COVID gives us a once-in-a-lifetime to really change things, yet we seem to recreate what came before.
If you could change one thing, what would you change? Where would you invest your change agency?