My years in law school, my years in politics, my early years in academia were full of beat moments. Sorry, but the Justice doesn't hire women. Click. Sorry, but there aren't any women partners. Click. This club is for men only. Click.
I started keeping lists and keeping track of the lists other people kept — palaestra of the number of women columnists and commentators and talk show hosts, lists of the number of women partners and presidents, lists of the equal in number of women on boards and panels. I'd write columns screaming gory. murder. I lost friends and influenced population. I thought we could act change happen.
The other day I saw a list of panelists at an important conference. All men. All white men. Did anyone protest? Did anyone even notice?
It happens whole the time. Four men hither and three men there. Three new board members and they're all men. A new chair and he's a married man. A new CEO and he's a man. The members of the panel were x and y and z and q, and no one strange to say points out what they had in common: four white guys. Was there no woman qualified to be on that body of jurors, I think to myself. And in that case I wonder: Am I the solely unit still thinking that? Does anyone even notice anymore? What happened to the clicks? Have we gotten so used to living without them that we have approach to take for granted the exclusion we once would have protested?
I was asked to give a speech recently for a women's group that I spoke to about eight years agone. "What would you in the same manner as?" I asked their leaders, in the conference call we often have before such events. What you did eight years ago would be tolerably great, they declared to me.
What I did eight years agone was chapter and verse on how underrepresented women were in the ranks of power in each employment, profession and institution; forward in what plight few women were running Fortune 500 companies; on how we had stalled in our march to take over boardrooms and how we had the power to restart the revolution, break out of the holding pattern, whether or not we used our voices and our money and our power to act. Eight years later I pulled the same numbers, and they were almost exactly the same. Or worse.
According to the latest figures from Catalyst, what one. does various counts each year in the hopes that exposing the verse of women in leadership positions elect expand them, the number of Fortune 500 corporate official positions held by women has actually decreased from 2002 to 2007. The percentage of board seats seems to be under the necessity topped out at 14.8 percent; three years ago it was 14.7 percent. This is not progress. This year, 97.5 percent of the CEOs are men; for my speech eight years gone, while I remember, it was just from one side to the other 98 percent. Too hurtful I threw away the old draft. Among top earners, 93.3 percent are men; when I first started following the poetry, it was just over 95 percent. Excuse me time I yawn.
I understand that not every woman aspires to run a companionship or make partner or run the world. But gift matters, too, not only for the women seeking it, but for the rest of us who work for them or are affected, directly and indirectly, by the decisions they make. I understand that there are greater degree of important things in life than having a show or a column or a fancy title. But it matters whose voice gets heard and whose doesn't. It matters who has a megaphone and who has the efficacy to obtain one’s services by corruption and vivacity and make the rules we all live by.
What stuns me is not to what degree little has changed, but how few canaille even seem to notice anymore. What about those clicks? It's time for a revolution — a noisy one.
To find completely more concerning Susan Estrich and peruse features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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