Women in Anything
I was raised under a materialistic system of governance. My mother was a professional woman who supported our family exclusively, with no visible support coming at any time from dear old Dad, who was long gone by the time I was four. Mom never lost a step and never complained about any of it. In fact, I would say that she would have been surprised if it was any other way. She had lived in a male-dominated household since her mother had died when she was only fifteen. SHe was a star on the Lansing High School Women’s basketball team and a crack amateur tennis player playing on a homemade clay court with her cousin and vying for the New York State Amateur title at one point. She made the decision to go on to Cornell all on her own, in fact contrary to her father’s comprehension and support, and paid for it all on her own as well. After WWII she took the rather radical step of joining the Rockefeller Foundation and going where few women would have chosen to go, into the hills and jungles of Venezuela to help indigenous women and children improve their lives. After picking up Dad in some Caracas night club, she married but continued to work to support the two of them and their soon-to-be-growing family, which delivered three children (me being the last). It seemed my parents adhered to the the what’s Mom’s was ours and what’s Dad’s was Dad’s philosophy of marriage. Once Dad had his American citizenship under the aptly-named War Brides Act, he was off to greener and less cumbersome pastures in suburban California. Meanwhile, Mom and her brood went back to the tropics to regroup before heading to chilly Wisconsin to get her doctorate and eventually move on into the UN Diplomatic Corps.
I summarize my mother’s life above even though I wrote a very fulsome biography of her called Mater Gladiatrix, a title which tells you how I looked at her and her strength of character and accomplishment. Anytime in. My business career when someone would suggest that I was not sympathetic to women and their plight to breach the glass ceiling, I would cite growing up under my mother’s regime and the deep respect I had for her. Once, someone suggested that perhaps it was my resentment for her dedication to her career rather than her motherly duties that may have secretly made me more a misogynist than I thought. I took that in stride and didn’t bother to mention that no one was less likely to lean into the need for reverse discrimination for women than my mother. I remember when I told her of my first divorce, her question (and it was an honest question to her) was why I was required to settle anything on my soon to be ex-wife. It was simply not in her thought process that women deserved anything that they did not create or earn themselves. I set her staring on New York Matrimonial law and AMerican convention on the subject and she just kept quiet though I knew her opinion of it all and noted her good sense in understanding that she may have been an exception to the norm in such affairs.
Tonight I have my dear friend Mike Parkinson, a fellow Cornelian and retired Air Force Colonel and Flight Surgeon speaking to my business ethics class. I asked him to help me address the topic of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues that are top-most on the minds of today’s business executives. He organized his brother Dan, a notable conservationist, to address the E part of that equation and took on the task of address the social and governance portions by virtue of his role as member of the Dense Department’s Health Board. It seems he recently chaired a report on Active Duty Women’s health issue for the joint command and he felt it would form the basis of a good anti-discriminatory case for the course. I wholeheartedly agreed and have read the report he helped promulgate and a PowerPoint version of its findings and recommendations that he will use to present to the class tonight. It is a very involved and interesting topic which promises to resonate with the students, especially since 50% of them are, indeed, women, and this is a decidedly military town with many of them working in and around the military complex.
As I sit to wait for the class hour to begin, I do what I always do, which is to catch up on campus news by scanning The USD Vista, the campus newspaper. This week’s front page is dominated by two articles; The first is about how the University is addressing a Title IX lawsuit being brought against it by female varsity crew members who are complaining about unequal treat in all things, but especially financial aid. The second article is about “the slap heard around the world” and the campus debate about the ramifications of the Will Smith slap on-stage at the Oscar’s of comedian Chris Rock. That issue combines all of the topics on the hit parade; violence, the role of comedy and civility, women’s health (in this case Smith’s wife Jada’s alopecia) and Black community interactions and symbolisms. And on top of that action-packed list, the joke heard around the world that caused the slap was a reference to the movie G.I. Jane, when Demi Moore shaves her head in order to compete in a male-dominated military training exercise. Sure enough, that is the movie that I assigned for tonight’s class. I couldn’t have planned for a better, more relevant front page to the campus newspaper to remind my students that these are very real and poignant topics for an ethics course and that they will benefit by getting some exposure to the different ways in which the community at large view the topics.
I never served in the military, so that angle on this topic tonight will be very new to me, but just as with the environmental topic for next week involving Bighorn Sheep and public land grazing rights, you don’t really have to be in it to appreciate the complexity of the topic and the ethical dilemmas these issues represent. I want to take a moment to say how honored I am to have friends like Mike, not just because he has selflessly given of himself to help me and my students out, but because he has taken an important slice of his life and dedicated it to dealing with important issues that make a difference for scores of people and perhaps to the country as a whole, which now relies to the extent of 17% and rising for its military cohort, which are comprised of women. I think those numbers belie the importance of bringing women into a workable position in the military because as we see every day in the general political arena, it is the more balanced and empathetic role of women as leaders that is helping guide us out of many of the testosterone-laden bad places where men in their primordial lay aggressive furor tend to lead us. As far as I’m concerned, its far more than the military or even business. We all benefit greatly by having more women in anything we do.