In defense of uppity women

“That’s ‘DOCTOR Uppity Woman’ to you”

The insurance company nurse – let’s call her Betty – came for our home visit last week. I don’t mind because we get $150 each for letting someone come to the house, take our blood pressure, write down our medications, and tell us we need a hand rail in the shower.

Betty was great. It only took a few minutes of conversation – with me being very nosy – to learn that she teaches at the local community college.

And that she has a doctorate.

I told her that I tell the female dental students at the dental college to make people call them “doctor” once they have earned the title.

I don’t worry about that, Betty said. I want people to feel comfortable with me. As long as the students are professional with me, I am fine. And it keeps me humble not to be called doctor.

OH GIRL THE WORLD ALREADY KEEPS WOMEN HUMBLE AND WOMEN OF COLOR EVEN MORE SO.

I called her “Dr Betty” from then on. (I would have used her last name but I did not know her last name.)

(I do not know the etiquette of calling a nurse practitioner with a doctorate “doctor” when I am her patient, but I do know that a college student should call a teacher with a doctorate “doctor.”)

(And if I have to err, I would rather err on the side of being overly formal and calling a woman by her title rather than by her first name.)

Do men worry about staying humble so much that they don’t ask people to use their titles in a professional relationship?

Hahahaha NO THEY DO NOT.

Men own their power. They demand it.

Of course the dilemma that – as we women know – any time a woman does own her power, she is accused of being a bitch.

Uppity.

Too direct.

Too outspoken.

Too everything.

I completely understand why Dr Betty might want to avoid all this crap. She is a Woman of a Certain Age, with beautiful gray braids cascading down her back. She has seen things. She has experienced things. She has felt the wrath of a sexist, racist society and probably just wants to focus on her immediate mission of educating nurses. And just having a woman like her in that position is a fight and a clear message to the sexists and the racists that they are not going to win.

(Charlie Kirk would have been horrified if she had shown up to his house. Would he have let her in? Or would he have surrendered the $150 just to keep his racist, sexist principles?)

The good news is that young women are standing on the shoulders of the women before them and taking the next step. I saw this post this morning, after I drafted the first part of this piece yesterday (and honestly I was wondering how I would end this piece). This is from a young woman I know who just graduated with her DNP yesterday.

I graduated with my Doctorate of Nursing Practice to be a psychiatric Nurse Practitioner!!

Passionate passionate passionate about mental health.

That’s DR. MIDLEVEL to you!!

The Mommy Track is good when it’s the Daddy Track

The only good part-time lawyer is a male part-time lawyer

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

When I was in the corporate world and my friends and co-workers were having babies, they begged their bosses for some kind of part-time professional track. They wanted to keep working but working full time, with long hours and travel, just wasn’t an option. Who would take care of their children?

The bosses said nope.

So they quit.

Many of them were married to men who made decent salaries, I suppose. If the money situation were desperate, they would have cobbled together something suboptimal.

But the ones I knew quit.

Women with five to ten years of experience, good experience, who knew what they were doing and were ready to move up the career ladder suddenly gone.

But also – experienced employees whose institutional knowledge was suddenly gone.

After yet another co-worker quit after having her baby, I asked a male HR VP about this. Why couldn’t we have part-time professional positions?

He looked puzzled. How would the company handle benefits? Office space?

The company chose to lose someone they had had for ten years rather than get creative.

The only women in executive roles at that company – a Fortune 100 company with over 100,000 employees – either had no children or, if they had children, had stay at home husbands. How do I know this? Because there were barely any woman in executive positions and I knew who they were.

A friend at another F100 company in town did go part time.

“They just cut everything in half,” she told me. Half the pay, half the contribution to her benefits. The office problem did not seem to sway them.

Twenty years later, with her kids finally out of the house, and she is still there, doing her awesome work, back to full time.

Another friend went part time when her baby was born, but her company’s part time was that she worked only four days a week. Officially, she worked 32 hours a week.

Only her male boss would schedule meetings on her off day.

And call her on her off day.

And give her deadlines that required her working on her off day.

She still only got paid for 32 hours, though.

A friend in Texas – one of the friends who wanted to work part-time after her first baby was born – heard about a guy running for office by her. He’s a lawyer at a major law firm, only a few years out of law school. Married, three kids.

How is he going to campaign, and even more critically, serve, if he is an associate at a law firm? Those people work horrible hours.

Oh look his firm is letting him work part time?

I thought part-time professional work just wasn’t possible.

I was wrong. It just wasn’t possible unless you have a penis.

White men go home

You’ve had power forever and look where we are

We couldn’t even get the fabulous, wonderful, smart Jasmine Crockett past the primary. (Source)

An older white liberal man, during a heated political discussion, asked if I thought white men should even run for office anymore.

It took me only a second to think about it and answer “No.”

We were talking about a Democratic primary that involves one white male candidate and one white female candidate.

The male candidate looks good on paper: Stanford undergrad, Yale grad school. He has had some impressive jobs. People will look at that background and think he is smart and hard working, which I am sure he is. He is also probably a nice guy and is completely sincere in his desire to serve the community. I have nothing bad to say about this guy. Who he is personally is not the issue.

The female candidate does not have a fancy school on her resume. She has not worked at impressive companies. But she has been participating in the community at the local level, serving on boards and commissions and projects that probably don’t impress people but do work that needs to be done, like making sure that the local park is inclusive and accessible, both in the play equipment and in the restrooms. (The fact that there are restrooms at all is important to some of us. I sure haven’t seen men fighting for public restrooms. Indeed, they have argued against them.)

Our current legislator, who is a woman, also did not go to a fancy school. She has not had impressive internships or jobs.

But since she was elected eight years ago, she has done so much for our community and for women and children specifically.

In her first race, two of her major issues were maternal mortality and human trafficking, things I had not even thought about in our district. But she was right – they were problems in my own middle-class suburb.

Since then, she and the other Democratic women have proposed and passed legislation about insurance coverage for follow-up mammograms (which had been considered diagnostic and not preventive, so you ended up paying hundreds of dollars to make sure you don’t have breast cancer) and postpartum Medicaid coverage. She has proposed legislation about menopause research and other women’s health issues. Her focus is not exclusively women but it is something she cares about and acts on.

I’m not saying men don’t support solving these problems.

But I don’t see them pushing for legislation to solve these problems.

I don’t see them campaigning on solving these problems.

I don’t see women’s issues being brought to the forefront until female (usually Dem) politicians address them.

My question to all white male candidates – no matter how liberal they are – is, “What do you bring to the conversation that has not been brought up, discussed, and acted on a million times already?”

I’m waiting for the answer.

Men care about breasts

But not enough to make sure we have research and treatment and insurance coverage for them

At a panel discussion, a county judge said that one of her biggest challenges when she had her first baby was finding a place to pump in the courthouse. There’s only one pumping station, she said. In the entire courthouse.

Her husband had asked her what previous pregnant judges had done and she laughed.

“Previous pregnant judges?” she laughed. “Previous pregnant judges?”

Another panelist, an older white man who is a professor at the law school and who describes himself as very left, looked shocked when the judge talked about the lack of lactation space, not just for her but for other women using the courthouse. It had never occurred to him that this might be a thing.

A couple of issues here:

It’s rare for the needs of women in public spaces to be taken into account
It’s rare for the needs of women anywhere to be taken into account
Even the most liberal of men don’t see these needs

QED We need more women in office.

I talked about mammogram followups in a previous post. That is, if you have breast tissue that a regular mammogram won’t read (that is, the machine is not doing its job), you will often need a followup mammogram for more investigation.

In many cases, the followup mammogram is considered diagnostic. The first one is preventive and the law requires it be fully covered at no cost to the patient.

But when a procedure is coded diagnostic?

Hahahahahaha you’re paying hundreds of dollars for that out of your pocket.

In Wisconsin, a group of female legislators got a bill passed into law requiring insurance companies to cover the followup mammogram in these cases as preventive.

That is, as a procedure that insurance covers fully.

Female legislators. Women. Women led the charge on this. Because we are the ones who feel the pain. (Not that it should be that way, but damn it seems to be the only way.)

Men did not do this. Men did not say, “You know what we need? We need to make it easier to diagnose breast cancer!” Nope. Male Republican legislators are too busy trying to cut taxes for their rich friends or get rid of environmental protections or reducing the age of consent.

When I first learned about the Temperance Movement, I thought it was silly. Mean women who didn’t want their husbands to have a beer after work.

Then I learned that the tavern leagues had gotten legislation passed that allowed a tavern to garnish a man’s wages for his bar tab. The bar got paid before the children got fed.

Why did men even pass such a law in the first place? Was there not one man who voted for such legislation who wondered how workers would keep a roof over their children’s heads? Was there not one man who wondered why bar owners should get a break?

When I was canvassing last month, I talked to a 30ish woman with small children in the room behind her. I told her about the mammogram law that women had just gotten passed in our state.

She told me that she had skipped her mammogram this year because she always has to have the followup and she is so tired of the cost and the hassle.

I asked her to schedule a test, telling her that we need her around.

Women save women. We can’t count on anyone else to do it.

(Make sure all the like-minded women you know are registered to vote and know about the next election where you are.)

Don’t tread on me

But also give me some of that government health care while I tread on other people who aren’t affecting me in any way at all

Do you want to know what hypocrisy looks like?

I saw a cousin last week. This guy, who is white, is a huge trump supporter. When he comments on my political facebook posts, it’s always to argue and point out how I am wrong and Dems are bad and blah blah blah. His whole attitude is that he got where he is just fine so why shouldn’t everyone else?

(As in, when he was on his town’s school board, he dismissed parents’ requests for all-day kindergarten and for Pre-K. “They just don’t want to pay for daycare,” he said. Which may have been true but also is not unreasonable, especially in an environment where the only way to keep the lights on is to have both parents working for money.)

BTW, “where he is” is that he bought his father’s business, the business our grandfather started, the business that was already a strong, steady brand. He sold it a few years ago and retired early.

When I asked him about health insurance, he said he is on ACA.

Not a trump thing.

“You mean Obamacare?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“OBAMACARE,” I said again, waiting for him to recognize the contradictions between what he writes online about the Democrats and how he conducts his own life.

Reader, he did not appear to recognize the contradictions.

I have another trumper cousin.

(If you don’t have any trumpers in your family, it’s because your family just isn’t big enough.)

She is consistent in her rage about Dems and her acceptance of the cult. She refuses to get a covid vaccine because she says it will change her DNA. (Yes she has heart problems and is medically vulnerable why do you ask?)

Yet she divorced her husband when he needed multiple organ transplants so that he would qualify for Medicaid.

That is, when it was to her financial benefit, she decided that using a resource that the government provides was a perfectly fine thing to do.

What do you even say to someone who can’t see? Who won’t see? How do you even get through to someone when the answer is right in front of their face and they are looking at The Answer while they swear that The Answer is bad?

I really am asking you for a script. How do we get them to see? Even a tiny bit?