Monthly Archives: December 2022

A Tale of Two Realities: Where Men Thrive and Women Do All They Can to Simply Survive

Leadership, , , , ,

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of woke culture, it was the age of suppression, it was the epoch of making America great again, it was the epoch of controlling American ovaries. The seemingly season of light, overshadowed by the inevitable season of darkness. Where hope was a distant wish and despair was the cruel reality.

Where the whole world was before us, but we had to get there with half the pay. A time where we, the women were all going straight the other way: to hospital beds, to fill our anxiety medication, to inject ourselves with hormones to be able to birth a human being while balancing a career and unrealistic expectations set by a society designed by men, for men. 

Carlin, a political cartoonist from Peru, illustrated a comic representing the
obstacles working women face while men sprint ahead, 2019.

The graphic above went viral when Mahindra, a Mumbai based billionaire shared the illustration on Twitter, posting “I salute every working woman & acknowledge that their successes have required a much greater amount of effort than their male counterparts” (Mahindra, 2019). The illustration resonated with so many due to the clear depiction of the barriers women face when choosing to have a successful career.

Bugid and England explored a barrier women face in the workforce: The Motherhood Penalty. This outlines the thought that motherhood negatively affects women who desire to have a career while raising their children. As Carlin demonstrated in his viral cartoon, the penalty suggest that women with children lose work experience at the expense of raising their children while taking care of the family and household duties. Over the past three decades, that has become increasingly common in the United States, as birthrates have declined for women in their twenties and jumped for women in their late thirties and early forties, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend has pushed the median age of U.S. women giving birth from 27 to 30, the highest on record (Minchillo, 2022).

This results in potentially longer maternity leaves as older, new mothers will take longer to return to work after having an extended period of recovery from childbirth, yet federally funded maternity leaves in America are non-existent (Bryant, 2020). The Motherhood Penalty also reveals that working mothers are less productive at work due to the exhaustion of child raising and they are often inclined to elect out of high paying jobs for lower paying jobs that are more flexible or “mother friendly” (Budig & England, 2001).

The rate of attrition at which women are burning out is alarming. It is clearly evident that after the Covid-19 Pandemic and “The Great Resignation” in education, women are electing to give up their dreams of simultaneously being a mother and a professional. As a society, it is our obligation to support women as valuable members of our economy. Michelle Obama said it best when she shared, “No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half its citizens.”

It is up to us to ensure that this period is not like any other periods, that even its nosiest authorities will not overcome in silencing the far better things that we’ll do, the far better things that we, as women have ever known.

Reference:

Bryant, M. (2020). Maternity leave: US policy is worst on list of the world’s richest countries. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/27/maternity-leave-us-policy-worst-worlds-richest-countries

Budig, M. J., & England, P. (2001). The wage penalty for motherhood. American Sociological Review, 66(2), 204–225. https://ezproxy.latech.edu:2089/10.2307/2657415.

Dickens, C. & Dunn, H. (1921) A Tale of Two Cities . New York, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation.

Mahindra, A. [@anandmahindra] (2019, Feb. 5). I’ve been helping to baby-sit my year old grandson this past week & it’s brought home to me the stark[Tweet]. Twitter.

Minchillo, J. (2022). Motherhood deferred: U.S. median age for giving birth hits 30. Decisions by college-educated women to invest in their educations and careers so they could be better off financially when they had children have contributed to the shift toward older motherhood. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/motherhood-deferred-us-median-age-giving-birth-hits-30-rcna27827

Indigenizing Colonized Spaces

Uncategorized

BY: ADAM SOULOR

Throughout history, American Indians and Alaskan Natives have continued not to be acknowledged and moved to the bottom of society. The United States, from 1778 to 1871, entered more than 500 treaties with Native American tribes, all violated by the U.S. (National Geographic, 2022). These treaties mostly contained land agreements and land acknowledgments between the Native American tribes and the U.S. The U.S. took advantage of the treaties and began to break them to fulfill their dreams of manifest destiny and believed that indigenous people were “savages.” The settlers viewed the Native Americans as less than others because they did not speak their language and lived differently. Hence, the U.S. just used brute force to take over lands while killing and getting paid for each native person they killed, which drastically shrunk the large Native American population (Holocaust Museum Houston, 2022). The U.S. greed for land and heinous acts against Native Americans led to some tribes giving up and abiding by U.S. rules, leading to the Indian Removal Act in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson. The Indian Removal Act journey, created by President Andrew Jackson, was labeled the “Trail of Tears,” which brought native people from the east coast to Oklahoma. Many youths and older adults died along this journey to shrink the native population even more, which was a goal of Andrew Jackson. Now, fast forward a couple of hundred years, and Native Americans and Alaskan Natives are still fighting against the mass amounts of oppression and broken promises and treaties acknowledged by the U.S. The Native population may not be what it once was, but it is slowly making a comeback, and Native and Alaskan natives alike will not stop until all hear their voices and stories. Native American and Alaskan Native people have never been able to be in positions of power or be put at the forefront of leading changes and have that voice at the table. When looking at examples of this, you see Native Women who hold high importance within Native communities hold power positions, such as Deb Haaland, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. In 2018, Sharice Davids was elected as United States Representative and became one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. These two women have sparked more Native and Alaskan Native women to become more involved and advocate for their people. Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, throughout the past couple of years, have been Indigenizing colonized spaces that no one would have ever thought they could. Through the Native American and Alaskan Native push to be included in power positions then led to president-elect Joe Biden to appoint Chief of the Mohegan Tribe Lynn Malerba, the first Native American to serve as the Treasurer of the United States. She will also lead the newly established Office of Tribal and Native Affairs (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2022). Having these Native Women at the forefront is only the beginning. Still, it is an excellent start to bringing the first inhabitants of this land into the discussion on how to run and take care of the U.S. 

American Indians and Alaska Natives – treaties. The Administration for Children and Families. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/fact-sheet/american-indians-and-alaska-natives-treaties#:~:text=Nearly%20four%20hundred%20treaties%20were,treaties%20with%20the%20Indian%20tribes. 

Genocide of Indigenous Peoples. Holocaust Museum houston. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-of-indigenous-peoples-guide/ 

Treasury applauds appointment of chief Lynn Malerba as treasurer of the United States. U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2022, September 2). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/treasury-applauds-appointment-of-chief-lynn-malerba-as-treasurer-of-the-united-states 

The United States government’s relationship with Native Americans. National Geographic Society. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/united-states-governments-relationship-native-americans