Stickin' it to the Woman

I've always liked the phrase "stickin' it to the Man," used to describe some overt or covert subversion of authority.  Getting something that the dominant cultural paradigm would like to deny you.  Triumphing over petty bureaucracy.  I pretty much stick it to the Man every day by using some of my work time to write. 

So why don't we have a companion phrase like "stickin' it to the Woman"?  What would it mean if we did?  It sounds like it could be kinda sexy and dirty, but I don't think it is.  Women don't now nor have they ever held the kind of unassailable position of authority in our cultural pantheon that men have held.  We didn't even have the right to vote until 88 years ago.  Women as a group have largely been property for the last several thousand years.  Something a man could own, sell, and dispose of as he saw fit.

Stickin' it to the Woman then would pretty much just describe the way women have traditionally been treated.  It would describe the act of a more powerful group of people trampling on a less powerful group of people.  Using social pressures and cultural expectations to force someone to do things they didn't want to.  Using petty bureaucracy to keep people from exercising their rights.  Taking advantage of traditions to enforce unspoken rules of behavior.

Today, as a nation, we're making one small push back against the people who still think stickin' it to the Woman is okay.  For 19 years Lily Ledbetter worked in a Goodyear Tire plant, doing her job well and taking home her hard-earned money.  Then one day she received an anonymous note in her locker, telling her that she was making as much as 40% less than the men who performed her exact same job.  These were not men with more experience or education.  In some cases, they weren't men with more tenure on the job.  They were simply people who had the happy blessing of being born with a cock and balls.  For that they were receiving more money than Ms. Ledbetter. 

She sued Goodyear, but the Supreme Court overturned her win on the grounds that employees only have 180 days to dispute unequal pay.  In short, she was supposed to have filed suit before she even knew that she was being cheated.  And how was she to know she was being cheated?  (There's no law requiring employers to disclose pay rates to workers in the same job.)  One has to assume that the law exists only to give lipservice to the idea of equal pay, while rendering it virtually impossible to enforce. 

The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law today, does away with that 180-day statute of limitations by resetting the clock with each discriminatory paycheck.  In short, as long as a person is still employed by the company, he or she can sue for reparations, and up to six months after the last paycheck.  It does not, however, lift the paltry two-year limit on back pay.  Lily Ledbetter, after 19 years of discrimination, would only have been eligible to be paid for two of those years.

According to the Census Bureau, women on average still make only 78 cents for each dollar men earn on average, and I can only imagine that there are large numbers of people experiencing the same discrimination for reasons of their race, religion, or physical disability.

When I worked for the Church of the Valet, I was an administrative Jill of All Trades.  I did the newsletter, funeral bulletins, bookkeeping, website updates, database maintenance, bulk mailing.  Everything that needed to be done, I pitched in and did it.  A year into my tenure, one of the other administrative assistants quit and the church hired someone new.  A man.  We'd had another man in an administrative position, but there was always some discomfort.  The discomfort usually ended in me doing some of more menial clerical work and ultimately produced a promotion for the male admin. asst.

Gymbag, the new male admin. asst. was touted as having a lot of computer experience and a lot of experience doing website design and corporate communications.  In fact, he was going to have a different title, too: Communications Coordinator and Webmaster.  Two weeks in, it was clear to me that Gymbag was incompetent.  Not only did he know almost nothing about doing corporate communications, he couldn't be taught some of the most basic parts of his job.  (Like how to operate the folding machine that folds newsletters for mailing.)  So you know who did them. 

By the time I found out that Gymbag was making $4,000 more a year (and doing at least 50% less work) than I was, I had already turned in my resignation in preparation to move to Kansas.  I have no doubt that the real motivation in giving Gymbag a trumped up job description and a higher salary was to assuage the egos of the men on the hiring committee.  It probably hurt their pride to see a fellow brother fallen to the embarrassing level of "administrative assistant." 

It continues today.  At the Church of the Valet, Gymbag continues in his glorious reign of incompetence, and he continues to make more than the other admin. assts.  More tellingly, even the specialized parts of his job that I supposed were meant to justify his higher salary...they've been foisted off on the other admin. asst.  The Fabulous E is learning Dreamweaver so she can take over doing website maintenance.  (Turns out, Gymbag doesn't even know how to use Dreamweaver.  He was using some little dinky updater program, which explains why the new website design never got implemented.)  No one can quite tell me what Gymbag does to earn his paycheck, but the evil part of me hopes it's something dirty and humiliating that takes place behind the pastor's closed door.  Enough women have been forced to debase themselves to keep their jobs.

The Lily Ledbetter Act is a small step, but at least it signals the new administration's willingness to put a stop to people stickin' it to the Woman.  We need to keep an eye open for the ways in which the system is built in.  Women are in the majority in America, but we still operate like a minority.  The truth is: Stockholm Syndrome is real.  Culturally speaking, we've been held hostage to a discriminatory system for so long that we still sympathize with it.  It's the same story for black Americans of both genders--they're still struggling to break free from that feeling of being hostages and needing to appease their captors. 

If that sounds radical, think about these parallels.  At plenty of jobs I've been asked to do menial tasks that no one ever asked the male employees to do.  Often I did them.  Why?  Because when I rebelled I was punished in some way--often socially.  Because when I was a little girl and one of my uncles said, "Bring me a beer," or "Get the ashtray," there was no use in wondering why the boy cousins were never forced into service like that.  They just weren't and for the girl cousins to refuse to serve resulted in punishment.