In our fight for women’s equity, we need to change the conversation
They say doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, and yet, too often, that endless repetition is a perfect description of what we as women’s advocates do. We use the same talking points, the same data points, and we continue to preach to the same choir. The needle doesn’t move, and we wonder why.
At the end of last year I opened up about how challenging it gets sometimes to remain optimistic, when, for example, philanthropy continues to invest less than two percent of its wealth in half the world’s population (the female half). After a lot of reflection, learning, and conversation, I’ve realized that accelerating our impact requires finding new ways of communicating about what we do and why it matters — in other words, changing the conversation.
While our work at Working for Women focuses on growing women’s economic power by removing barriers that keep women from growing wealth, I’d actually like to offer the topic of menopause as an example of how important changing the conversation can be. Why have we accepted, for so long, speaking in hushed tones, in private, about this biological fact that affects half of the world’s people? The more we talk about it, the more we normalize it. I’ve started sharing the occasional menopause-related post on LinkedIn, as my way of helping to change the conversation. Why, because the menopause impacts women’s earnings but that is for another article.
At Working for Women, we’re changing the conversation this year by taking a hard look at the language we’re using about what we do and why we do it; at the people we are and aren’t talking to; and at the questions we are and aren’t asking. As just one example, we are making a point of always using the term “investing,” rather than “donating,” when inviting people to support our work. When you invest in someone, or in a cause, or in an organization, it feels constructive, strategic — whereas “donating” or “giving” can cast the giver as a hero and the recipient as just that: a vessel for receiving, and nothing more. The women we invest in here at Working for Women are whole; they don’t need gifts given out of pity, they need investments given to help them overcome the social and policy barriers that keep them from creating wealth. They need equity to remove the blocks that keep them from expressing their talents and ambitions. Your investment in them, and in us, is an investment in possibility; it’s an investment in the future.
Faith in women’s potential is what led me to start Working for Women, over five years ago. I don’t talk a lot about the moment that I committed my life to going down this path, but if we’re truly going to change the conversation, maybe it’s time I give this particular story more airtime. I was running my previous company, and I went on a mission trip to Guatemala with a friend. In one part of the trip, we invited and spent the afternoon with local sex workers — hosted them, gave them a meal, and shared in conversation. While we were walking around the neighborhood to invite them to join us, I noticed that all of the sex workers worked in a row of buildings one block from the police station. And it struck me that each woman was running her own business. She was paying the rent for the room she used, she was giving a cut to the gangs that were there to “provide protection,” and she was making sure that she brought enough money home, because that was the reason she was doing this: to support her family. The only reason these women were doing this work was that they didn’t see another possibility (there’s that word again).
At the end of the trip, I realized, “This is my life’s work. These women all have business skills. What if they had other opportunities and they didn’t have to sell themselves?” From there, I started bringing Working for Women into existence. I had long been inspired by the 1% for the Planet model of channeling resources from the business community to protect the environment, and I wondered, why not do something like that to generate investment in women?
The connective tissue between these Guatemalan sex workers and the women that Working for Women’s network of nonprofits serve today is that they are people who are invisible to society. No one wants to see them. And when we do look their way, too often, we don’t see them for their possibilities, we see them for their trauma — their circumstances.
As Melinda French Gates, a woman I deeply admire, wrote in her book, Moment of Lift:
“Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude…The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders — even in their own homes.
Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality.”
In a video that Working for Women recently shared, a woman, Amanda, who works at one of the nonprofits we support, says something along the lines of, “I was incarcerated, but these women aren’t seeing me for that, they’re seeing me for what I can do.”
We have a tendency to make everything binary in this world: black and white, insider or outsider. But, as Gates writes,
“If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, ‘I’m not in that situation because I’m different.’ But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, ‘I’m no better than others.’ So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.”
When we are willing to change the conversation, we may just find that we all have more in common than we realized.
Beth Bengtson
Founder & CEO, Working for Women
www.workingforwomen.org
beth@workingforwomen.org
@workingforwomen