Toward the beginning of March, I spent the weekend in the cheesey state scrapbooking with Uncle Bex and Cousin Mowla. It was a good, relaxing weekend with progress made on scrapbooks of course.
As part of that weekend, here are a couple of the interesting videos I saw. This one came from facebook. In the last six months I've learned from my sheepish friends that shearing normally occurs in early spring right before lambing starts. This video caught my emotions because of the lesson, "Now sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. When you find that you're down, well just look around. You're still got a body, good legs, and fine feet. Get your head in the right place, and hey, you're complete."
This other video is more for entertainment value. It's one of those that is so ridiculous it's funny. Marcel the Shell - "For adventure, I hang glide on a Dorito."
Have a good week! Ours started here with rain, snow, and high winds today, but I think we can recover. I spent today taking a long nap as part of recovering from being sick last week.
Over the last 4-6 weeks I've been reading a couple books related to work and research on females in the workplace. And how we all have unconscious bias (we're all a little bit sexist, even females themselves, and we're all a little bit racist, even black people themselves). Someone at work e-mailed me this short Pixar video (see below). It seems related, at least in my mind.
Since I work in a male-dominated profession (engineering), this video has some resonating points for me. And it reminds me of a time in January in the late evening when I was driving and happened upon some conservative talk radio. I didn't recognize the talk show host - it wasn't Rush or Sean Hannity or Mark Levin. It was soon after the State of the Union address, and the host was giving some analysis of that. He was talking about how Nancy Pelosi (and other democrats) didn't applaud and give a standing ovation when President Trump said unemployment for African Americans was down. And that unemployment for other minorities was down. What they did give a standing ovation for was a statistic related to women (can't remember what the exact statistic was). One of the host's points was Nancy and friends were being a bit hypocritical in only cheering for a good statistic for women and not for other minorities. Which I think is a fair point.
The next statement the radio show host made I completely disagreed with. He said that women have already won equality, so nothing more needs to be done. Why are they still fighting? Nancy Pelosi has already been Speaker of the House in the past, so the battle has already been won. Everything is equal now. That is where I disagree. That's like saying "we've had a black president now, so racism no longer exists and we don't need to do anything." Not true - there are many people and pockets of places where there is not racism. However, ask any black person if they have felt discriminated against in the last 2-3 years, and I'm fairly certain they will tell you they have been. Sometimes very openly by people calling them names or threatening them, but often it may be subtle, kind of like in the video of Purl. Often it wasn't anything they said, it was the body language, what they didn't say, what they would stop saying when a certain person walked by, or what they didn't invite you to participate in. Or their insistence on conformance to be accepted rather than appreciating you for your differences. For example, I have black friends (respectable engineers) who say sometimes security follows them through a store.
Is it really "equal" if we've had 230 years of Congress existing, and a little over 4 of those years have had a female as the speaker of the house? Would it become equal if for the next 222 years we have a female as the Speaker of the House? Is it equal now when women make up 25 percent of the Senate and 23 percent of the House, though they comprise almost 51 percent of the U.S. population?
This year at robotics I've also been mulling over what it is I bring to the robotics team as a mentor. I'm the only female technical mentor on the team. There are 2 or 3 moms who help with administrative things or "craft/advertising" things, but I'm the only female mentor helping to work directly on the robot. All the other mentors are white, and many of them are middle-aged. Some of them have talents I admire. One guy is a highly engaging person who makes everything fun and teaches in a very fun style while still being very clear about the technical concepts or goals for a project. He's always dreaming up fun "extra" projects. Another guy brings more of a take charge approach. If kids are wandering around without something to do, he gives them something to do. He has a loud voice and is OK with telling others what to do frequently, so at competitions he can tell the kids to "clean up your trash" in the bleachers before leaving, and they do.
What do I bring? I'm not loud. I don't have the voice to be loud even if I wanted to be. I have a bit of a monotone and tend to be serious if I don't know someone well, so I'm not making every activity "fun". I'm not bossy and I'm not telling the kids what they need to do all the time (although occasionally I will if the situation warrants it). After reflection this season, the conclusion I've come to is I bring diversity and a role model to the team. How will girls on the team aspire to work on the robot if they don't see other women or girls working on the robot? How will girls aspire to become an engineer if they don't know any women engineers? Less than 20% of engineers in the workplace are female. If we ever want to improve that number, I think part of that is to have role models.
When I was younger and growing up in a state that is used to strong pioneer women and has a relatively homogeneous (probably >90% white) culture, I didn't really think about this type of stuff, and I probably didn't believe issues with race and gender still existed. And now I'm approaching middle age. Or you could maybe say I've reached middle age. So this is what middle age is.....realizing you're old and are now the role model rather than the one looking at role models. Middle age is realizing that things are more complicated than you used to think they were. And yet they aren't more complicated. Sure, every story has two (or more) sides, and often the truth is somewhere in the middle between the stories. But it still comes back to understanding that all people have three very basic emotional needs:
