"There's a WOMAN running this place?"

Rant alert.

Here's the thing about where I work:  almost all of the senior managers are women.  Not just women, but women who are now or have been, for most of their careers, working mothers.

Our plant is something of an anomaly in the giant Swiss company which owns us.  Not simply because of the noticeable dearth of females in leadership positions at other sites and at the top levels of the organization, but because our plant runs really, really, well.

Go figure.

Say what you like about gender equality, and a lot of us are married to men who would self-identify as progressive, even feminist, but the reality is that most working moms also manage the vast majority of the household responsibilities.  This means that even though we have achieved income parity with, and perhaps superiority to, our professionally high-functioning spouses, we are still the ones that leave work early to take the kids to the dentist and come home to help with homework, cook dinner, and scrub the toilets.

We're the ones who know what size jeans and shoes the kids wear and which socks came through the laundry last week without a mate.  We're the ones who know how much money is in the checking account and when the bills are due.  We have the family calendar in our head and we're the ones that schedule our workday around the piano lesson or ski team practice.  We're the ones who go to soccer games.  

We're the ones that plan the meals, grocery shop, and cook dinner every night.  We're the ones that do the Christmas shopping.  We're the ones who wash the clothes and dispense relationship advice and make sure the pets and children are all up to date on their shots.  We're the ones who divvy up the chores and make sure everyone does their bit.

We have our heads in the details.  We can juggle six things at once.  We not only know what needs to be done, we know how to do it... and we know how to delegate.  And we know how to address someone who isn't pulling his or her weight.  There's no ego involved.  We're just doing what we need to do.

This is what makes us able to run a successful business.

We're damned proud of it.

We interviewed a man a few weeks ago - I won't name names, because I don't in this blog, but he is a member of a prominent local family which owns a landscaping company and whose last name starts with F and rhymes with gnarly.

The guy was a knuckle-dragging misogynist.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

He could not get his brain around the fact that women were running the joint.  The rest of us could not get our brains around the concept that in the year of Our Lord two thousand almost twelve, a man would come into a job interview and in all seriousness say, "Let me get this straight - there's a woman running this place?  And a woman in charge of production?"

Women can vote, get advanced degrees, be personally and professionally successful, marry or not, have children or not, even own property in our own name.  But we still aren't president; we still don't earn the same dollar for the same work; and our success is marred by institutionalized paternalism and cultural chauvinism.

For all our gains, true equality has been far too slow in coming, and has even regressed in the past twenty years as we have, as a nation and as a gender, allowed the anti-feminist rhetoric of the Right to infect our values.  We've been lulled into thinking we have it good enough.  We've been brainwashed into believing that the veneer of political correctness - even as we sneer at it - has corrected discrimination when, in fact, it has merely concealed it.

We need to do better.  We need symbolic, meaningful and binding acknowledgement of a social and economic commitment to equality.  We need the ERA.

Mr. Rhymes-With-Gnarly did not get the job.