Whose Time Matters

Last week I had lunch with a colleague whom I hadn’t seen in some time.  I was eager to catch up and hear about her recent adventures.  During the past year, she headed up a non-profit organization that ended up exerting huge demands on her life, in terms of time, labor and emotional commitment.  She explained that before she accepted the job she was promised the aid of a board of directors to help lighten the load, a board consisting of eight members split equally among women and men.  It didn’t take long to discover that the male board members did zero of the work necessary to keep the organization flowing and had zero compunction about letting the women shoulder all of the work.  I didn’t know this kind of thing was still happening at such an obvious and brazen level.  And lest anyone think this happened in Alabama…no, it was in a non-profit arts organization right here in left-leaning, liberal Los Angeles.

What were the men thinking?  Were they even thinking at all or was their behavior just a reflex, a ‘normal’ reaction when there’s grunt work to do and half of the people in the room are women?   Did both the men and women on this board harbor unconscious assumptions about whose time and energy are important and deserve honoring?   It reminded me once again how far we’ve haven’t come.   It also reminded me of how deep the tentacles of misogyny are when liberal men, whom I like to count as friends of equal rights, have so little awareness of their sexist behavior.