I woke up at 30 and discovered, oh shit, I’m a feminist

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a child of the so-called ‘post-feminist’ era. Growing up, I never really ‘got’ why this women’s rights and feminism stuff was such a big deal. Granted, the lion’s share of that attitude stemmed from privilege: I was born to a loving, intact, upper middle class family. I was the middle child between two boys, and I was the one who was good at sports and standardized tests. I was a tomboy, and that was embraced. Mom and Dad told me I could do anything I dreamed of, Dad coached my girls’ sports teams, and Mom encouraged video games as much as Barbie dolls. But as I grew up and started my career, I was always the girl in a sea of boys – a math major in college, a nerdy data analyst in my first job, an MBA student in a program that was 71% male – and it never phased me. I figured if anyone would feel the effects of a gender divide, it would be me, and I wasn’t having any trouble.

So I fell into a common trap: this whining about widespread gender discrimination was sort of silly. It must be a phenomenon of the less educated, or the flyover states, or the unsuccessful women looking for an excuse, or the wives who hadn’t chosen enlightened enough husbands. It didn’t affect me. I was strong and confident and ambitious. If I ever encountered some anti-female bullshit, I would just kick it out of the way and move on creating a name for myself in the world. I fell solidly into the ‘go away, this topic annoys me’ camp of post-feminism.

And then I started to do things in the world. A switch flipped at 30: I was out of grad school, no longer focused on simply learning and growing, no longer climbing the lower rungs of the ladder.  I became the CEO of a startup and started looking for money, and partnerships, and high profile board members. I moved to San Francisco and immersed myself in the startup community, where Ruby on Rails proficiency had a far higher currency than business acumen, and as soon as someone discovered I wasn’t a tech entrepreneur their eyes glazed over. I was following in the footsteps of the founder of the startup, a white man, and I would get lots of approving head nods to the vision and strategy I discussed passionately, but only the most candid and well-meaning funders would tell me the real deal: this was going to be a hard row to hoe for a lot of reasons, but being a woman was only going to work against me.

Well, shit.

All those older women, my mom waxing poetic about the importance of pro-choice policy, the Sheryl Sandberg/Anne-Marie Slaughter debate, even my crunchy women’s & gender studies friends from college… they had recognized that glass ceiling when it was still so far above my head that I couldn’t see its sheen.

The other day I was chatting with the mother of an 18-year-old girl who reminded me a lot of myself: born and raised in the bay, going to a good college, raised by progressive parents. She had the same attitude as I had: oh, I’m sure this was an issue back in your generation mom, but ours is different. There are plenty of guys in my gender studies class, all my female friends are super ambitious, and we’d never settle for men who don’t understand that a marriage is an equal partnership where both parents have equal responsibility for the children. Thanks for all your hard work to get us here, really, but don’t worry about us – we’ve got it covered.

The message I wanted to send to her was: oh honey, just you wait.

And it’s not a bad attitude to have. It’s arguably better to assume there are no barriers than to feel from a young age like you’re fighting them – it creates a can-do attitude and allows women to build a self image around their personalities and passions and life goals, not the place they’re at in society. Perhaps the real lesson here is simply that that process of self awareness and self realization isn’t one that’s limited to our adolescent years, but rather is an iterative lifelong process. We constantly have to redefine ourselves for where we are in our careers, who we are in our relationships, and how society perceives and responds to us. I think the hardest part of waking up at 30 to discover that my gender does define me to some extent, does have an impact on my opportunity to succeed, was a big blow to the self-evident truths I had spent my formative years building up. To have that come crumbling down and have to redefine my world view mid-career was a challenge for which I was not prepared.

I guess that’s why they call it lifelong learning.