In which Joanne encounters an unexpected moral dilemma

So here's an interesting conundrum: 

As a card-carrying Net Impact member and social enterprise/CSR junkie, I believe in incorporating one's values and ethics into the way one does business.  Bill Marriott disagrees. He checks his values at the door, which means, ironically enough, that his hotel chain sides with me on marriage equality:

"In an interview last year with Business Insider, Bill Marriott explained that he personally believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. But he said he does not mix his views on the subject with operation of the business.

'We have to take care of our people, regardless of their sexual orientation or anything else,' Bill Marriott said. 'We have all the American values: the values of hard work, the values of integrity, the values of fairness and respect.'

He further pointed out, 'Our church is very much opposed to alcohol and we're probably one of the biggest sales engines of liquor in the United States. I don't drink. We serve a lot of liquor.'"

Well, crap. Do I applaud the guy because his corporate stance aligns with my politics, or disagree with him for not using business as a force for (his version of) good in the world?

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.

An inappropriately personal blog post

The great thing about being a rare and totally sporadic blogger is that you have approximately 2500 half-written blog posts wandering around your hard drive at any given time. I found this one recently, originally written in October 2010, and was surprised to see how little my world view (and sense of self) had changed.  Definitely inappropriately personal, but also definitely important to share.

Why do we work in social entrepreneurship?  Why give up all the money, fame and glory of the private sector to slave away in a thankless industry with no financial rewards and rarely a faint feeling of accomplishment?  I think I might be getting closer to an answer for myself, personally.

I feel. Maybe in a stronger way than the “average” person. In this capitalist society that I love we’re trained that we need to harness our emotions, that over-expression is bad, that it represents a lack of the all-important quality of control. This simplifies things – it allows us to look at situations objectively, remove ourselves from hard decisions, let employees go more easily. I can do it to some extent, I can be a “professional”, but there’s a limit to it. More than the people I see around me, I feel.

I have strong emotions. I am impassioned. I get happy easily and angry more easily. I have all those emotions smart achievers in control are supposed to be able to bury – jealousy, greed, sadness, mania, idealism. A classmate joked the other day that he needed the name of my dealer because I was so zanily enthusiastic that I must be on drugs. That’s the good side. The bad side is what’s cost me relationships, made me break down in tears during performance evaluations, put me into screaming matches with good friends. It’s sent me to therapy. It’s made it harder for me to get over breakups, severed friendships, and family deaths. It’s kept me up at night worrying about poverty and natural disaster thousands of miles away. It’s what has led me to this field of work, and it won’t let go.

I work in this field because I have to. I can’t read the headlines of the paper and sigh at the state of the world and finish my coffee and go on with my day like normal people. Those headlines eat away at me. There’s only a certain extent to which I can detach from them. There’s only a certain amount of inequality and injustice and unfairness I can stand, without feeling compelled to fix it. I remember when I was in fourth grade and I learned about the Holocaust, and I thought my grandparents were bad people for having been alive when it was happening and not having put a stop to it. If only the world were so simple. And it’s not like I’m out saving North Koreans or Darfur refugees every day of my life. But I can’t detach so much that I can do work that makes NO difference. I did it for two years, I tried, and I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Maybe the people who are actually out there on the front lines, finding foster homes for battered kids or marching into the line of fire or physically feeding the malnourished, will turn their noses up at these statements. I can’t claim that I’m doing everything in my power, the way they can. But I think I’m a little closer to understanding myself, to understanding what compels me to work in this field of “social good” as opposed to the regular business life. I think I’m a little closer to understanding how my personal life, with all its ups and downs*, ties into my professional path, my other activities, and my insecurities. It’s all related, somehow, and I think I’m getting one step closer to knitting it all together.

* I could probably smooth out all of said ups and downs with a little daily pill. But would that make my life better off? This is something I struggle with sometimes. Would I rather feel less, have less pain and heartache, have more stability… but know that I’m not really “feeling” life to the fullest? Will this tendency to be more emotional and more passionate than others lead me to greatness, or drive me off a cliff?