I was once a “webmaster” – back when that was a job – working under a Christian evangelical patriarch. Late forties, silver hair, dutiful wife – so basically Mike Pence. I’ll call my guy Mark Price.
I was in college at the time, and this was a pretty cool job – I made fifteen bucks an hour and could work basically any hours I wanted, and as many as I wanted. I just sauntered into the office, sat down, and started making websites. Specifically, this was for an institute loosely associated with the college, and our biggest project was making a website, funded by a grant from a pharmaceutical company, about a little-understood chronic illness.
Mark Price was a congenial fellow. A handsome Santa Claus. I can’t remember how I was hired. Did I interview with Mark? I have no memory of this. In any case, nothing prevented me from getting the job, and I was a brash, outspoken, sometimes shaved-headed young woman. So far, awesome.
Things didn’t get weird until Mr. Price brought his new wife in to meet us all. She was a widow or divorcee, I forget which, with kids at home, and Mark Price was her second husband. She looked at him with stars in her eyes.
I was made to understand that the two had met at church and that the new Mrs. Price was so very, very thankful to God for bringing her a husband like Mark. A manly, strong, commanding, Christian husband like Mark. Especially since she was a single woman with children. She was ever so grateful. I’m not stereotyping her – she told us all of this explicitly, in the office, during work.
This is an uncomfortable thing to make “friendly” little speeches about in an office.
If were in this position today, as an adult woman, forced to listen to my boss’s wife hold forth about submitting to her godly leader husband, I’d be like, “Fuck, why do you have to make my workplace all gendered and awkward?!” A lot of women, especially in male dominated industries, are already involved in a finely-managed dance about gender that involves, in most cases, trying to de-emphasize it entirely.
But I was 20 or so, and my coworkers were all undergrads or recent graduates. The age gap between us and the Prices seemed enormous. When you’re still in that “parents just don’t understand” phase of life, it’s easy to shrug off weird shit by people of your parents’ generation. The Prices seemed old, although in retrospect, Mrs. Price was probably in her late thirties, as I am now.
Some of my coworkers who had been hired before me had been invited to the Prices’ wedding. I listened as my male coworker – who was 22 at the oldest – told me privately how creeped out he had been, confined to a church pew for an hour-long sermon in which Mrs. Price dreamily promised to “obey” Mr. Price forever. There was an explicit speech about wifely submission. The whole office was creeped out.
Once, I designed a web form with some pulldown menus. Today if I were designing a form with a question for Gender and a pulldown menu, I’d make the first item in the pulldown menu “Select One” or “Options” or just “————.” But that was not yet common practice in the early days of the Web, so I created the options “Female” and “Male,” in alphabetical order. Mr. Price came by and made me change it. I told him it was alphabetical. All the other form fields had alphabetized options. He made me change it. Male comes before Female, the alphabet be damned.
On another occasion, he asked for my opinion “as a woman,” about some matter of web design that had nothing to do with being a woman. Like, “As a woman, I think we need a MySQL database.”
Then, excitingly, the pharmaceutical company behind our chronic illness website decided to send our team to a conference about that chronic illness, where we’d shoot video footage and develop content for the website. We’d all get to stay in a hotel (I mean, of course we would, because that’s how work trips work, but it was still very exciting for me at age 20). Mark Price informed us his wife would be attending.
And that’s how I ended up sitting next to – I’ll call her Katherine – throughout a long, plated conference lunch during which she said women look best in heels and unfeminine without them, and that she always wears heels despite her bunions. Mark looked on proudly at his wife virtuously educating me about feminine footwear/suffering. Katherine also talked about her thirteen year old daughter buying a dress for a dance. Katherine didn’t approve of the dress, and said — wait for it — “What, now I’m supposed to compete with my thirteen year old daughter?”
NO. OH MY GOD. NO, YOU ARE NOT. Is your husband a pedophile? Do you think women only exist to look nice for men, and to be pitted against one another? Do you think only one woman can look nice at a time? Is that all there is in your world? Can your daughter please go to college very far away from you?
There was only one other woman on this trip, a software engineer who was maybe a senior in college, and was deep goth. Lydia did not give a shit about conventional beauty norms, and was profoundly morose and bitingly derisive of most things and people, including me. Lydia had rolled her eyes throughout the bunion speech, and when we got to “What, now I’m supposed to compete with my thirteen year old daughter?” – well, Lydia and I had the only friend-like conversation we ever had later that night at the hotel. “OHMYGOD WHAT THE FUCK.” “FUUUUUCK.” “OHMYGOD KATHERINE, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.” So that was a nice side effect, I guess. This godly submissive wife got Lydia and I to pass the Bechdel test together for one special moment.
And everything that ever happened after that was just as you would expect. Mark Price was a congenial fellow unless his authority was questioned, or someone thought “F” came before “M” alphabetically. If my entire livelihood had depended on Mark Price, I’m sure this would’ve been worse, but working college students tend to drift in and out of part-time jobs, as I drifted out of this one. The age gap served as a buffer – maybe Mark Price could tell himself that someone like me would settle down, or be forcibly settled down by god and man, when I “grew up.”
Mark Price had many fine qualities, and I don’t think he ever did anything illegal, although given his student workforce, he may simply have lacked the opportunity to pay men more or to discriminate against pregnant women or something. Or maybe he wouldn’t have done those things at all. Maybe he would have been phenomenal about compartmentalizing, or very cognizant of HR law. Maybe he just wanted to share his wacky lifestyle with us.
People on the conservative end of every major religion oppress women – although they generally put it a little differently, saying, for instance, that they respect the different roles and gifts God has given men and women.
How much of that are you supposed to bring to work? How much of that should you hide? Should you invite your subordinates to a deeply religious wedding, when those subordinates might feel obligated to attend? Clearly it’s fine for the boss’s spouse to visit sometimes. It’s fine for her to make conversation during lunch about her own footwear choices.
It’s hard to draw a bright line regarding what type of behavior people who believe in divinely-ordained patriarchy should leave at home. But it’s certainly easy to note that this belief system makes people uncomfortable, and makes work even harder for women striving for equal pay, equal opportunities, and a professional work environment.
My youthful male coworkers were creeped out by the Prices, but we were kids and it was all low-stakes in a way it wouldn’t have been if we had been adults with mortgages to pay. You think male coworkers – even the normal seeming ones – wouldn’t use what they know about the boss to win a battle against me, to get a promotion over me, to get a bigger raise than me? You think Mark Price wouldn’t maybe hire a couple of guys from his church and completely change the office dynamic until someone like me just left, “voluntarily”? Even if everyone stayed on their very best behavior at all times, it’s pretty hard for a guy who attends hour-long sermons on women’s obedience on Sunday to avoid implicit bias on Monday.
Allyson Downey in Here’s the Plan: Your Practical, Tactical Guide to Advancing Your Career During Pregnancy and Parenthood, a detailed manual on managing your career throughout pregnancy and motherhood, gave some advice I had never seen anyone else say in print. After careful caveats, #notallmen, etc., she went on to say that if you’re a working mom in a job search, avoid bosses whose wives stay home. (Note that she’s not suggesting discriminating against them, she’s suggesting declining a job offer, which anyone is free to do for any reason.) She suggested googling your potential boss to try to figure this out. Men with working spouses tend to “get it” best, while single people or married people without children may or may not, and men who have children but near-zero care work and domestic responsibilities are often the worst to employees (sometimes including involved dads) who do have those responsibilities. In my own life, my husband does legit 50% of all housework and childcare, and the management/emotional labor behind these tasks. Equality! Except I still would have a hard time competing in, say, an investment bank against a guy who does zero percent of those things. I mean, he and his wife can live the way they want. But, to phrase this as politely as possible, I’d rather pick another coworker, please.
My main takeaway from Mark Price was this: I don’t want to work for a boss who’s accustomed to women treating him like a god. Hell, I don’t want to drink coffee next to a guy who’s accustomed to women treating him like a god. And the problem isn’t mine, it’s his.
The American electorate, and American working women – two groups with a large overlap indeed – deserve 50% of spots at all levels of management and government. And men whose explicit belief systems, shored up by regular meetings on the topic, involve divinely ordained male dominance, deserve none of them. They deserve jobs, sure. But no man who attends meetings on the topic “men are meant to be in charge” should be in any leadership role, anywhere.
Patriarchy – actual, formal, religiously enforced patriarchy – makes men unprofessional.
