After spending the day working on copywriting revisions and feeling kind of grumpy, I received the nicest email. I won’t reprint it here, because it’s so darn flattering you’d think I wrote it to myself, but it thanked me for my work at One Woman Marketing and reminded me that today is Women’s Equality Day.
The email came at a time when I was feeling directionless. I started blogging with the goal of writing a book on marketing for women. Then the publishing industry started tanking, the economy started tanking, and my letters to agents starting coming back with form rejection letters attached.
“Women and business is kinda ghettoized at this point in time,” one colleague told me. “Women entrepreneurs read Fortune and Inc.; are there still women business magazines out there? There used to be tons. if there’s only a few now, that’s a sign.”
Pink Magazine had just gone defunct.
I tweaked my mission statement a thousand times, and moved my focus from women in business and a more general audience of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs. But I couldn’t stop writing about women.
Sure, men and women are both just people trying to navigate the same world. We’re also different. We have different advantages, different stereotypes to overcome, and different social expectations guiding our behavior. We have different hurdles. Women still earn just 77 cents of every dollar, and lest you think that’s a relic of a quainter time, that discrepancy is going up.
Talking about these differences, and celebrating these differences, is the only way we’ll achieve equality. Otherwise we’ll just end up trying to cram ourselves into the business roles men have created and refined over hundreds of years of history.
To celebrate these differences without delving into cheap stereotypes involves a weird juggling act that always leaves a few people offended. So far, I haven’t figured out a better way. But I’m going to keep writing about it, because I find it fascinating. It’s my life, after all.
And if that damn book proposal doesn’t sell soon, you’ll find the e-book for sale here.
Learn more about Women’s Equality Day at the National Women’s History Project.
We are different and we have different needs. I've tried to never gloss over the reality with my desire to blur the genders and close the gender gap.
One of the many reasons I write here and write often about so-called "women's issues" is in the hopes I can contribute in my own way. Just as it is still subversive for women to inhabit spaces largely carved out and designated for men, it's subversive for me to take an active role as a male ally. And I do so cheerfully, in solidarity with my sisters.
Right now, however, most things are getting ghettoized, at least in the conventional channels. Print media needs to evolve, but in fairness, I see everything gravitating towards the internet slowly but surely.
We are different and we have different needs. I've tried to never gloss over the reality with my desire to blur the genders and close the gender gap.
One of the many reasons I write here and write often about so-called "women's issues" is in the hopes I can contribute in my own way. Just as it is still subversive for women to inhabit spaces largely carved out and designated for men, it's subversive for me to take an active role as a male ally. And I do so cheerfully, in solidarity with my sisters.
Right now, however, most things are getting ghettoized, at least in the conventional channels. Print media needs to evolve, but in fairness, I see everything gravitating towards the internet slowly but surely.