Here’s a simple test. What pops into your mind when you see the words president or nurse?
Most of us know plenty of male nursing students and female presidents of RSOs.
We live in a society that likes to call itself post-feminist, where the days of bra burning, fighting for the right to vote or to earning as much as a man are over.
But, in our post-feminist society women make up only 19 percent of congress, according to a 2015 factsheet put out by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) and Rutgers, and only 23 CEOs of S&P 500 companies are women, according to catalyst.org.
Wyoming has been on the progressive end of gender equality before. Our congressional representative, Cynthia Lummis is a woman. On our campus we see powerful, influential and intelligent women teaching our classes, in charge of our labs, as heads of our departments or even the deans of our schools. We get to see men and women taking on a wide variety of roles in our daily lives, but the realities of the real world are not nearly as inclusive as we may be lead to believe.
The bad news is that in Wyoming women make only 67 cents to every dollar a man makes, according to a 2013 Wyoming Women and the Wage Gap factsheet put out by the nationalpartnership.org. The situation for women in the workplace only goes downhill from there. Let the job go to the most qualified candidate, as conventional wisdom says, but that theory too gives women the short end of the stick.
Gender inclusive language is the place to start to even out the scales. Show that a job, hobby or lifestyle choice is not exclusively reserved for one gender. There are lots of male nurses and female presidents, and by eliminating the stigma hopefully the door is open for more.
As a university we’re all too aware of being politically correct. The university HR page is careful to use gender-neutral language such as “the applicant” or “prospective employee” on job openings. In our own equality state the women of our State House of Representatives proposed HB 99 in order to no longer be officially called “madam chairman.” The change to “chairman or chairwoman” or even “chairperson” seems like a no brainer, but out of the ivory tower of academia even a simple change to include both men and women is controversial.
The world at large may not change overnight, but we can start by making sure to include men and women in our mental pictures. Who knows maybe by the time we graduate and enter into the real world the 67 female cents may creep closer to the male dollar.
