I started this blog before I moved back to my hometown to take what I thought would be the last job I'd ever have, and I have not written in it since, mostly due to everything I went through in the intervening time. I know those data will make me easier to identify, but it's a critical part of my growth, in some ways, and regression, in others, over the last 3 years.
I've been writing for work for the last few weeks, but I found it virtually impossible to get started without working through, which in my world means writing out, what I've been through in the last 3 years. If you think that will all be going up on this blog post today, you've got another thing coming. It's too raw, too new, and people I love and should have been able to trust will find it too painful to know how much they truly hurt me. I've written vast chunks of it, but I'm not in a place where I can share that yet, nor am I sure I ever will be. There is no one catastrophic thing that made me leave my position or my town, but when you put everything that happened together, it made for an untenable situation.
I would like to be able to write out the whole interconnected system of negatives on here one day, but until then, I will do it piece by piece. One of the aspects of my identity that I wrote about in my very first blog post 3 years ago was that I liked country music. I did listen to country three years ago. I don't any longer, at least not by any Nashville-based male artists except Eric Church. The reason I no longer do so is analogous to one of the reasons that I left my position. Here is why that is.
When I first moved home, I was listening to some country. I listened to Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert, a little Carrie Underwood, even some Eric Church and Jason Aldean. When I was living away from home, it helped remind me of the working-class town where I was from and the people I loved there on the edge between urban and rural. However, when I started listening to country on the way to and from work back at home, I noticed how seldom women were played on the radio. Representation has always been a problem for women in country, but it had gotten far worse. The new artists who were being promoted were almost entirely men. Further, I realized that none of the female artists I was listening to took the typical Nashville path. They came from various reality shows, bypassing the Nashville system entirely. Not only that, but they were an order of magnitude or two better than any of the male artists, with the possible exception of Chris Stapleton. It did not take a genius to realize that talented women were not only not being promoted in Nashville, but they were being shut out. They were not really even being allowed to exist in Nashville. The whole system was set against them.
I also work in a male-dominated field. I won't reveal which one, but let's call it Goat Microscopy for ease of writing and understanding. Females make up less than 30% of the graduates with my degree in Goat Microscopy, though that percentage was much lower in my particular department. However, where I worked in my hometown, there were only 3 other women out of ~20 people in my position. Having been still more isolated during my previous degree, I knew how it felt to be kept out, to be left out, to be ignored, to be judged more harshly due to sex/gender and how men can be either unable or unwilling to see all the myriad ways that they are being discriminatory, exclusive, and damaging.
In my degree program, I also saw how women had to outperform men by an order of magnitude or two to be seen as equal. It is like having men run a 3k around a flat, even track and women run 3k uphill on a rough trail while carrying a backpack and calling equal times equal effort. Further, when women are given any sort of advantage, such as some sort of preference on hiring, it's that women with an equal time get a better chance at being chosen, and men cry foul at that, not recognizing or refusing to admit what women experience. For me, before I even started in my graduate program, the first response I heard to my presence there was "There's a girl in Goat Microscopy?!?" The first week, I was working with a male classmate on an assignment and mentioned that I was working on a fellowship application. His response was, "Oh, you'll get it because you're a girl." I stopped working with males in my department for the most part after that. For one thing, they were less help than baggage, but mostly, it was because even the "good" ones would spout sexism on occasion. I was never safe from their discriminatory behavior or thinking. I just didn't know whether the next cut would be a papercut on the surface of my proverbial skin or another deep one straight through to the bone.
I chose my job carefully, opting to go home to a less prestigious workplace because I thought I could do more good there and because I thought I would have an easier time in the culture I had grown up in. So there I was, supposedly back home, in another workplace, one full of older Goat Microscopy workers. These older Goat Microscopy workers thought they were amazing, that their experience and sex made them superior, but I saw exactly the same thing there that I saw in country music. Here were predominantly very average white male Goat Microscopy workers, looking down on female Goat Microscopy workers who were 10-100 times as smart and capable as their male counterparts had any chance of ever being. However, here again, the males ignored the complexities of the system in favor of protecting their own egos. They were unwilling or unable to see how much harder women had to work for the same credit, the infinite hoops they had to jump through that men do not, the tightwire they had to walk between being considered aggressive or weak. Male Goat Microscopy workers are anonymously walking down a nice, wide sidewalk; women Goat Microscopy workers are performing in a circus where any misstep could be the end of their career. That extra energy does not come from a vacuum. I had done the whole being 10-100 times better thing, even through all the tragedies I endured in my last degree, and I was not sure that I could do that again, not with everything else I knew I was facing.
I learned quickly that it did not matter what any of my coworkers said about what they believed about women in my field. I could only trust what they did, which clearly betrayed their bias. After the first few forays into discussing gender bias issues devolved into men defending their policies and themselves, amid actions that were still sexist, just not as glaringly sexist as they used to be, I stopped talking to my male colleagues about it. I talked to my dad a little longer, but not much. The lies, the self-justification, the oversimplified models that didn't match the data just could not cut it with me, and I was really sick of being gaslit. I chose not to be bombarded with lies. I realized that the system was set up for me to fail, that I had, not just hurdles to jump over, but ladders to climb while my male coworkers just strolled along. When I saw that my supposed reward for getting up those ladders was working with (or more accurately against) these coworkers for the next 40 years, I decided that I could do more to change the dysfunction by leaving and describing exactly why I left with no fear of firing or on-the-job retaliation.
I also could not ignore these parallels between Goat Microscopy and country music. So, I stopped supporting the country music system. At first I would only listen to country radio if they were playing a female artist, but that was so rare I stopped listening to country radio altogether. I listened to 80-90% female artists on Spotify and Apple Music. I made a point of buying women's albums, even if I could access their songs on streaming services. I listened to the Pistol Annies non-stop for awhile, which introduced me to Ashley Monroe and then Angaleena Presley. Thanks to my brother's fiancée, I was introduced to Maddie and Tae, Cam, and Katie Armiger (pre label nonsense). Now I listen to predominantly female Americana, Margo Price, Ashley Monroe, Caitlyn Smith, the amazing Lori McKenna, and the little-known-but-should-be-famous Emily Scott Robinson.
In both these situations, I learned that if the system is dead-set against people like you, sometimes what you have to do is not lean in to the system that is so clearly broken, but chuck the whole system out of the window and create your own. I did this with country music. I do not listen to any male music that comes out of Nashville except Chris Stapleton or Eric Church. Oh, I'll listen to the anti-establishment Sturgill Simpson, maybe a little Hayes Carll, but Nashville-based bro-country? Nope, not until you acknowledge your problem with your utter denial of talented female artists and fix it. I will not listen to any male artist who does not openly acknowledge the problem and spend at least 25% his energy fixing it. So, beyond Eric Church, I'm not interested in buying or listening to anything from someone with a Y-chromosome out of Nashville. I will sponsor female musicians on Patreon and Kickstarter, buy their self-produced albums, and tell the Nashville establishment to go fix its broken self.
As for Goat Microscopy, it's headed for a serious fall, which will require rebuilding the system anew anyway. I think I'll wait for that to happen before I spend too much energy on the actual building process. In the meantime, I'll brainstorm some better ideas and test them out in small ways. The idea that evolution is a globally optimizing process has doomed many systems to ultimate failure; just because something has worked in the past is no guarantee that it will work unchanged in the future, or even that it will evolve quickly enough to keep pace with technology. If you don't keep updating your model as soon as you have new data, it will become obsolete very quickly.
"All models are wrong, but some models are useful" ~attributed to George E. P. Box.
The biggest problem with both the old male Goat Microscopy workers and male country artists is that they are holding on to a model of the world that has been proven not to be useful, and they've gone stale as a result. They're not changing. They're not growing. They're not evolving. Experience counts, but only if you're still learning. Once that stops, you're no longer a CPU, but a RAM disk and can and should be replaced by one. Women innovate in directions men often do not see as possibilities. They need to be allowed to grow, not be forced into pots too small for their roots.
What Eric Church has done in promoting female country artists on their own terms should not be an aberration, but an expectation, of all males in all male-dominated fields. It should be the bare minimum to get hired for any position in one of these fields. Understanding the systems in which you live and work and their inequities is required to be a decent citizen. Doing what you can to correct them is necessary to be a decent human being.