Notorious RBG
Meet my latest whimsical, wonky woman watercolor, featuring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or RBG. She is one of my heroes. I’ve been reading about her for years and I remember seeing an interview once where she was asked when there would be enough women on the Supreme Court. She responded, “When there are nine.” People were shocked and she continued, “But there had been nine men for years and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.” She always makes me think.
One of the things I like best about her is that her personal style is to always be calm (a goal of mine – ha) and to try to bring people around to her way of thinking with logic and deductive reasoning. And, I love that she can have a warm relationship with people who have views that are very different from her own world view. RBG tends to be liberal in her thinking and she was famously good friends with former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who was quite conservative in his rulings. Their bond was opera. But, the larger point is that one doesn’t have to compromise in order to get along and certainly one doesn’t have to be angry and insulting in order to be heard. I so wish there were more people like her in our world today.
RBG lost many opportunities as a young person and lawyer because she was female. If you haven’t seen the film On the Basis of Sex, I sure would recommend it. Eye-opening to see how far we’ve come and what work is left to do. Watching that movie and seeing some of her trials took me back to one of the most painful political lessons I learned as a professional woman in the workplace. I was a brand new Branch Chief and one of my first initiatives was to get a few technical folks to put together a proposal to a national office in D.C. that granted money to government labs for high-end computers. We won and got a $4.5M grant. Back in the day, that was real money. We worked hard and integrated these new computing environments into our lab and were able to provide better support to our customers. Now, fast forward a year – we decided to request another grant for Phase 2 of our lab expansion. The team did a great job with our proposal and we were about to send it forward when I got a call from the lead civilian at our headquarters activity. It was unusual for a person in my position to get a call like that. He was sweet as could be and told me he had been thinking about this high performance computing proposal and he thought we should take turns – you know, you got the grant last year so the east coast should get it this year and so on. While I hated the thought of waiting another year, I couldn’t argue with his logic. And, he was the Executive Director. So, we didn’t send ours in and they got a grant. The following year, our team had greater requirements and we put together a superb proposal. Well, Headquarters wouldn’t forward ours to the D.C. offices but they forwarded the east coast proposal again. I called the Director who had called me and, guess what – yup, he had amnesia and didn’t remember ever having that conversation with me. I didn’t sleep well for weeks after that. Partly I was just so angry that I’d been played. And, mostly I was mortified that my folks would not get the tools we needed and it was because of me; it was my fault. It was such a bitter pill to swallow but I endeavored to learn from that experience and went forward with eyes wider open.
Part of the reason I worked so hard to mentor and credit and promote strong women over the years is because there is still a glass ceiling and there are still stereotypes that we must figure out how to deal with and how to maneuver. I love women like RBG and others like her because they lead the way in breaking down some of the barriers that still exist in the workplace. And, RGB does it with grace and intelligence and humor.
Here’s to you, RGB! And, as the saying goes – Here’s to all the strong women out there. May we be them, may we know them, may we raise them.
L’Chaim!