My story begins the day I was born, or maybe well before that.  I have no Y chromosone.  Neither did my mother. Neither do any of my female friends, my daughter, or my sister.  We’re all X’s.  Now I know that nature is more complex than this, but for the most part, humans  either have two X’s and are female or an X and a Y and are male.  This is who I am, female, with X’s.   Do not misunderstand.  I like who I am, I like being female, I like that I can cry at movies, and give birth, and drink wine with my friends,  go shopping without apologizing, and that I was never required to do the same amount of push ups as guys during the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge.  I am happy with my lot in life and the fact that I have no Y has not limited my freedom as it does for many other women in the world.  That said, every now and then, I am bluntly reminded that not having a Y means I have less importance or at the very least, less clout.

At work there was an astute colleague who once said, what we need is “borrowed clout”.  At work, men and women were generally equal as long as they got the job done, and as long as they had “clout”, could get others to do things too.  Clout can come from hard work, from talent, from having a good reputation, from a good track-record, from reciprocity, from position, from luck, and unfortunately, in some cases, from having the right chromosomes.  I worked in a male-dominated industry and some of this comes with the territory. Some men and women have quiet clout.  Both men and women can lose their clout because their mouths get them into trouble.  There is no gender requirement for clout, until there is.

Yesterday on the news I watched a sports figure apologizing profusely for suggesting a women sportscaster lacked knowledge in her field.  I saw the offense right away.  I also saw the age-old criticism of “she’s too sensitive” and the observation coming from all corners, that some of this comes with the territory of being an X-X among X-Y’s. I personally thought the apology was good and sincere and that the incident was small but very representative of life in the X-Y realm. The man also realized that as a father with daughters, he needed to change, to allow them to be all they can be without risk of bias.

There were many times in my career when I was asked to get coffee or asked to order more paper for the copier, which were not my job.  I would be asked where the boss was, even when I was the boss. While these were for the most part, honest mistakes, they were biases based on assumptions about women’s roles and capabilities. Women and men are different.  Men are (in general) physically stronger.  I cannot carry a couch up a flight of stairs, and I am okay with that.  But I can hike up a mountain and program a computer.  At one point, I was proficient in  four programming languages.  There are people who assume I cannot turn on a computer because of my gender. Some of them think that older women should  not climb a mountain, they should be knitting doilies. I am pretty good at that too. Most of this is not intended to insult, its just that they have not met someone like me before. We all have biases, some of them grounded in truth, and some grounded in ignorance.

When I encounter these limitations – people who won’t answer my email until I add a professional title, people who won’t give me a good appointment time, but will give my husband one because “he works”, it’s irritating and frustrating, but when it happens I know it’s a bias. In these times, I “borrow clout”.  I either make my name sound generic and androgynous, or I add my husband’s name to the appointment request.  When I was young and single and needed my car fixed at the shop, I invented a fake boyfriend who was good with cars. When I did this, I not only had better service, but got a better price. I’m a terrible liar, so maybe the shop just took pity on me.   Its annoying but a fact of life that the world does not treat people equally.  We all need to “borrow clout”  at times to get attention.  When traveling for work I have had business men cut right in front of me in line, only to find me sitting next to them in the elite section of the plane.  Sometimes clout can feel like sweet justice.  Now that I have retired I have no more clout with the airlines.  The only thing worse than having  no clout, is having it, getting used to it, then losing it!

So all of this is to say that although I know men and women are different and are called to have different roles in life, there are many women who are good at “men’s work” and vice versa. The males in my household are better cooks than I am.  I am better at cleaning and organizing. When my son is home he mows the lawn.  When my husband is traveling I mow the lawn. In our house, there is no “men’s work or women’s work”, there is “just work”. My husband is better at handling spiders and mice, and better at installing dishwashers than I am. I take care of ants and weeds.  In fact, I cannot do many of the chores my husband is proficient at. It might mean he is more skilled than I am, but it does not mean he is more important.  That’s where bias comes in.  If you need to “borrow clout”  to be important as a human being, something is wrong with the universe. Yet we see it all the time.

Jesus had a very impactful life. But he started with no clout in a world that was likely biased against his mother and his father. In Jesus’s world there was a serious bias against first born sons. Jesus didn’t need clout because he trusted God in all things. People were so threatened by his brand of humble power they crucified him. And still, centuries later, he has more “clout”, more impact, than the average world leader or pop icon. Jesus didn’t have to lie or boast or add names to his request to get things done – his directions and his influence came from the Almighty. In God’s world there is no need for us to distinguish ourselves based on accomplishment or traditional roles. We are important to God because we “are”. While this gives me peace, it also makes me realize that losing clout (or no longer needing it) challenges the way I think about the world. For starters, I should no longer look for bias. Rather, I should train myself to look past it. I should not borrow “clout”, but following the example of Jesus, I should strive to personify it, to deserve it. Jesus earned a clout that comes from being a decent and extraordinary human being, through faith in God. Here was someone with no clout who eliminated bias and made more difference than anyone with it. The lesson he taught was also sweet justice: watch who you cut in line in front of, they may wind up sitting next to you. In God’s world, there is no bias, no need for clout, no need to jump the queue. We all have the opportunity to stand in Group 1. Every time I board a plane, I think of the parable of the workers in the vineyard: “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16, ESV). There are many interpretations of this parable, but to me it means that clout might work differently in Heaven than it does here on earth.
(lwr Oct 6, 2017)