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The “Boys Don’t Cry” Problem Of Work
You may be familiar with the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, which is essentially the Brandon Teena story. This post won’t necessarily be about that version of Boys Don’t Cry, although I enjoyed the title (and the film!) so I swiped it here.
Rather, this is about how that central tenet — boys do not cry — influences a lot of what happens in first-world, white-collar work. Let’s set the stage here.
Item 1: Work is still (largely) a “man’s world”
This is changing, which is good. (If you were to list the most important inventions of the past 100 years, I think “the pill” would be Top 3, right?) But I don’t think it’s changing very fast. There are still more male CEOs with one name — John — than women CEOs in total. I can bring up the 2016 U.S. Presidential election here, but I don’t really want to. In short, unfortunately: patriarchy won. It still very much has a place. So you can stop reading now and think I’m anti-female or something. I am most assuredly not — much closer with females than males, actually — and let’s try to address that in the next section.
