I’m thinking about how people make choices to belong to a lot of very well-known
and approved-of institutions. Belong to a school, a team, a church, a mosque, a
company. I went to Harvard to get the greatest education I could get, so I wanted
to belong to this institution deemed one of the best institutions. And then your
experience isn’t always about that. It’s about a lot of other things you didn’t expect
you’d have to deal with. But you don’t want to speak against it because so many other
people are telling you how great it is. “It’s so great you belong to that church.” “It’s
so great you went to that school.” “It’s so great you work for that company.” So how
do you get people to reconcile their experiences within the place they’ve chosen to
belong to, with what they’re experiencing and change the culture or structure of it so
it really can be the place they had imagined it would be for that experience?
of people don’t realise, the seeds of Nazism were born in the United States, not in Germany,
and they’re coming back. So from that perspective, equality is a really important step. ButWhat’s necessary for that is quite different depending upon the answer to the social structure
and I give you one last example now. Luggage racks on airplanes. And I ask people who, as
a group, not just individuals, do luggage racks on airplanes disadvantage? The men almost
never guess. The women sometimes say, “Women.” Or sometimes people will say, “Short
people.” But it’s even more poignant for women. Because luggage racks are high. So if you’re
short, yeah, you’re disadvantaged. But also it’s not that it’s just high, you’re taking something
that’s potentially heavy and lifting it up maybe over your head. So women are, as a group,
shorter than men. Women as a group have less upper body strength than men. So even a
short man has more advantage, generally speaking, than a woman and a luggage rack. And
women as a group carry more luggage than men. So who designed this thing that you have to
lift up your luggage over your head? And my guess is men. My guess is they didn’t do it with
the intent of punishing their wives or daughters. They just normalised the world based on
who they are. And didn’t think. Didn’t think about other groups. I’ve been on planes where
women are struggling trying to lift something over their head and sometimes guys refuse to
help because it’s like, “You want to be a feminist? Go ahead!” And they don’t realise they’re
in a structure that’s gendered. And some women negotiate the structure by checking their
luggage. Adds 30 minutes to your flight. It might mean your luggage goes missing.The other story I wanted to share is about my oldest brother, he just passed away. He was
in the Marines. And I was maybe 12 when his fiancée dumped him. He was a mess. He was
holding all of that relationship in the image of being a man. A Marine, not just a man. He
would come home and go down in the basement and play this song by Jerry Butler. It’s called
“Need To Belong To Someone.” And in the lyrics it goes, “A man needs to belong to someone.
A man hates to be known as no one. Will ever this sweet girl bring love into my world? A man
needs to belong to someone.” And in a funny way, I just thought of it actually, it was the first
time the word as such was imprinted on my mind. I was 12 years old listening to my brother
needing to belong.Now that’s a really
great question. So I’ll
tell you two more quick
stories. One, before I
graduated high school,
I got a full scholarship
to Harvard. 1964. I have
five sisters. Harvard
didn’t allow women.
I said, “No!”formal equality, where you treat everybody the
same, is not where we want to get to. And we don’t
even want to just get to equity. We want to get to a
place where we support all people to fully flourish.109EMPOWERINGCONVERSATIONS