The War Against Women in Healthcare and Tech

I have two feminist-y things to rant about. As I'm sure you know, the House of Representatives is currently deciding whether or not it's going to pass the AHCA as their promised repeal and replace plan for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Some of my favorite political commentators have referred to the Republican plan as "repeal and go f*ck yourself", which though blunt seems pretty accurate. Ironically, the original version of the bill would be most dangerous for people who are more likely to support Republicans: older people in rural areas. On a recent episode of The Weeds, one of my favorite podcasts about public policy, one of the hosts actually said that the type of person who would get the best healthcare for the lowest amount of money under this plan would be "a 21 year old person living and working in New York City." That literally describes me (provided of course I get a job after graduation, that is. This is because urban areas have more hospitals/clinics/doctor's offices and the increased competition lowers prices as compared to rural areas, and the AHCA is cheaper for younger, healthier people to incentivize more of them to join markets while pushing older, sicker people (aka people who most need healthcare?!!?!?) out of markets since it is more expensive to ensure them. 

Of course, I don't support this plan. Premiums will go up for everyone, healthcare markets will become dangerously unstable, coverage will still be worse than under Obamacare. And on a moral level, if I have a job and make a living wage I would rather pay more every year for my healthcare if it ensured an overall better system. I don't mind paying a bit more so that an elderly man can get his medication, or so a child can go to the doctor for regular checkups because healthcare should be a right not a privilege. And when I actually really need healthcare as an older or sicker person, it would be nice to have an established system in place not designed to screw me over. 

Now to the feminist part. The newest version of the bill is even more harmful, especially to women. Essential healthcare benefits like maternity coverage, hospital visits,  and trips to the doctor's office wouldn't be covered. What other parts of healthcare are even left?? And of course, the people making the decisions about this healthcare bill (which is essentially a trojan horse of tax cuts for the wealthy disguised as a healthcare bill) are mostly older white men. The optics of this look awful, as they should. A Vox reporter shared this photo on Twitter yesterday, rightfully enraging people:

It's almost like all these guys don't realize that maternity care is necessary to bring white men into the world?? Someone should let them know. This healthcare thing is just so infuriating because Paul Ryan and his kin keep saying over and over that their plan ensures "access to healthcare for everyone", "access" being the key word. Their point is that the government isn't obligated to make healthcare affordable, merely to make sure everyone TECHNICALLY has access to markets in which they COULD theoretically buy insurance. I just don't understand how as a society we can't agree on the basic fact that if you someone is absolutely unable to afford any sort of insurance, they don't have access to it. That should be common sense. Paul Ryan likes to talk about "open markets" and "freedom" until he's blue in the face, but I think I speak for most rational Americans when I say that I'd rather people have medication and live-saving procedures and cancer screenings than Paul Ryan's deranged philosophies on freedom made into law. Freedom to me means people not dying of treatable illness in a wealthy, supposedly democratic country. Okay, healthcare rant over.               

The other thing I wanted to share was this fascinating article about sexism in the tech industry from The Atlantic titled "Why is Silicon Valley so Awful to Women?" I'm not a tech person so even though the author's findings about widespread discrimination on the basis of gender in the tech industry didn't surprise me, I also didn't know much about the problem before reading the article. The author chronicles the experiences of several successful women in tech and also runs through how various companies have attempted to fix the myriad of problems their female coders, engineers, and marketing executives face. The most frustrating part to me was how one well-meaning approach to make corporate culture more accepting of diversity totally backfired. Some companies started integrating unconscious-bias training into their programs, but instead of showing male employees that they needed to fix their biases, it led to many male employees thinking along the lines of 'if everyone has bias, then this is normal and I don't need to change.' 

Thankfully, the article ends with some kind-of uplifting statistics as many companies like Intel have made positive strides in hiring more women and people of color while working on retention of female employees. But the overall message was still pretty grim. In order for executives at Intel, for example, to take the diversity project seriously, they had to offer financial incentives at bonus time or else the hiring goals wouldn't have been met. The people in charge of hiring at these companies will respond to money, but if they weren't offered that incentive, hiring qualified women for the sake of it would still not appeal to them. One of the women interviewed remarked that it was frustrating that women today still face the same challenges that she faced trying to break into the industry 25 years ago. UGH.                    

Wearing White for the Suffragettes

The other night, when Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, a number of congresswomen wore all white and refused to clap. Presumably, this was an ode to the suffragettes and possibly even to Hillary Clinton who wore white during one of the 2016 debates and for her convention acceptance speech. I couldn't bring myself to listen to Trump's whole speech because his voice makes my eye twitch and my body fill with rage after a few minutes, but seeing the congresswomen in white reminded me of my favorite article from the campaign.

This is where I have to admit that on the last night of the DNC over the summer when Hillary accepted the nomination I actually shed a few tears. Granted, I had had several glasses of wine. I teared up. It took me by surprise how meaningful it was to me to have a woman make it that far on the road to being president. Even though she is far from a perfect person or candidate, the symbolism and struggle really meant something to me. I tried to explain it to my boyfriend at the time who was watching with me and thought I was being absolutely ridiculous, but there was no way to even begin explaining to him what I felt. Sympathy and empathy are not the same thing and no white man has ever known a different world than one where every President (save one) that they've ever saw or listened to or heard about has looked like them. They have no point of reference and cannot imagine how much it could mean to see living proof on a stage that an actual person of your gender could for the first time in this country's history get to lead it.

Anyways. After the DNC speech, an op-ed writer at the Washington Post wrote a parody of Hillary's speech that at the time I thought was the greatest thing ever written. Some feminists and/or Hillary supporters didn't like the sarcasm or something about it, but I really loved it for whatever reason. I read it like 5 times and laughed until I had tears in my eyes. The women in white at Trump's speech reminded me of that article from July so I found it again and the rereading in the wake of the election results was a very different experience than reading it back in July had been. All the jokes about a woman president sting now and make me feel hopeless. I often think about how ridiculously difficult it was for Hillary to get so far, how many years, how much money and effort and coordination and gradually moving up it took. And how little time in took Donald Trump. It's entirely feasible that another woman won't get as close as she did in my lifetime. Electing a woman to the highest office in America is like a category 5 hurricane happening in a cold water climate or a tornado hitting New York - only very precise and rare conditions could create such a phenomenon and once it happens it isn't likely to come around again for another hundred years or so. I really hope I'm wrong and I certainly want to work in whatever career I end up in to speed up the process of electing more women. But rereading the parody speech this time did not make me laugh. (Here's a link to it if you want to give it a read.)