Rep. Katie Hill has been in Congress for 3 months now, and to hear her describe it, it's been a culture shock, at least when it comes to the casual sexism she encounters in the halls of Congress on a daily basis.
Brooke Baldwin asked for the gory details, and Hill complied.
“I was talking with one of my colleagues on the floor, and he gives a lot of these one-minute speeches and it is an opportunity to have to talk about any subject for one minute,” Hill told Baldwin.
“I was like, ‘oh, you’re Mr. One-minute Man’ referring to the speeches,” she continued. “And he’s like, ‘I can also be One-minute Man and Mr. Five-minute Man, whatever kind of man you want’ — and it was just like ooh.”
While Hill did say she didn't think he meant anything by that, the point was that it was inappropriate. "Dude, you can't say that," she said.
In another anecdote, Hill described a conversation about a woman who is running against her. One of her male colleagues asked her, "Well, is she a babe?"
None of these stories rise to the level of harassment, but boy are they annoying. This is the crap I and many others had to put up with on a daily basis. It's been the price to enter the boys' club and dare to participate. I remember when, early in my career, I was told that I needed to bone up on sports because I couldn't talk to clients about anything but business. Schmooze, baby, or fail.
This shouldn't be that hard. Treat women like equals. Talk to them like equals. Don't diminish them. It really isn't tough.
(h/t Raw Story)
