Chisom Udeze makes the case that despite the progress women have made in the past 50 years, it is an illusion because it is designed to uphold the patriarchy. She argues that when we try to force cultural change, we are no longer tolerated and retribution is swift.
By Kathryn B. Creedy
I was at once validated and challenged as I listened to Chisom Udeze’s podcast Gender Equality is Designed for Some White Women, a correct and uncomfortable look at our efforts at equality.
I’ve long noted the corporate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts inside aviation and aerospace companies seems to stop at women – and I realized Udeze is right – it stops at white women. This is not to say women, including women of color, haven’t broken the glass ceiling but it is to say their power for change is questionable. Thankfully, there are hundreds of others working to connect with underrepresented communities to bring them the opportunities our careers represent.
“Big companies benefit because with more women in leadership it is better PR,” Udeze stated. “But the extraction doesn’t change. Think about the men in this new ‘equality’. What we have seen to date does not to address their dominance. White women are given access to power but no accountability for how they use it. If representation doesn’t come with structural change, it’s performance. If access doesn’t come with accountability its BS, quite frankly.”
The uncomfortable bit here is whether or not our aviation/aerospace womens’ organizations are doing the same thing. I’m frankly not sure, I just know what I observe.
I know the cultlure has not changed. I know the culture women face is the same destructive culture affecting people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, the disabled, the neurodiverse – both male and female. I also know that every underrepresented group has their own organization to represent the different constituencies and their needs. Finally, I know we haven’t come together as one voice to force cultural change.
But here’s a bigger question. Has the current structure in which we live been successful in dividing us, so we only look to our own needs rather than joining together to force change?
Are we selling society short by focusing on women alone? Are we selling society short by focusing on educated women and not focusing on the marginalized in society Udeze urges us to remember?
In the past year we’ve witnessed how high-profile DEI efforts were largely window dressing, mere PR announcements that are gone with the change in the wind out of fear of the backward policies of the new administration. While I, and a lot of others, doubled down on our support for DEI, it still took a back seat as companies and institutions backtracked and their employes said they were afraid to even like our social media posts.
Culture Change
You’ve heard the two theories of culture change which centers on sexual assault, harassment and discrimination. One theory is if we get the story out there, things will change. But there are thousands of stories out there and nothing has changed. The other theory is – and what most women’s organizations strive to do – if we get more women in power, things will change. Well, there are thousands of women leaders, and nothing has changed.
“For this reason,” Udeze says, “women are not free, they are just being sold a version of equality that requires them to uphold the very system of oppression including eventually themselves. If we think in terms of centering liberation on the marginalized, it dismantles oppressive systems. For women to be successful, full liberation means the redistribution of power, not just rearranging it.
“What are we actually talking about is women getting access to the same spaces, salaries and system men have always had,” Udeze continued. “That means the board rooms, the C Suites. It means equal pay and leadership roles. But here’s the question. Equal to whom and equal access to what? The reality is the gender equality movement – the one companies talk about, fund and they hashtag about – was built to make certain white women become ‘equal’ to white men not to dismantle the systems that exploit everyone and not to redistribute power. It has only rearranged that power on who gets to hold it.”
Udeze cites how the first woman CEO is celebrated but asks whether her presence has changed the structure or just the person at the top. “What is she the CEO for, what does the company extract and from whom, who does it exploit,” asked Udeze. “When we push for equal pay, we celebrate white women closing the gap with white men, but we ignore all the other women who make less and less and less.”
Existing Outside our Comfort Zone
As women we are told to get comfortable being uncomfortable in the workforce as we push for our rights. It should be a message for the entire workforce. While I am uncomfortable with some of her in-your-face language, I was grateful because it was closer to the truth than I think we’d like to admit largely because if we accept responsibility that women leaders have not changed the culture, it becomes a blame game when it should not.
So, for this White American woman, I was challenged to ask whether women have actually been liberated or just coopted to serve the interests of the patriarchy as Udeze suggests. I have long thought we have been coopted.
We are forgetting the have nots in our quest for equality. She forces us to ask if we are part of the exploitation. Recently, I read Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net by Jessica Collarco which makes the case that polarizing politics have been used to force women into an untenable role which maintains the patriarchy. It illustrates a major problem. As much as working-class women try, it is always one step forward before confronting rules that place them 10 steps backward. Udeze points to these marginalized women – care givers, older workers, the undocumented, the disabled, immigrants, sex workers and “all those who are too busy holding everyone else up” to move into the equality arena.
“We must ask whose equality are we centering on,” she said. “It is the mainstream white, educated middle class women? Who gets erased? Working class, women of color, fat women, Muslim, trans and disabled women.
“If we are not including the most marginalized in society, we are just creating a new flavor of keeping the status quo,” she continued. “We must ask what systems shapes inequality. Systems create gender inequality and it’s the same system that creates racial and class inequality and all other forms of oppression. We can’t talk about gender equality without talking about race, class, disability, appearance, immigrants, sexual orientation. If we don’t do that, we are not making a difference. We are only rearranging the furniture.
“Equality without justice is just assimilation,” Udeze concluded. “Representation without redistribution of power is performance and access without accountability just creates new flavors of gatekeepers and it doesn’t serve anyone not even white women.”
Thus, it is for those of us who can fight to represent them as well. The lack of societal supports – provided in other industrialized societies – means we all remain oppressed and become part of the exploitation because, as Collarco maintains, the patriarchy is still being used against us. Becoming America’s safety net without addressing the under- and working-classes continues the exploitation.
It’s About More Than Women
Through Udeze’s lens more women in power haven’t changed exploitation, wage theft and has not upended the system in which race and class are exploited with most of those affected – care workers, domestics, service workers being women of color.
But here Udeze is missing a real problem – in our quest for gender equality, we are failing marginalized men who face the same culture and constraints as we do. The anti-DEI movement is as much about them as it is about women. Indeed, if you know history you see the entire merit argument is just 21st Century racism.
In fact, those who insist on merit are full of crap unless they are working tooth and nail for equal opportunity. Without that they will always be judged on their white male privilege.
Culture is the number one issue confronting women and minorities in aviation and aerospace. The studies that have been done focus on women including the Women in Aviation Advisory Board which cited culture as a top concern. It’s the male-dominated culture. (Recently, someone at the Women in Aviation International conference said she hated that phrase because it is just the dominant culture, period.) I agree. And it is not unique to aviation/aerospace, it is societal.
It’s About Safety
It is only in the last few years researchers like Kimberly Perkins have made a strong case that culture is inextricably linked to safety. Last year, I criticized WAI for not linking its allyship discussions to safety during the conference. While most of us think about aviation safety, I think about how safe it is to be a woman, a person of color or to have a different orientation in our society today. That is of equal importance.
“We also need to be honest about something,” Udeze said. “Even for white women gender equality is an illusion because the way we practice it serves the patriarchy. As long as women remain young, appealing and useful to the patriarchy they are tolerated,” she said. “But the moment white women age out of desirability, or she no longer fits the narrow frame of cute and obedient; the moment she challenges power instead of performing it, she too becomes a problem. The patriarchy does not liberate white women it changes their proximity to power, and it reworks that accessibility the second they stop serving patriarchal interest.”
Now you understand why I was outside my comfort zone. Then I heard this:
“Older women become invisible,” Udeze continued describing the excruciatingly familiar. “Ambitious women who speak up get called aggressive. Women who speak up are labeled difficult. Women who refuse to perform femininity the right way get punished. White women were never really given equality. They were just given conditional access and that access depends on them staying quiet, compliant, young, pretty and nonthreatening enough to be tolerated.”
Recognition dawned. But we must also include the underrepresented men. If anti-DEI is attack on one, it is an attack on all and only serves the status quo.
“What we have now – conditional access to power – is not what we need,” she said. “We need transformation for our collective liberation of all women, even the ones we’ve marginalized. “Not equality on men’s terms but liberation on our terms. Can we imagine that? I think we can and, more importantly if our daughters, sisters and nieces are to have a future. We must.”
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