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I'm not a woman.
If you've met me you've probably noticed that.
I was, however, meeting a woman for lunch last week.
This was a professional meeting. I was dressed bussinessy: jacket, button down shirt, no tie, nice slacks, shiny shoes.
I had about a ninety-minute drive, plunging through the suburbs of Chicago, so arrived plenty early.
I used the rest room, made sure I didn't have anything in my teeth and went out to wait in the front foyer of the restaurant.
The hostess, probably in her forties, well-meaning and efficient I'm sure, asked me if I'd like to go to my table. I said I would prefer to wait by the door. (I like anyone I am meeting to have a say in where we sit.)
Then she said, "Let me seat you, I'll let you know when he's here."
And I thought, Wow.
"I'll let you know when he's here," she said.
Seeing me in business attire, correctly surmising I was having a business lunch, this woman assumed immediately and with little apparent thought that I was meeting a man.
Now listen, I'm a white American male in my fifties. I've never been discriminated against in my life.
Well, I guess that's not true. When I was in grade school I used to walk a mile to my Roman Catholic school and had to cross paths with "Publics" as we called them, kids who went to the nearby public school.
There was some bad blood. I had a raw egg hurled at me one morning when I was about nine years old. It splattered against my knee and ran down my pants. Not quite Northern Ireland I'll grant you, but I cried and ran a few blocks back home to mom, who washed me up, gave me a clean pair of pants and drove me to school.
So there was that. But then I was nine. I had no idea what it meant. I wasn't offended except for the aching knee part.
But as I've grown, gone to college and into the workforce, I've never been held down or dismissed simply for what I am. I mean, as a white male, I have been in the majority for my forever.
And, yet, at that moment in the restaurant, I understood full well that if I had been a woman I would have been appallingly offended at the assumption that I was meeting a man.
Sounds small, I know, but dismissals can come in the smallest of gestures.
When someone claims discrimination these days we often think little of it. We want people to get over what appears to be their hypersensitivity. We want people to lighten up. Of course, we think that way unless it's us being discriminated against.
The hostess, no doubt, had no malicious intent. She simply thinks a certain way. It's more or less a reaction of habit.
But here's the deal; women have been permeating the workforce for decades now, gaining more and more ground and positions of authority. Fifty-five percent of those who attend college are now women.
You'd think our minds would get used to the idea at some point.
Of course, this small dismissal is more problematic in that it is simply looking through the keyhole at the larger problem: There is still pay and opportunity discrimination against women in business today. It's getting better, but it's still there.
We need to fix that until it's fixed.
As we do, it seems to me that we all have a responsibility to change our habits, to think and respond differently. Malicious or not, a dismissal is still a dismissal. And dismissal is not an issue of being sensitive. It is an issue of being minimized.
And who in the world ever wants to be minimized?
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