OK, you go first.
Hi, I'm Eileen and I'm 28.
Hi I'm Kai
and I'm 20.
I'm Amy and I'm 56.
I'm Monique and I'm 40.
Are you ready? Yes.
OK.
How do you define feminism
and do you consider yourself a feminist?
I think it's such a loaded word these days
and it's kind of like I am kind
of afraid of not defining it correctly.
There's so many just differing definitions.
To me, it is,
it is we're all equal.
We should be treated equal.
We should have equal opportunities.
I had a subscription to Ms.
Magazine. You know I grew up,
I grew up in the women's movement.
It meant a huge,
huge amount
to me that this movement was
happening.
And then it got co-opted
by the Democratic Party
and liberalism.
I think my problem
with feminism is identity
politics.
I would say I'm 95 percent a
feminist.
The constant like you need a man
around here. The 10 percent of me
that believes that makes me feel like
I'm not. Not feminisming right.
Right. I'm not like doing it right.
What's one thing you wish you could
change about how men interact
with you on a daily basis?
Anything I say is just going to lead to a lot of
not all men comments.
I mean certain men definitely need
change. There's one man in
particular that I think we all
know needs to change.
I do think the thing I want from men is better allyship.
Because I've been really fortunate that I haven't had
a lot of negative interactions.
But, there's been a lot of opportunities
for them to speak up
or do more that have been missed that I didn't even
realize were missed until I started meeting
people who would take them.
Men interact
with me and try to guess like what my
ethnicity is. To me it feels like they're trying
to impress me by being able to infer something
about me before I can confirm
it. I get that all the time.
But it's like even if you guess right.
Like does that mean that you suddenly understand
something about me?
Do you feel pressure to change the way you speak
in certain situations?
In the work environment,
and I spent a lot of my career in finance
and on trading floors around
mostly men.
You know how do you convey that you are,
you know,
you know what you're talking about?
Saying things with confidence
and like saying things
with conviction
and also erasing some
of the ahs
and uhms, and like the verbal crutches.
So I constantly check my
emails like for how many times I say just
or like how many exclamation points.
When like I am just
kind of an exclamation point person.
In my life I am
a very feminine person.
I like
wearing heels.
I like wearing bright colors.
I have a lot of pink and,
at one point in my life I
thought maybe I should dress
more seriously,
so I could be taken more seriously
as a professor.
But the truth is people need to be comfortable
with professors looking like
lots of different people.
How is your experience as a woman different
from your parents generation?
There's obvious differences like,
like saying things like I send
like 300 e-mails a day
and them being like I
send two a week.
Most of my growing up,
she was a housewife
and I sensed
that melancholy.
I knew I would never
want that.
I think of my,
my dad's sister
who moved to
England to study to be a drafts woman
because then women couldn't be architects.
My sister is an architect.
So I think it's like going
a little bit of full circle.
So you know, a career choice that
my aunt couldn't have,
a generation later my sister could
I didn't polish my nails
The question I'm looking at right now is do you find yourself judging
other women for how they present?
Well don't look at my nails in
case you're judging me.