I remember one of the most impactful pieces of literature from my freshman year of college was an excerpt from The Second Sex, in which existentialist and second-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir argued that limiting women to the domestic sphere, and thus forcing them to socially, emotionally, and financially depend on their husbands, was an existential threat to humanity. 70 years later, our world would be, in many ways, a dream come true for Beauvoir. This week when we visited Sacramento, I loved how most of the legislators and politicians we met were women: intelligent, confident, powerful women who work to change the laws of my state, women who I trust to represent my interests in government. And yet meeting Stephanie Tom, Chief Consultant of the AAPI Legislative Caucus, reminded me that gendered barriers and pressures surrounding women’s domestic and professional lives are still very much present. Hearing her story, I had the peculiar sensation of remembering that I was a woman, and I was forced to take a good look at the gendered systems of oppression that affect the way I envision my future.
Stephanie, cheerful, charismatic, and impeccably dressed, started her story with her parents, sharing that, “Both of my parents were politicians, so I grew up right here in the Building, in Sacramento. But ironically enough, I did not want to go into politics.” In truth, young Stephanie adamantly rejected her parents’ career path because they were absent from her youth, and she wanted to be a better mother for her own child. Work life balance is an issue that people of all genders, especially politicians and legislators, struggle with, whether it be due to excessive traveling, long hours, or lack of emotional and time boundaries between work and family time. However, it’s difficult not to see the socially and culturally gendered aspect of parenthood. It is the woman’s body that must take time off work before, during, and after childbirth, it is the woman who is expected to sacrifice vital years of her prime raising the newborn. And it is the woman who bears that irretrievable loss of career opportunity, growth, and thus, ambition. For a multitude of reasons, I do not currently envision myself having any children, and asking around my cohort, many of my female cohort members feel the same. But I often wonder if my vision for my future family would have been different had we been socialized with opposite gender roles, where like seahorses, it was men who birthed and cared for the offspring.
I loved that Stephanie’s story defied the zero sum game narrative given to women about parenthood and career success. She achieved her family goals while pursuing a career no less ambitious than her parents: she rose to become a corporate executive at software company Oracle. Not only as a woman, but as an AAPI woman, shattering the bamboo ceiling is no small feat, especially in tech! Though she faced a host of hostile, sexist encounters in her career, I take comfort in the fact that the solutions for inequality in the workplace are far more direct (closing the wage gap, balancing gender representation in every level of leadership, culturally valuing non-aggressive forms of communication and conflict-resolution, etc.), and I see tangible progress being made slowly but surely. Nevertheless, Stephanie eventually left the private industry because she realized her passion lay in community organizing and political activism, which is why she found herself back in the Capitol where she grew up.
Listening to her career path, I saw how this transition to public office worked out for many reasons: she had decades’ worth of network and hard/soft skills from the private sector, and her son was already well through his adolescence. Therefore, she was able to make time for her son while working in private industry, and then pursue a different type of happiness through a more time-intensive job: serving in public office. As someone trying to visualize the beginning of my career, juggling success, meaningful work, and potentially a family seems impossible most days. But I think that’s why I love meeting and listening to people like Stephanie, because she shows that though we are all flawed and make mistakes, it is possible to end up having accomplished everything we wished for ourselves. Perhaps it won’t happen all at once and perhaps we will not end up on a straightforward path, but if we go after what we want, there are people out there, like Stephanie, to give a helping hand. Through her story, I heard a warm voice of encouragement: though you will face many barriers in life, many due to your gender, the world is at your fingertips to make of it what you want.