Hello ... It's 2019

If we want our daughters and sons to be treated fairly, and respected for their ideas, we need to model the behavior we hope they'll experience.

It's 2019. As you know :) This fact is asserted because it's important to the story.

I'm on the planning committee for a small event. The committee is comprised of over ten people; all of us are women except one. We're all in our late 50s, and most of us have, or had, careers. We're professionals. We do a lot of our collaboration via email.

So it caught me off-guard when one person, the only man on the committee, made an out-of-the-blue reference to a woman's physical appearance, not one of our committee members, in one of his "reports" (sent via email). It was presented as a joke, but didn't seem funny. And ... it's 2019. Has he been following the news? What would it take for him to understand that women dislike these kinds of comments within this context? This guy has a spouse and kids. Would he have made the comment if his spouse or kids were on the committee? I doubt it.

Often the first to speak up, I've decided to hang back to see how others (who know him better) respond. To date, it's been nothing but crickets.

To the few people who haven't seen the memo: It's 2019, and when people are working together to accomplish a task, irrelevant comments about physical appearance aren't appreciated by most - at least among the people I know. It creates an awkward situation. And it leaves people with the impression that you're totally out of touch.

Is this a really big deal? No. Is this really surprising? Yes (at least for me). Having spent 32 years working in high tech, I'm happy to report that I didn't encounter many who seemed so out of touch with current expectations regarding respect.  

If we want our daughters and sons to be treated fairly, and respected for their ideas, we need to model the behavior we hope they'll experience. Let's start doing that right now.