Women And Leadership Course at GW's GSPM

Welcome to the 2010 Summer semester blog on women in political leadership. Content will include discussion about the books read in class as well as the politics of the day. Blogging is an important skill and vital to engaging more women in politics. This blog is intended as an educational tool to all women and men interested in promoting women in politics.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Does the Generation Difference Actually Exist?

Today someone forwarded me a recently released report from the Berger-Marks foundation on generational differences amongst women in the labor movement. The report documents the findings from a conference of women union organizers and members. Apparently their has been a fairly large rift amongst different generations of women in unions, stemming from differences of judgment, expectation and perception. One of the main findings of the report was that for these women their were certain outside forces that made them distinctly different from one another -- I think the best example of this came when they asked the women participating in the conference the following: "When you graduated from high school, what were your expectations of yourself?"

The differences were very interesting, the "U35" or under 35 years old group came up with the following list:
Career driven, College, marriage, then kids, Balance work and home, Do your own thing, Have it all by mid-20s (old by 30)

The over 35 group came up with the following:
Be the opposite of our mothers, Be intellectual, Get a job, Be successful, Be self-sufficient Go, go, go–but where?

Despite these great differences, the women at the conference ended up coming up with a tangible plan for how to solve many of the problems unique to women in the labor movement that was inclusive of all generations. What this report ended up reminding me of was Delegate Dumais' assertion that it was not necessarily an issue of generation that really stuck out as the main difference between everyone: She emphasized the idea that Maryland has a citizen's legislature and that every single person brings a personal history with them, which I don't think was to say that generational differences do not exist but rather that they do not factor into every individual in the same way. As simple of an answer as that may have seemed, I know that all too often I get caught up in the idea of generational differences without thinking about the fact that generation means different things to different people.

Maybe it is possible that in specific instances generational differences are very significant, like in the example of the Labor movement -- but I think one of the most important lessons to take from this is not just to isolate differences -- but to build coalitions based on our diversity of opinions.

If you are interested in looking at the report in more detail you can find it here:
http://www.bergermarks.org/resources/SteppingUpSteppingBack.pdf

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