When I turned to Maru after watching Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2018 biopic, On the Basis of Sex, she had tears in her eyes.
I asked if she was crying because she was happy we’d come so far. Surprised, she looked at me and said, “No, I’m crying because even after all of her effort and hard work, we still deal with so many of the same issues half a century later.”
When I paused to think, I realised the evidence was all around me.
At one of Maru’s former companies, a senior male member of staff ridiculed the #MeToo movement. He then went on to “jokingly” tell Maru that she wasn’t allowed to get pregnant.
I’ve worked for, and seen, many companies who are proud of their zero gender pay gap, yet their leadership teams are still stacked with men.
And looking on a macro scale, a 2018 World Economic Forum report estimates it will take more than 100 years to truly close the gender inequality gap across economic, health, political, and educational dimensions.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a titan. I’m grateful I got to witness a part of her life, work, and influence, but we must continue her work.
We’re a long way from true gender equality, and it’s on all of us to make day-to-day decisions that slowly move the world to a more equitable place.
“When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg