“I’ve been giving the same speech for the past twenty-five years on pay equity. Why am I still giving the same speech? Why is the representation of women exactly the same on corporate boards, in corporate C-suites, and in government? They haven’t changed at all. If anything, it has gone down.”
—The Oral History of Jan Jones Blackhurst, UNLV Gaming Law Journal, 2018
I would like to have a conversation with the women in the gaming world, and while this may sound like mansplaining, I like to think it isn’t. In my defense, I learned what I am going to talk about from a woman, and since she is no longer with us in this world, I will tell you what I think she would tell you. But go ahead and bash me if you want, I can handle it.
The woman’s name was Rosa Parks and I met her, in spirit, at the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University. Rosa was a black woman living in Montgomery, Alabama, and she would ride the bus to her place of employment every day. The way this worked in Montgomery for black people like Rosa was they would enter the front door of the bus, pay the dime fare, exit the bus and walk to the back door, re-enter the bus and sit in the back. They did this so the white people would not have to have black people walking by them. Sometimes, I am told, the Black person would enter the front of the bus, pay the dime, step off of the bus, and while walking to the back door, the bus would drive away. This would mean the black person would have to walk to work, often in the rain or sweltering heat. Those white bus drivers in Alabama really were interesting human beings.
One day Rosa got on the bus and was sitting in an appropriate seat for a black person, but the bus became particularly full and so the driver told her to move out of the way and give the seat to a white man. Well, to the amazement of all, Rosa did not move. Now this was a big deal, because Rosa could be put in jail in Alabama for this terrible thing she did. Moreover, as she mentioned in her book, she was concerned she would be manhandled or lynched, for there was this group in Montgomery called the KKK that often involved itself in making sure black people obeyed these Jim Crow laws by lynching them if they did not. The KKK would even leave the body hanging for several days to ensure the message got out to the black community, as well as teaching the children of Alabama how things worked there.
Rosa did get arrested for not giving up her seat. It was also the case that during her time at the police station she asked for a drink of water, but was told that was impossible for the drinking fountain in the area was for whites only.
Well, that all happened on December 1, 1955, and Rosa then did an interesting thing. After she was bailed out of jail and paid her fine, she went to the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, a group comprised of back women, and they came up with a plan that involved handling out leaflets encouraging all black people to boycott the busses in Montgomery starting on December 5th, 1955. Approximately 17,000 black people in Montgomery did stop riding the busses, and they stopped riding the busses for over a year.
Rosa called this “nonviolent civil disobedience,” and it wasn’t always easy. The black community would wait in places to walk together or pool rides, and sometime those KKK people would fire rifles and pistols at them, throw rocks, burn down houses, and stuff like that. But the black community hung together and after a year, there were a whole new set of rules about how people were to sit on the busses. This also was part of a history of events that led up to the Civil Rights Act and this is why Rosa Parks is known as the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.
Allow me to get to the point. I entered the gaming industry in 1972, and have essentially been in it ever since, and I totally agree with my dear friend Jan Jones Blackhurst. Things are moving slowly for woman, glacially slow. I also agree with Albert Einstein when he argued: “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” I believe what Rosa would tell the women in gaming to do is to crank it up and get into a little civil disobedience.
I think Rosa would tell every women’s organization out there to write to the conferences and let them know that if they plan on offering any manels when the conferences come back that your women’s organization will encourage all of its members to not attend. If the conference says fine, then the whole conference can become one gigantic manel. Also, if you do not belong to a group, just tell them individually you will not attend a conference that has manels. You all can also write to their sponsors and ask them to stop supporting a conference that discriminates against women. My guess they will want to listen to you.
The conference business has been terribly strained with this pandemic and the last thing the conference organizers want to do as they try and dig themselves out in the post-pandemic world is to alienate women. But I guarantee you that as conferences get going again, it will be the same old scene of the vast majority of the participants being male, with many panels having no women at all. If this is cool with the women in the industry, and they accept this as their role, then keep doing what you are doing. If however, woman would like a change, then work for change. The conferences are misogynistic and there is no net tendency for them to change. If you are waiting for men to effect this change, then you are on a fool’s errand. If you are OK with accepting your second-class status, then keep doing what you are doing and nothing will change.
I think Rosa would want you to do something about it. This is low hanging fruit, grab it, and then start grabbing for more. Trust me, I see no inherent reason for the treatment of woman to improve in the pandemic and post-pandemic worlds, so I think Rosa would suggest you dig in your heels and start saying goodbye to those folks who think you do not deserve a seat.
The manel may be a small start, but it is a start. What Jan Jones Blackhurst is telling you is if you keep doing what you are doing you are going to keep getting what you got, and if you are unhappy being treated as a lesser person, then get in action and be a part of the change you want to see. In other words, be a Rosa.
