Pay Women the Money They Need to Make the Culture
Sure, 2015 was “great” for women. But only if 2015 marks the last year in which things can be so very bad.
Because this is 2015, we open on an Instagram. My favorite of the year. I didn’t take this particular photograph, but I did screengrab it, meditate on it, make it my phone background. It was a picture of an Excel spreadsheet.
I was up late one night a few months ago working on a profile of Claire Boucher a.k.a. Grimes and I had hit a writing impasse in the homestretch. So I cannonballed into her ’gram (a.k.a. dogged cultural reportage). I scrolled back a few weeks, trying not to accidentally double-tap anything at 3 a.m. (lurkers never win). And there it was. In between hair-dye selfies and a photo of a baby rhino butt: a pixelated snapshot of her laptop screen. The spreadsheet contained two columns marked “engineer” and “producer.” Boucher had written her name in each column 13 times. There were no other names. The caption read “Fillin out tha paperwork.”
In order to know why this image hit me straight in the gut, it is important to realize that incredibly few women…
