The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

In my maudlin moments connected to the job search I get frustrated with figuring out how to represent myself. Until I entered an environment where merit was judged so reductively I used to think that past accomplishments were simply enough. I was reading a book the other day about how to play up those things, especially seeing how (for most of us!) our GPAs are not going to be opening the doors. But in reflecting on the whole system, I noted how certain items end up being shorthand confessions for negative qualities, whether they mean so truthfully or not. The GPA is just one example (hmmm, only a 3.09? Not very smart or hardworking...). Or for a person who is unemployed, they acquire a certain "untouchability," because even though their unemployment may be due to no fault of their own (e.g., a layoff) it's so easy for an employer to immediately construe that if a person is unemployed, there must be some aspect of dessert to it. Who would want to hire the kind of person who would actually need a job?

But these kinds of erroneous supposition evidence themselves in many other ways and many other contexts, and my thoughts on it turned to something I recently read in Salon, a discussion on women who wear t-shirts admitting that they'd had abortions. While this subject matter has little bearing on my job search, it was interesting to think about because the same mechanism was in play, trying to communicate something whose resulting message you can't control and is often misconstrued. For instance, some people said that the t-shirts acknowledging abortions would label these women negatively, perhaps as sluts, poor, or people with the poor judgment to have gotten pregnant. And they might even appear as such to people who claim to be pro-choice! The worst is so easily assumed, and the truth of it is so frequently ignored. Very likely those women are monogamous, educated, and responsible, but for some reason still needed to make that choice. But that is the last thing that is presumed, because these biases become very ingrained and we judge people so easily on their basis, even though we may aspire to be non-judgmental.

It was argued that the women wore the t-shirts because they wanted to start rewriting those suppositions. That as long as people kept their reproductive activities in the shadows, the false perceptions would persist for lack of anything to challenge them.

Although it may appear to be a leap of topics from reproductive freedom to job-hunting, the connection between the two, relevant also to many other areas in between, is the way that they all involve communicating to strangers in such brief ways that helping them get past their biases to see your worth as a person may be difficult.