Today we’re launching a new project to encourage informed and important conversations about how gender roles and expectations are changing and we’re excited to share it with you. Please join us by using our discussion group kit, Turn the Page. You can also read our materials and comment or give us your feedback. Over the coming months and years we plan to roll out other exciting new initiatives, and we hope that you will suggest great new content or projects to us along the way. We’re happy you’re here and we hope you stick around and join the conversation and give us your thoughts and advice, as we continue to grow.
Let me begin by explaining a little about why my mother and I were moved to start Role/Reboot. It’s a story deeply informed by my mother’s life experiences, and by my own and those of my peers, as well.
My mother was born to immigrant parents in NYC who wanted the American Dream for their three girls; at the time, this meant a good marriage to a successful man that would allow them to raise children and not have to work. As it turns out, my mother has lived the American Dream, but not exactly the one her parents had in mind. She attended Barnard College on a scholarship, graduated at 20, and by her mid-thirties had started a successful company, Work/Family Directions, which pioneered a new generation of family-friendly workplace changes and benefits which were adopted by hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. She married my father in her early 20s and they are still happily married almost 40 years later. Along the way she raised two plucky daughters with strong feminist instincts.
By the time my mother sold her business in 1999, she was, by her own account, burnt out on women’s advancement work. She had been writing and giving speeches on women’s work force issues for over 20 years and was frustrated that her ideas still sounded new to most people. There had been amazing advances for women, but things felt stuck and she wasn’t sure what was next.
After a near-decade sabbatical from gender equality work, my mother and I, along with co-founder Morra, began discussing the lives and of 20s-and 30-somethings and their experiences with gender roles and new expectations. In the course of these discussions, we realized that a new moment, and perhaps even movement, was afoot. The seeds for Role/Reboot were sown.
Role/Reboot was created as a dialogue about and for a new generation of men and women. The women’s movement of my mother’s generation professed that the ultimate goal was equity and real partnership between men and women. And Role/Reboot reflects the success of these efforts because it assumes that men and women of Morra’s and my generation grew up with increased collegiality and partnership. But it also acknowledges that there are a whole crop of new issues at hand.
New circumstances have profound effects on gender relations and are not yet fully understood: The pervasiveness of internet pornography and its impacts on our sex lives, the disparity of educational attainment in favor of women, the continued cultural and political battle over full LGBT equality and inclusion, the fact that only half of American adults are now married (compared to 70% in 1960) – these are each examples of forces that change what men and women think and expect of each other.
At Role/Reboot, we want to reframe the discussion on gender, taking stock of old and new concerns, and helping to mold culture for the better, one informed conversation at a time. We believe deeply in the power of conversation to spur individual change and eventually collective action, and to make a better world for men and women. We are guided by the understanding that politics is always playing catch up with culture, and that political movements are the result of cultural shifts, and not the other way around.
Join us!
Sincerely,
Nicole Sussner Rodgers, President, Role/Reboot