WOMEN ARE RUNNING AMERICA

DUTCH

by Willem Meiners

KATE GALLEGO is, through her mom, a descendant of the Neerken and Lahuis families, from the Coevorden area in Holland. She is the mayor of Phoenix, Arizona. Her colleagues in San Francisco, Washington, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Boston are also female, as well as in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and those are two of America’s top-five biggest cities. All of those major towns have a woman as mayor. There was a time, not long ago, when all mayors were men. They’re not anymore. Very much not anymore.

The New York Times has a woman as its top exec, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post is a woman, and so are her colleagues at the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Press agencies Reuters and Associated Press: led by a woman. The top bosses at CBS, ABC, Fox and MSNBC are all women.

Mary Barra is in charge of General Motors, and Karen Lynch runs the ten thousand branches of drugstore and pharmacist CVS, founded by descendants of the Hoogland family of Maarsseveen. They are actually exceptions. Big business leadership is still far behind what has become the norm elsewhere in society. There, from the bottom up, the trend is unmistakable: women, especially young women, are starting small businesses all over the country. They are becoming contractors, plumbers, bricklayers, electricians, TV installers. In urban America last year, more women started businesses than men. No wonder: six of every 10 college graduates are women.

REMEMBER, from a century ago? Back then, the decade was known as the Roaring Twenties. Roaring, because everything suddenly changed so quickly and favorably. World War I was done and over with, as was the Spanish Flu pandemic that had originated in Kansas, and under the leadership of a jazz-loving president, the economy was recovering faster than ever before. Within three years, unemployment was down from fifteen to two percent. A million new homes were being built each year. In Los Angeles, one in three people possessed a car, and farmers bought one-third of all automobiles. Neighbors had radios, refrigerators, gramophones. The White House hosted jazz concerts.

And although no one was allowed to drink a glass with more than one and a half percent alcohol in it, due to a foolish constitutional amendment they hastened to undo, beer, whiskey and cocktails flowed. Young women smoked, America was dancing the charleston. President Harding, descendant of grandma Verkerk from Gelderland, boarded a train, traveled to Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan’s heartland, and told a square full of stunned white folks that Black Lives Matter.

IT DIDN’T last. The president died in office, stock market shares plummeted, and before everyone realized it, World War number two broke out, more brutal and deadly than the last.

Today’s Roaring Twenties are unfolding differently, more balanced, calmer, more deeply rooted. You don’t hear much roaring, because everything happens more gradually. Unemployment is practically zero, there is work for everyone who wants to work, roads and bridges are being repaired throughout the country, wages are up across the board, and Generation X, the Millennials, and among them especially women, younger women first and foremost, are making their opinions clear. Issues like immigration, discrimination, the environment, access to health care, gaping income disparities, #MeToo: they now insist that, for the sake of keeping the peace in the workplace, a company takes clear positions and applies pressure. Otherwise, the workforce will rebel. Or she walks out.

AMONG THE big companies this is called: the race for talent. Grow and think along with your own staff, the generations after that of the Baby Boomers who were not half as socially minded. In the entire history of the world, workers have never been as well educated as they are today, never before have they possessed so much knowledge. They are in demand. This gives them power and influence. That’s why you see all these big companies now openly pressuring politicians, who themselves have rarely been so stupidly divided before. It’s a trend that will be with us for decades to come.

It is good news. Because it goes hand in hand with sweeping changes and improvements throughout. Those five biggest cities? New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia. Four of the five have a Black mayor, two male, two female. Who would have thought, a hundred years ago, fifty, thirty. America has become different since then. Better.

* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman.