Just Thinking

All my life, I have always thought more about being a woman than I thought about being Black/African. Up until not very long ago, when I thought about discrimination, gender, not race, came to mind. This is not to say I did not watch Roots as a child, but race issues previously felt distant and foreign. Before I go further, let me clarify, I am African, born and raised on the continent. Some people would call my complexion honey brown, but I am black by the general definition . The problem, however, is that when I considered equality, I did not consider the color of my skin as much of a problem as my possession of a uterus. I was used to being the only female or one of the few. 10% of my computer science class were females, in all the roles I held I was the only or first female on the team and so on. All this changed a couple of months ago when I had an interesting conversation with an Australian colleague.  We were at a work function doing one of those ice breaker exerc...

I will start this post my saying up until now, I never seriously considered myself a feminist and in a lot of ways I still don’t. I am however a strong believer in the “strengths of the sexes” and the different and wonderful ways we can leverage our strengths as men and women to build synergy and balanced social systems. Even at that, a lot of times I still think I could be a little too traditional but then again, I find that in life, it is all about balance. That said, I will move unto the meat of my post. The idea for this post literally popped into my head yesterday after a long day and I felt I had to write this down before I forgot about it. I doubt it will be a long post as the message is all in the title but allow me to elucidate. I hear and read a lot of what I call rants about female inequality in the work place (don’t burn me at the stake just yet), some very well founded and very true. It is actually a fact that women face a lot more blockers profes...

Recently, network marketing has become quite popular. People use phrases such as do you have a "Plan B" and very passionately remind us white-collar workers about how elusive "job security" is and how we all need to have a back up plan just in case our jobs/industry decides to go belly up. I totally agree with the concept and the global economic situation makes it more pertinent but am not personally a fan of network marketing for a host of personal reasons I do not particular wish to debate on the world wide web at this moment or on this post. That said, I usually come away from conversations like this asking myself some hard questions about the future and serious thinking of all the possible "What ifs....". In mathematics, X is usually a letter used as a placeholder for an unknown variable. So, my Plan X is to find out and catalog all of my possible plans from B to W and perform selection by elimination until I find that one thing asides from my d...

Recently, network marketing has become quite popular with people using phrases such as do you have a "Plan B" and very passionately reminding us white-collar workers about how elusive "job security" is and how we all need to have a back up plan just in case our jobs/industry decides to go belly up. I totally agree with the concept and the global economic situation makes it more pertinent but am not personally a fan of network marketing for a host of personal reasons I do not particular wish to debate on the world wide web at this moment or on this post. That said, I usually come away from conversations like this asking myself some hard questions about the future and serious thinking of all the possible "What ifs....". In mathematics, X is usually a letter used as a placeholder for an unknown variable. So, my Plan X is to find out and catalog all of my possible plans from B to W and perform selection by elimination until I find that one thing asides f...