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For a middle-aged woman, I've been paying a lot of attention to tall and tattooed young men lately, thanks to my son Lucas's newfound passion for basketball. Because of him, my lifetime professional basketball game attendance is up a mere 3,000% or so in the last six months.We've had a lot of fun, and I enjoy watching the guys duke it out. Even so, the highlight of my basketball experiences this year was going to Madison Square Garden to see the WNBA Liberty take on the Connecticut Sun.
That's because Billie Jean King was there. When the announcer called her name, she stood up and waved. The crowd went wild. So did I.
Billie Jean rocked my world in 1973. I was an eleven-year-old girl in desperate need of role models when she beat professional Male Chauvinist Pig and master showman Bobby Riggs in "The Battle of the Sexes." At that moment, a world of possibilities opened up to me.
An unexpected bonus at the WNBA game was that many of the men's rooms had been temporarily converted into women's rooms, given that women vastly outnumbered the men there. If you don't think this is a topic worthy of mention in a newsletter, it's a fair bet that you are not female.
Every woman knows that there's a law of the universe that states that the women's room 1.) must always be miles farther away than the men's room and 2.) must always have a long line. (This is such a grave injustice that in 2005 Mayor Bloomberg signed the Women's Restroom Equity Act [aka "the potty parity act"] to remedy this sorry state of affairs, at least in New York City.)
Contrast this to my experience a few days later at the 14th Ira Sohn Investment Research Conference held at the Jazz at Lincoln Center auditorium. This much anticipated and well-respected event, where investment luminaries share money-making strategies, raises millions for children's cancer programs. This benefit is an example of Wall Street at its finest and most generous.
This time, however, when I went to the ladies' room at the conference, it was COMPLETELY EMPTY. Yes, there were a few of us dames among the hundreds of men in attendance, but it was sad to me how few there were.
Of the eleven speakers that day, none were women.
