(Editor's Notes by Christina Myer - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

Banking doesn’t tend to bring much into perspective for me. The elves in the series of tubes that make up the Internet (apologies to the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens) send my paycheck to a bank, from which it is then distributed to pay bills and such. If you want to buy a house you have to take in a stack of documentation that takes up a small suitcase. And the tellers really, really hate it when a person ignores the instructions on the drive-up ATM and tries to insert coins. (It wasn’t me! But a teller was explaining to me why the ATM was, again, out of order).

That’s the extent of my exposure to that world.

But last week, banking was my doorway into thinking about how many people are under the delusion that all the work of securing women’s rights, equality and equity has been finished.

Let’s not touch on the number of people who are still viciously (almost fearfully?) fighting to push women’s rights back a century or two. They get enough spotlight.

I’m thinking about something much more subtle.

“Ohio’s first female-led bank Fortuna near launch after raising $20.7m,” read the headline from Fintech Futures, North American Edition on Aug. 15.

Board chair Lisa Berger and CEO Ilaria Rawlins hope to offer “boutique banking for small businesses,” but they, in 2024, are the first women to launch ANY kind of bank in Ohio.

Remember this quote from the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

“So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

We are just now approaching another first for women leading in the workplace, in Ohio. How wonderful it will be when women starting a business is no longer headline-worthy.

But back to banking, and a little perspective.

Well within the lifetimes of many of the people (including women, disappointingly) who loudly proclaim women’s fight is over, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 finally prohibited discrimination against a loan or credit applicant for reasons related to sex, marital status or familial status (and other factors). Before that, many banks turned away a woman seeking a loan or a credit card unless they had a man to sign for them.

Those people have seen the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution protects the right to an abortion, and the overturning of that ruling in 2022.

Women are still publicly being told the greatest accomplishment available to them is to become a wife, homemaker and mother — and that education and career are of little to no value. (Don’t get me wrong, a woman — a person — has every right to choose the path that is right for them. No one else has the right to determine a particular path for them.)

I wish the path chosen by Berger and Rawlins didn’t feel like such uncharted territory. But according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, of the approximately 4,800 banks in the country, fewer than 20 have majority female ownership.

Nothing wrong with men being in leadership, of course, if they are the right fit for a job; but women in positions of leadership shouldn’t seem so out of the ordinary. As we celebrate and encourage them, we’ve got to also use their success as a reminder: The goal is for it to be so perfectly ordinary that we don’t notice. THEN, we can stop the fight.

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com