There’s a video being passed around of Senator Lisa Murkowski praising her female coworkers for showing up to work on the day after a brutal blizzard, while the chamber appears to be conspicuously absent of men (fwiw, there were a few men present). One of the videos going around has been edited to intersperse images of strong women celebrities looking badass into Sen. Murkowski’s short speech. It’s all very exciting.

“I think it’s genuinely fabulous,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor. “You look around the chamber, and the presiding officer is female, all of our parliamentarians are female.”

“Our floor managers are female, all of our pages are female. Now this was not orchestrated in any way, shape, or form. Perhaps it just speaks to the hardiness of women that you put on your boots and put your hat on, and get out.”

GQ seems to agree that the men of the Senate got showed up by the ladies:

Even if the Senators are stuck out of town in their home states, you can’t tell me there aren’t some male staffers who could have made it in. We all like to watch Netflix and drink on a Tuesday afternoon, but the men of the Senate need to make a better showing next time.

Why is this being hyped as a pro-woman moment? Why haven’t we instead wondered why all of these women felt compelled to make it in to work on one of the worst weather days of the year, while most of their male counterparts felt safe not coming in?

Could it be because women are still experiencing inequity in the workplace and so we accept nothing in ourselves that could possibly be construed as weakness, such as evaluating the commute and deciding that unsafe weather conditions warrant staying home for a day such as being scared by a little snow on the road? Or maybe it’s because we’ve been conditioned to be afraid of missing the tiniest detail that might help us get ahead at work or that might damn us in our absence? Or did these powerful women – these Senators, these congressional parliamentarians and pages serving in one of the highest offices in the country – did they perhaps remember that time that they missed that meeting and had the credit for their work stolen by a male coworker…again?

Nah, I’m sure it’s because women are “hardier” than men, because men are lazy and would rather find an excuse to drink beer and watch TV instead of do their jobs, because men disappoint when the going gets tough, because women have some undefined quality that translates into a superior work ethic.

That’s gotta be it, amirite, ladies? Way to be there when the men weren’t! Woo!

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