50 Percent Female

Earlier this year, a good customer named Jim asked me a sharp question: Why are all the people working for you in the workshop women?

If you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of our company, Jim is mostly correct. Megan Fitzpatrick is the editor at Lost Art Press. Kale Vogt (who goes by they/she) and Katherine Schwarz are both associate editors. And all four of us work at the shop on Willard Street in Covington.

I didn’t have a good answer for Jim that day. That’s no surprise because I don’t think quickly on my feet. But I wanted to give him an honest answer, even if it’s probably the wrong answer or will piss some people off. So here it is.

Before I begin, one important background fact to understand is my father was a conservative and a Republican. And a lot of the advice he gave throughout his life (which I appreciated) was through that lens – plus his service in Vietnam and his training as a family physician at Washington University.

When I graduated college in 1990, I had to learn to pay rent, bills and car insurance – like everybody else. Plus I had to choose a doctor as my primary care physician. At age 22, I had no idea how to choose a doctor, so I asked my dad, a medical doctor, for advice.

Here’s a paraphrase of what he said: If you have to choose a doctor cold, choose a woman. The women in med school had to work far harder than the men, both to get into med school and to graduate. Chances are, any female doctor will be better than a male colleague.

That wasn’t the advice I was expecting from my Reagan Democrat father, but I took it. And it turned out to be a key part of my upbringing.

You see, I grew up with three sisters, all headstrong in their own ways. And we were raised by a woman who was both a mother and a serial entrepreneur.1 My dad had a busy call schedule, and he spent his days off at our farm following his true calling, which was building houses.

So for the most part, my mom raised me and my three sisters. And for whatever reason, I have always been more comfortable around women.

Years later, when it was my job to hire people, I always fell back on my father’s advice.

At the Kentucky Gazette, my first failed business, I hired a reporting staff that was half female and half male. The two men I hired were recommended to me by other reporters, and both were good hires. The two women I hired had been students of mine when I was an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, and I had seen them destroy their male counterparts in class for months and months.

Both women were something else. One of them, Nikki, had a penchant for digging up public documents in dumpsters.

Then, at Popular Woodworking Magazine, the hire after me was Kara Gebhart Uhl. (She still works for me now as managing editor for Lost Art Press and handles our contracts and many other things). In addition to being the kindest person on the planet, Kara is the most organized and detail-oriented publishing professional I have ever worked with.

When Kara took a promotion to work with Writer’s Digest, I hired Megan, one of the fiercest human beings on the planet. She says I’m exaggerating when I tell the following story, but I swear I’m not. On her first day of work at Popular Woodworking, the IT department sent down a guy to set up Megan’s computers (it was complicated). He couldn’t get things to work right, and Megan’s professional-grade interrogation made the IT guy cry a bit.

And he was a former U.S. Marine.

Like me, Megan also came to the job at the magazine without any woodworking bona fides. Unlike other candidates for the job, she didn’t have professional training in the craft. But I had watched her come into our workshop years earlier and ask for training to build furniture for her house, including a giant trestle table. She had a natural drive to build things (big things) that other candidates couldn’t compete with.

Plus, I like underdogs.

This pattern has repeated itself here at Lost Art Press. When I went looking for my first apprentice, I queried men and women. The first person I offered the job to was a man.