We’ve come a long way, baby?

38 thoughts on We’ve come a long way, baby?

1. I live in Denver and enjoy driving in rural Wyoming — it settles my mind. One March a friend and I were on Wyoming 487 between Shirley Basin and Casper (where you can go miles without passing another car), just over the Natrona County line, and as I like to do in the rural West, I tried to see what radio stations I could pick up. I found an old-school country station. They were playing Tammy Wynette. “Stand By Your Man”.

   My friend (another lady, and another product of the South) and I caterwauled along like it was “Bad Romance”, but I couldn’t help thinking that even twenty-five years ago, two women in a car by themselves in this part of the country would be looked at askance, or worse. The song was just an added layer.

2. Every year, I always re-notice that about the Boston Marathon. I find it really upsetting.

   A good read if you want a huge, “Look how far we’ve come/look how far we still have to go,” with and emphasis on the former, Gail Collins’ “When Everything Changed” is a major trip. It also really clearly reveals the ways in which a lot of men and some women (*coughcoughPhyllisSchlaflycoughcough*) have deliberately perpetuated patriarchy.

   And on a more personal note, every couple of weeks or so, I stop and think, “Wow. I’m a female scientist working in a prestigious Harvard-affiliated institute, in one of the best labs of the institute, working with almost only women, with two female bosses, and I am assuming that I will go on to get a PhD.” I did my senior project in college on discrimination against women in the sciences. I know how many problems I’ll still have to deal with, but right now, I couldn’t be luckier.

   (On an unrelated ish note, yay Boston! Except the MBTA. The day I’m able to get onto a trolley car at 8:40 am on the D line is one I’m sure I won’t forget.)

3. I work for a very conservative organization, with a history of being a little less than inclusive. However, recently I realized:

   – the Executive Director is a woman
   – the President-elect is a black man
   – the Chief Technology Officer is a woman
   – the General Council is a woman
   – the Publisher is a woman
   – of the remaining Vice-President/C-level executives, three of seven are women (which means we actually HEAVILY favor women in our leadership, which is DELIGHTFUL)
   – the (very technical) division I work in is 3 men and 3 women, two of whom are non-Caucasian, two of whom are much older than the usual for our field

   It’s a good feeling. Even if the membership has been conservative in the past, the employees are quite amazing.

4. No, but now I’m going to have some in retrospect. Thanks. 🙂

5. It is amazing how far we have come. I can’t imagine living back then. I cover myself up when I leave the house but what I wear is totally up to me. Having the ability to choose is great. Yep. And that’s what we are fighting for.

6. For some historical perspective on women’s running definitely check out Kathrine Switzer’s book. I think it’s called Marathon Woman.

   I just love how normalized running is in Boston. When I lived in a small town in upstate NY I would get honked at, whistled at, yelled at, constantly on my runs. Sometimes 5 or 6 times in 4 or 5 miles. (One time an 18-wheeler honked at me. At that point I really learned what the phrase to “jump out of one’s skin” means.) I’ve now lived in Boston 3 years and haven’t gotten any honks/whistles/etc.

7. All day, everyday. The first glimmers of women in the building trades happened in 1972 with Title IX, but mostly that was unskilled labor. Women didn’t start entering the skilled trades until the late 70’s. We’re still only 1% (there are higher percentages out there for construction in general, but that’s due to the Laborers’ presence on road construction—very visible, and with Federal dollars there has to be some women on the job; but mostly due to the allowed practice of considering female non-trade labor like secretaries and accountants in the mix. I say “1%” because that is the actual figure for women with my classification: journeyman wireman).

   All day. Everyday.

8. We have come a long way. My Mother recently shared with me being turned away from the doors of the hospital where my younger brother was being treated. The reason? Pants. She had to go home and change into a skirt before she was allowed to enter the hospital. That was the mid-60s. Can any of us imagine being turned away from a hospital our child is in for any reason?? I can’t. I’m afraid that would have been a “go directly to jail” moment for me.

9. We’ve come even further when you realize that women weren’t allowed to compete in long distance races because it was thought that their uteri would be damaged or fall out from all that running. Seriously. PBS did a great documentary a couple years ago about women and sports and how much has changed in just the last 30 years or so.

10. I think about Quakerism in this context. Three hundred years ago, a Friend (Quaker) couldn’t marry outside of the fold, or would face being read out (excommunicated). Men and women worshiped separately, which was designed to give women the ability to speak freely without being judged or silenced by husbands, relationship partners, or other men in the meeting. But worship was still nonetheless separate.

    One also couldn’t drink or attend service at other churches or gatherings.

11. Speaking of women and marathons, the marathon for women wasn’t added to Olympics until 1984, for pretty much the reasons FashionablyEvil states. Joan Benoit Samuelson of the U.S. won it. I was a senior in college that year, and the college students I teach today find it difficult to believe that women were excluded.

12. Love this — I have those moments too: when i buy birth control pills or condoms freely, when i daydream about what I’ll be when i “grow up” and gender never even comes into the equation, when I play on my coed soccer team on Friday nights and almost score a goal, when I see little girl athletes playing sports and they’re just as fierce or fiercer than the boys, and they don’t even realize that 50 years ago there might not have even been a team for them.

    Not that life is perfect, but it’s crazy when you think of how recently life was so different, and how far we’ve come.

13. Do you know Maya Lin’s sculpture The Women’s Table? It’s a beautiful way of marking progress.

14. One time I was at a trade show and was hanging around with my boss in the expo center’s press room. I started chatting with another editor, a middle-aged woman, and pointed out my boss to her. She asked me sotto voce, in all seriousness, “Does it bother you, working for a woman?”

    She was being nice, but I almost laughed in her face. My boss was actually the fourth female supervisor of my career, and one of the best ones I’ve ever had, of either gender. She’s gone now, and how I miss her…especially compared to the flaming (male) asshole I report to now.

15. My little progressive thrills come in tiny, tiny, insignificant little ways. I was recently at Southeast LinuxFest, and when I registered and picked up my t-shirt, they asked if I wanted a men’s- or women’s-cut shirt. It was just a little thing, but it meant that there consistently have been enough women in attendance at a tech conference that they bothered printing up shirts just for us, which they’d never done before.

    (Another tidbit: a presentation on using a plain-text integrated text-to-speech synthesizer for blind Linux users. When I spoke to the guy afterward, he said, “Everybody always talks about how accessible Linux is. I think that means it should be accessible to everyone.”)

16. I think about this a lot too. I recently read an article about Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the entire Boston Marathon in 1966, and thought, “Wow, what a badass.” She had to run as a bandit (someone who is unregistered) because women were thought to be “physiologically unable” to run marathons. The first registered woman was Katherine Switzer in 1967 who registered with her initials so the race officials couldn’t tell she was a woman, and still on race day, officials tried to remove her from the race. I am so grateful for women like these because it paved the way for me to be privileged enough to run track and cross country in high school (something that immensely improved my self-esteem) and to continue on to marathoning in my adulthood. But then I also think about how when I was in high school, there were still events that the boys competed in that girls did not, like pole vault and steeplechase, which was always perplexing to me. And even today, I’ve had friends tell me stories about how their doctors discourage long distance running because, I don’t know, apparently it’s going to ruin our lady parts or something. How long we’ve come, and how far we have to go…

17. My parents have an employee on their farm who once told me she was hounded out of her old job by homophobic bullying and that she had never felt more accepted than working for them in her current job. This is in a tiny little village out in the sticks where everyone is white and values can be a bit outdated. And yet this woman and her partner – who is a truck driver – live together openly and are friends with all the neighbours and their colleagues on the farm. Their being a lesbian couple is seen as purely incidental. Besides their lifestyle being illegal 45 years ago, I think even 30 years ago they would have been harassed constantly. And this is not some big progressive, cosmopolitan city, this is the smallest of small towns.

18. Sorry to be clear, when I mentioned that the lady’s partner drives a truck I meant that it is also pretty awesome that a woman can drive a truck for a living in my country and earn her own money going all over the country unsupervised and nobody thinks less of her or frowns on it. I don’t think this happened much 50 years ago either!

19. Sports – I play on a co-ed floor hockey team and we’re geeky so we keep stats and give ourselves awards every season. 2 of the 4 players consistently in contention for top scorer are women. From Grade school to my sophomore year of college only boys were allowed to play hockey – either on ice or in a gym.

    Work – My very conservative workplace has allowed me to go to flextime and work from home some days. This will better enable my wife and I to balance her career, my career and our kid’s schedules. When I was growing up, my mom stayed at home while my dad worked 2 and sometimes 3 jobs. It wasn’t until HS that my mom worked outside the home and my dad was able to scale back and eventually stop moonlighting.

20. I’m reminded of this on a daily basis because I work in a very heavily male dominated field. I once went to a trade show and got several remarks from different guys about how I am a woman, and they don’t really see any women in this industry. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed for them bringing it up or appreciative.

    I’ve got lots more stories like this, some good and some bad, especially when thinking back about my time in school, where I was the only female 98% of the time in all of my classes.

    I once went to a womens clinic for a regular checkup while living in Seattle. I wasn’t expecting the heavy security doors (and what looked like thick bulletproof glass) and the need to buzz the front desk through an intercom to enter the building. To me that was a reminder of how far we’ve gone, and how far we have to go.

21. I had this moment two days ago. I had been running around in shorts all day and had settled in the evening in my bed reading a book set in the early 1900’s about (fictional) suffragettes. In a march one woman was wearing a costume that exposed her legs and she wrote in great detail about how freeing it was. About how her skirts felt like perpetual bandages and the sensation of air on her legs was weird.

    Laying there in shorts reading this, I realized how I’ve never thought of shorts as freeing. (In fact, I usually prefer not to wear them.) But this description made it very real for me.

    And all that from shorts.

22. The last time I went to get tested for STIs, I noticed under “sex” the options to check were “Male,” “Female,” and “Other _____________.” I don’t know if this is unusual but it’s the first time I’d seen it and it made me really happy.

23. Oh! Another reminder almost daily for me is my first tattoo…it’s the number 1919 and was to commemorate my grandmother’s birth year (who was my favorite person in the world). This was also the last year women in the US couldn’t legally vote, and when Congress passed the 19th amendment (ratified by states in 1920). So while 1919 might seem like a really far away time, I remember that was within my grandmother’s lifetime. No so long ago, really.

24. Had kind of a similar experience last night watching Rachel Maddow. The segment was about a survey of military attitudes towards serving with minorities (read: Jews and African-Americans), and how overwhelmingly opposed people were to it. This was in the 40s! That’s not that long ago!

    The moral of the story was that Truman ordered desegregation of the army anyway. The parallel was in the current military survey of attitudes towards serving with gays – take the Truman way, tell them to DEAL with it!

25. I think about how far women have come whenever I get a refill on my birth control, when I mark my previous sexual partners as both female and male, and talk to my nurse practitioner about sexual problems that I (unmarried) and my partner have. I am also happy when my NP says that the pap is totally my choice and that she will refill my birth control either way because she trusts me with my own body. I have (almost) total freedom regarding my reproductive concerns and choices, and no stigma.

26. When I was young, I got married to a man coming from a very traditional family (French nobility, I am French/American). His mother was an extremely elegant and proper lady, classic dresses, strand of pearls around the neck, never a hair out of place, perfectly mannered. She had a very pleasant personality, we became friends (I proved the misogynistic stereotype wrong, I always had very good relations with my different mothers in law).
    At the time (it was the 80s), we were discussing politics, a woman had been appointed Prime minister in France for the 1st time, and she told me “it won’t last”. I asked her why, and she said: “women can’t be in politics, they can’t be leaders, it’s not in their making, they can’t be agressive enough, and it’s a good thing; there will never be women presidents”. I politely disagreed.
    Now when I see so many women involved in politics, wether on the right or liberals, being party leaders, prime ministers and more, and the number is growing, I am glad–even about Sarah Palin. The notion that women can’t do certain jobs because they don’t have what it takes has disapeared, and it’s great.

27. On thing I have noticed in IT/engineering field that maybe someone has insight on is a lack of US born women in non-management roles. There are very few women as programmers and engineers if you just count US born. When I work with offshore engineering and dev teams they are usually around 60/40 men/woman. The few woman I have worked locally with besides project managers and such were all immigrants from India, China, Korea, or Japan. Is Asia ahead in that field?

28. I got each of these comments into my inbox as emails throughout the day and they were really awesome to read.

29. Today I sat in a room full of women, working on a government environmental policy for a Canadian provincial government. The actual policy development team is probably about 50/50 men and women, but for this particular section, all the interagency experts were women… it was an incredible feeling I remarked on to my husband when I got home. Within my grandmother’s life, women couldn’t vote, and there we were, no boys in sight, a bunch of female scientists creating policy in the government.
    Earlier in the day I’d also exchanged emails with a principle of the consulting company I work for – a woman who’d run her own company for 20 years – and another female manager within the company, discussed policy with two government employees in US jurisdictions – both women, and talked about my thesis research with a well-known research scientist in my field – another woman!

    One of the government women had brought her daughter in to work that afternoon, and she sat in the back drawing us pictures while the meeting went on (mine’s on my fridge, now). I hope we gave her a good picture of what women can do, too.

30. I had a moment a lot like yours when I was talking to my mom about my grandmother. My grandmother has a rare blood type that was incompatible with each of her three children, meaning that each pregnancy was a 9-month-long battle of baby and mother poisoning each other to death. The problem also got worse with each pregnancy, so that after the second one, her doctor told her not to get pregnant again or she and her baby would both die.

    The part that BOGGLES MY MIND is that, when my grandmother was facing death if she got pregnant again, birth control was still ILLEGAL in her state. Which meant she did get pregnant again. Which meant my aunt (the third child) very nearly died before she was born. And even after that pregnancy, my grandmother had to sneak out-of-state and get her tubes tied somewhere else, because that was illegal, too.

    So I definitely agree with you – the work of achieving gender equality is far from over. But I am so grateful that I live in a world where I, as a woman, have easy access to birth control and can protect my health if and when I need to.

31. I teach biblical studies in Protestant seminaries, and while the female students now tend to outnumber the male students, courses still tend to be dominated by the male voice.

    This summer I taught an intensive summer session geared toward local pastors, mostly rural, raised up by their relatively conservative United Methodist congregations. Of my five students, *all five* were women.

32. I am currently an undergraduate student taking a combined honours in physics and chemistry (heavy on the physics).
    My “you’ve come a long way, baby” moment was earlier this spring when I was talking to a variety of professors about the possibility of them hiring me to work in their lab for the summer. I spoke to an older, female chemistry prof. When she found out I was a physics student, she mentioned that physics was her primary interest as an undergrad. Given the gender politics/ societal expectations or rules of the time she went into chemistry instead.

    It’s slight mollification that I can study physics. Still, in my small-ish (15 000 students) university there is a singular female physics prof, and only one other female in my year.

33. My moment was fairly recently. I was looking at a history of my high school’s sports trophies and photos. And even though our school was founded in the 60’s, and is in a very progressive area, for the first several years in the trophy cases, there were no girls in it whatsoever. And it was roughly another decade or so before you really strongly saw girls’ teams. Today, somewhat oddly, the girls’ teams in various sports are more likely to place first or second than any of the boys’ teams for the exact same sports. Also, when my school was first founded, it was all white. Today, whites barely make-up half. And more of the athletes are ‘minority’ than not.

    With the way the trophy cases work, they double back on themselves in the hallway. Standing in the opening of the hall, on my left, all the sports pictures are all white boys. On my right, there are as many nonwhites as whites, and, ironically, more girls than boys – for whatever reasons, the girls’ teams for any given sport at my school place more than boys’ teams for the exact same sport.

    I was standing there just a few weeks ago, and it was quite a moment when me and my friends realized all this. 🙂

34. I work for a non-profit solely dedicated to improving systemic responses to domestic violence. ‘Nuff said.

    Additionally, I was heavily involved in theater when I was younger. Historically, only men and boys were permitted onstage. I saw an all-woman/girl production of Richard III when I was in college, and I think that was a moment for me. The expansion of women and girls in the dramatic arts has been striking; we’re included, even if the resulting industry is still incredibly sexist.

    More abstractly, I think that the moment when someone said, “Hey, you know who could really pull off this female lead? A female,” was another one.

35. I’m 54 years old. I grew up mostly in the South. MY WHOLE LIFE is this story — how far I have come personally, given the of my family (most of them anyway) and my surroundings, and how far we have come as a society, given that many of the same attitudes pervaded the entire society for a very long time.

    We are not where we should be, not at all. But we are at least started to travel in the right direction.

36. @ACG #15:
    Southeast LinuxFest’s women’s shirts were at my request. Speakers were asked what size shirts we wanted, and I stated my size with “womens” written next to it, then got on IRC and said something like “so, there are going to be women’s shirts, right?” Another woman joined in, and the organizers pretty quickly said they’d talk to their shirt supplier.

37. @ john #27:
    Have you read “Unlocking the Clubhouse”? Something mentioned in there is that in the US women can choose to quit a sexist field when it gets to be too much. Many other places, that choice doesn’t exist. I’ve read elsewhere that technology is very lucrative in India, so good for the dowry. That pretty easily leads into the critical mass where the sexism dies off more. We don’t have that critical mass in the US.

38. My boss is a woman. My entire team are women. We are business analysts (the people who interface between the internal customers — the higher-ups, what we call the “product owners”, who actually deal with the real customers — and the programmers.) The product owners are also all women. The president of the company is a woman, although the CEO of our division is a man.

    Among the programmers, there is only one US-born female programmer, but the head of the QA team is a woman, one of the two project managers is a woman, and I think that actually 50% of the developers might be women! Our top DBA is a woman (although her boss is a man.)

    And we don’t work in some sort of pink collar industry. We’re an IT company that serves the health care industry by creating web-based software to track quality metrics for hospitals. Our parent company (the one that has a woman president) is a non-profit that lobbies on behalf of hospitals and helps to train hospital staff.

    I have been in meetings, thinking about the Bechdel test and how fiction is so much weaker than reality, as six women, including former clinicians and hospital staff, programmers, quality analysts and business analysts, argue over the design of a web site in great technical detail, including the exact formatting of data elements, and wondering why the hell you never see an all-female technical team in fiction when obviously it happens in real life.

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