Don't Get Mad At Things That Happened Back Then. Get Mad At What's Happening Now.

by Erica and Karen

Over the years that we worked, many of us were targets of bad male behavior, like leering and manterrupting and overlooking. (Also rape and sexual assault, crimes then as now and intolerable ever, but not a focus here.) For the most part, we just kept moving forward. Maybe we got angry when we were alone with our friends, but being seen to get angry was a really bad idea. We weren’t oblivious, but we needed our jobs and we wanted to succeed.

We put up with behavior we would not put up with today. Some of us—including some of the fabulous women we interviewed for our podcasts—remember being told things that seem reactionary now: that we were too aggressive, and bitchy, and that if we wanted to succeed we had to tone it down and take a back seat. Of course, we could not be seen as wimps, either. The bitch/wimp paradigm allowed only a very narrow path for success.

So we took the advice. We did want to succeed, and we did need to know how to succeed, so we listened. And sometimes we passed the advice along to other women.

But now we wonder. Did we do the wrong thing?

We don’t think so. We were new players in a male-dominated world, and we needed our jobs. We would not have kept them long if we hadn’t listened. So yes, we needed to be told what worked—so that we could succeed and then change everything. So that now our daughters can now retort: stop trying to fix the women—and our sons don’t even think about fixing the women.

What do we think now? We don’t often worry about the past, though recent events have dredged up some dark memories, and to the extent we lost opportunities because those in charge did not think a woman could do the job, or insinuated that something other than expertise was required, of course it makes us mad when we think about it. But we don’t spend much time worrying about the past.

We worry about the present.

Many things are better, especially the numbers of women now in the workforce, and at senior levels. Their presence alone changes the atmosphere. Institutional efforts like NASDAQ’s recent initiative to require listed companies to have at least one woman and one “diverse” director on their boards doesn't sound like a huge step—one of each per board??? But it is.

There is plenty to make us mad, though. Women are still way behind men in salary and status, and the pandemic has hurt women badly—all jobs lost in December were held by women. Women still face some of the attitudes we faced. And women over 65 are pretty much excluded from the working world. (Older men are sidelined too, but their silver fox image gives them an advantage.)

That sounds like a continuation of the outdated thinking that persisted when we entered the workforce. We remember what to do. The movement we all started four decades ago never stopped. It is just expanding. We’re grownups now, and we can see the whole picture. We were in the picture when we started, and we plan to stay in the picture for a long time to come.

Do you think women are making progress, whether they are coming up or trying to contribute in a different way as retirees? We would love to hear your story.