Let's move away from sociology and the ancient history of our species, and back into the diverse workplace.

Proposed new thread - What are the BEST aspects of the current workplace for women?

Is it that opportunities are expanding? That overt discrimination is more suppressed than ever?

Is it the chance for recognition, for sisterhood, for real contribution? Is it expanded training opportunities, or expanded child care?

Friends, I do not deny that everything's not peaches-and-cream for working women. Discrimination is still with us, and too many men "just don't get it". But there are plenty of threads about what goes wrong. Shouldn't we say a word or two about the areas where progress and improvement are visible?

Please share your personal experiences, articles you've seen, stories you've heard.

I have experienced an improvement in workplace discrimination over time.

To be fair, I must say that I'm sure that years of working in a nontraditional field (largely through 10 years active duty Navy) has helped.  Somehow (it's not easy to describe for those without the same experience) it has influenced my behavior in ways that have probably helped. Overall it is not just interpersonal behavior that has improved, I think.  In the engineering fields a woman's presence is not so much a novelty as before. But I suppose that is also linked to interpersonal behavior.  Whatever...

As far as pay goes though, I can't be sure but it's likely I am paid less than my male counterparts. If our pay structures were more transparent, I would not need to feel suspicious. However, I hasten to add that the quality of my work is more important than my compensation because opportunities in my line of work are scarce and I am the winner for having secured my job among several dozen male candidates.

My 2 cents

Thank you dorothyCQE for sharing your  experience on the Diversity at Work board!!!!

Kudos to the woman who just won around $2million in a gender pay discrimination suit against walmart (or walfart as I like to call them now!)

You're welcome McCathy.

I actually thought this was an interesting question because:

I have never personally seen or heard of an employer in my state that offers child care, or help with child care. That is something I read about in magazines.

I have no sense of sisterhood with anyone in my workplace, and have not had a close friendship of this kind since my last U.S. Navy deployment and we had downtime we could share with our workmates.  At my place of work we are too busy to feel like brothers or sisters.

My workplace has women engineers, but zero women in top management positions. When sitting at a big conference room with 20 middle managers, I have noticed I am the only woman in the room; I do not hold a management position, so the number is still zero.

I can make a difference in my position, and it marks the first time in many years that I've had enough influence to do that but the position alone does not provide the influence.  My interpersonal skills, negotiating ability, openness and willingness to embrace diversity, ability to hold my own in a technical conversation, and yes, a firm handshake help me to be effective in my work. 

It has been a number of years since an E-8 reservist said to me "You should be at home." Most of the treatment I received while in the Navy was straightforward and fair.

It's a far different world than the one my mom described to me, in which at Christmas time the office women would line up for their bonus and give the manager a kiss on the cheek to receive it.  I'm unclear if there would be no bonus without the kiss because I was not there, but that is the impression she made when telling the story.

Wal*Mart is in the process of performing damage control on television in the form of a pretty long infomercial.  I saw it yesterday and from the looks of it, the employees are just as happy as they can be, business is great, everyone is getting bonuses, and they are making impressive contributions to their communities.

Comments anyone?

Hey Dorothy!  How are you doing?

 

 

Bunzo

Hey Bunzo, doing good--thanks for asking!

No doubt Wal Mart is hard at it, warming up the propaganda machine.

I have a relative working there as a cashier. The pay is better than her last cashiering job. But should she try for promotion it is hard to know what the outcome would be.

It actually would be no surprise if so few women continued to management positions.  As I have said, there are (count 'em) zero in my workplace.

I will be interested to see how the Supreme Court's recent decision factors in the recent Wal Mart award--the Supreme Court ruled the employee (Ledbetter in this case) "should have filed an EEOC charge within 180 days after each discriminatory decision was made and communicated to her."  I had a little trouble imagining an employer saying, "Okay, we're going to discriminate now by (XYZ)." In companies with opaque compensation practices, the discrimination can go undetected for years.

Well, that's a discussion for another day I guess.

I think back to my great aunt, Sister Mildred.  She was born about 1900 and she was a nun for 75 years.  When she was 19 years old living in Jamestown, ND, she worked at the haberdashery.  She didn't have a boyfriend and was essentially minding her own business.  One day her cousin who was a Christian Brother came to visit and asked her about her plans for life and talked to her about becoming a nun.  She really wasn't interested, but in order not to offend him, she said that if she could get into this particular order (Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet), she'd consider it.  I'm sure she never thought that would happen because the closest convent was nearly 1000 miles away.  Her cousin, however, tracked down a nun from that order who came to visit her.  She felt that such an unlikely occurrence must have been divine intervention and therefore joined the convent.

As a nun, she was trained as a nurse and eventually became a highly regarded hospital administrator.  She built 3 hospitals for the order over the years and eventually died at 95 years old.  Being a nun allowed her to have a career and do a job that was interesting and exciting in an era where women could not do things like that.  If she were born today, or for that matter if she were born when I was born even, I doubt she would have gone into the convent in order to do what she wanted to do.  It just was not an option for a woman (married or not) to have a career like that.  It is certainly well within my grasp and my daughters' grasp to have it.

So, all in all, I'd say that there are just a lot more options.  Not all of them fit everyone, and as you say, things are not perfect, but there are thousands of choices that didn't exist even 20 or 30 years ago.  For that matter, I'm in a very male dominated industry.  It is only now that I'm starting to see an influx of women and only in certain segments of my industry.  I'm sure my 3 year old would be shocked when she grows up to hear how often I was the only female in a room of 100 men!

Tess

I am gratified to see that after a long wait, this topic has come alive.

I expect that for women serving as the "first" in several occupations or in many employers, there is a challenging combination of exhilaration and trepidation at being the pioneer.

"I expect that for women serving as the "first" in several occupations or in many employers, there is a challenging combination of exhilaration and trepidation at being the pioneer."

I don't know about other women, but I felt exhilarated about getting back into my field and trepidation about the risk of losing it again. It didn't have anything to do with my gender, and everything to do with winning the post I knew I was right for.  And it was abject relief.

As for women pioneers, maybe.  I wish we could ask Tess's aunt, or Madame Curie, or Admiral Grace Hopper if they felt exhilarated or trepidation. Maybe Sally Ride did. Maybe they were just so smart that it felt natural for them to be doing the work they were doing. I really do wish I could speak with Grace Hopper, but she's passed on.

Nowadays I do not think so.  Instead I think our young people would wonder what's wrong if they got the sense they were locked out of a field where they feel they belong. "Why shouldn't I be able to (XYZ)?" would be more likely than exhilaration.  Or so is my impression after working among them in the schools ending last year.