The Office: Still A Man’s World?
October 25th, 2009
A bit of a brouhaha erupted recently over basketball games at the White House. Seems President Obama likes to unwind over a friendly game of basketball, and invites a rotating squad of high-level Washington power brokers to join him on the White House court. All of them, of course, are men, a growing point of contention in the feminist blogosphere.
I can already hear the groans from many readers who think this is just a bunch of angry women getting their knickers in a twist over some minor male/female divide. I might have thought the same, except for an image that stopped me short while reading a front page story in the New York Times about the contrversy, headlined “Man’s World At White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say.”
First of all, that headline is a tad misleading. It is Obama’s male aides that see “no harm, no foul.” Five women who work in the White House, all of whom asked for anonymity because of concerns of appearing “publicly critical” (i.e., not good girls?) responded with eye rolls and complaints when asked about sports at the White House. But what I found most distrubing was the mention of an off-the-record meeting that White House communicaitons director Anita Dunn recently hosted for women reporters–over chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies!!!
Well isn’t that sweet? The gals got together over cookies–homemade, I hope, by one of the attendees–while the guys solved the world’s problems on the playing field.
I’m particularly sensitive to this sports thing because I have no interest in sports. That has often left me looking on with a weak smile while the editors I’ve worked for throughout my career (virtually all men) talked about last night’s game. I despise football (the remnants of growing up in a football-mad small town), I couldn’t care less about March Madness, and though I do pay slight attention to the Red Sox, I am not all that interested in the World Series when they aren’t in it. Has that hurt my career? Who knows? I’m guessing, though, that there are plenty of work environments where it would.
Women have come a long, long way over the last 50 years, as well-documented in the new book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 To the Present, by New York Times columnist Gail Collins:
The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers’ cigars on the men-only ‘Executive Flight’ from New York to Chicago. We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960–and the rare setbacks. “Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]” said a medical school dean in 1961. “We do keep women out, when we can.” At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren’t.” In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn’t approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by congress).
All of that sounds like ancient history now. It’s hard to believe that just a few decades ago women weren’t allowed to have a credit card or mortgage in their own name, much less hold an executive position or run for president. But it’s not all that ancient. Women still earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by men in similar jobs, with similar levels of education and experience. In business, politics, journalism and law women occupy only 20% of leadership positions (and much lower in Fortune 500 firms), despite making up 48% of the workforce. I don’t know if playing basketball with the residents of the executive suite would change any of that. But it might be nice to be invited. Or have the men join us for cookies.
I’d love to hear from women, and men, out there in the working world: Is facility with a ball, or knowledge of last night’s scores, an important career booster in your office?
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