Feisty Aphrodite Archives
Working Women, Where Did We Go So Wrong?
The following is from the article written by Monique Doyle Spencer, featured on CommonDreams.org:
It’s almost the end of National Women’s Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.
Ouch. I don’t want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn’t make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.
Here’s the honest truth: Her boss didn’t even know what she made. He didn’t care, either. She never felt secure enough to negotiate her own raise, so she waited for somebody to notice. They never did. So the extra $10,000 a year that would have made a world of difference to her family never came home. It stayed at the company where it meant absolutely nothing to anybody.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. We were supposed to demand equal pay, not whimper through our year-end review. We were supposed to “smarten” the workday. If your job takes you more than 45 hours a week to complete, you are going to too many meetings that you shouldn’t be at.
We were supposed to create part-time opportunities for smart, professional moms and dads. They could be analysts, administrative people, sales people, doctors, lawyers, who would work mornings or two days a week at the office and more from home.
We were supposed to figure out how to do that. If a boss wants people there for him or her at all hours, we were supposed to hire two people, not make one work the hours of two. We were supposed to see if America would put its money where its mouth is: that family matters. If you’re not related to me, I should not be spending every evening with you.
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This woman’s road in life has been dour. She does not know she is insecure. She really believes she has to work nights, even though she is perpetuating a system that is terrible for her children. As she became more bitter, she made everybody work longer hours, called more staff meetings where she did all of the talking, insisted that the boss should see her department working the latest. Plus nobody in the neighborhood can stand her anymore, because she thinks that stay-at-home moms are her free babysitters. She calls the seven hours when she leaves her kids with you a “play date.” Read the entire article here.
