How Can Employers and the Government Make the Workplace Better For Women? Not possible!

Better child care options. Closing the gender wage gap (The Census before the last one reported women made 82 cents for every $1 earned by someone with an XY gene.)

Yes, these changes are important and necessary.

But until the US's underlying misogyny is excised from the culture's social subtext, things won't change.

Women will probably have to wait for my generation to die out for there to be any hope.

Here is why I am so pessimistic.

Scenario 1: 1978

I have earned a bachelor's degree from Yale in the second class of women and an MS from Columbia. I am now married and pregnant and working.

My ex-husband and I just moved to Dallas and bought a house. I went to purchase a refrigerator, which cost $100 back then.

I had my own checking account and went to pay for it.

Clerk: "You have to bring your husband before I can sell this to you."

Me: "Why? I am buying it with my own money."

Incensed, I asked to see the manager. I asked him why the store wouldn't sell me the refrigerator.

Manager: "Because women can't make major financial decisions."

NB: This woman now manages a multi-million dollar real estate portfolio which I call "my fempire." Self-funded from stock purchases. So there!

Scenario 2: September 1, 2021

Texas passes Senate Bill 8, which became law yesterday. This law forbids abortions after six weeks. (I didn't know I was pregnant after six weeks.)

But here's the worst part of the law. The people who are going to enforce it! Vigilantes. The law "deputizes" citizens to take action against women who seek abortions. This includes the Uber driver who drives the woman to a clinic.

And it provides a bounty of $10,000 and the cost of attorney's fees for anyone who successfully sues.

There is no exclusion for rape and incest. The way the law is written, a rapist can sue his victim and earn $10k. (Way to go, Texas!)

The bottom line: any member of the public has legal standing to control a woman's body.

Hey, at least in 1978 women had the constitutional right to an abortion.

I actually met and wrote about Henry Wade when I first moved to Dallas. He was the Dallas district attorney who prosecuted, you guessed it, Roe v. Wade. But I digress.

Misogyny at Its Finest

This kind of thinking demonstrates people (mostly men) in power STILL think they know best what's best for women.

This is not the cultural Zeitgeist for caring about making things better for women in the workplace. These men were brought up thinking women were the second sex who were supposed to wait on them, look beautiful when they came home from work (Donna Reed always wore her pearls) and be ready for sex whenever they wanted.

If a woman earned a paycheck, great. But still clean the toilets!

My Attitude Didn't Help

I was a 1950s girl who never left her house without white gloves. Really! (I still have a pair....)

My mother wanted me to go to a college with a sorority so I could find a husband. She reluctantly agreed to let me go to Yale because maybe I'd find an even better husband. The fact that my education might help me never occurred to her.

My father paid for my Yale education, which was not cheap even then. I married a Yalie. When my father introduced us, he said, "This is my son-in-law Bob. HE went to Yale. And this is my daughter Beth Ellyn." Never a mention that I got a degree there too.

This always chapped me. But my father, who was born in 1922, didn't understand my complaint. He couldn't comprehend how his thinking devalued me.

So what values did I learn as a 1950s female? I'll tell you.

The chairman of our first Yale class reunion in 1979 asked me to be on the reunion committee. I was the only woman.

We met at the Yale Club in New York. Someone asked for coffee. The chairman turned to me and said, "Beth Ellyn, would you make the coffee?"

What did I do? Make the coffee. Didn't even think twice about it. Because that was the woman's role. Even though I earned the same university degree as all the men.

NB: I have upgraded my feeling of worth since then.

My Hope for the Future

I am hoping my son's generation will be less misogynistic and really do something to make the workplace better for women.

Here's why I believe that.

My father and I went to the Yale Club of Chicago's Christmas party in 1973. Yale hadn't even graduated its first class of women graduates.

I can't tell you how many "Old Blues," as Yale alumni call themselves, came up to me and said rudely, "You know, I voted against co-education at Yale."

I was always worried my father, a sniper in the Army in World War II, would lose his temper and start a fist fight. (He didn't.)

But guess what? When these Old Blues had daughters old enough to apply to Yale, they thought co-education was a GREAT idea.

Time heals many things.

Here's hoping!

P.S. Hey you men. Guess who plays a part in getting a women pregnant?????