Women Over 50 Take Note

Over the course of the last month, I have attended events throughout New York and New Jersey designed to inspire and empower professional women. I have been disappointed to witness a number of successful women my age – let’s just say those over 50 – continue to tell young women that men will be an impediment to their success.           

 I am not na?ve enough to believe that gender discrimination in the workplace does not exist. However, there is nothing neither inspiring nor empowering about continuing to tell young women that their male colleagues are responsible for their successes or failures. We should be offering tools and strategies to help these women develop the requisite skills and attitudes they need to take charge of their fates instead of continuously relinquishing that power to men.

 Still, I understand why women my age continue to perpetuate this message. We remember that as recently as 1965 there were no female Supreme Court Justices or national news anchors or heads of Fortune 500 companies or pro basketball players.  There were no female police chiefs or FBI agents or generals.  There were only 2 women in the Senate.  Women were not allowed to run marathons; married women could not get a loan without her husbands’ permission and elementary school teachers had to leave their jobs if they became pregnant. It is hard for young women entering the workforce in 2015 to imagine the world we grew up in.  Until recently, women devoted much of their time to unpaid labor and as a result were less accustomed to thinking about the dollar value of their work than men who have been conditioned to believe that their worth is based on the accumulation of goods, status and power.  Men learned how to evaluate their worth in the marketplace while women grew up believing our destinies were tied to the men in our lives.

 The legacy of that history is significant.  Women my age learned to wait to be asked...  for a date or to marry or to be invited to the pitch meeting.  We were socialized to believe that hard work is enough to get noticed and are more comfortable waiting to be invited to participate or offered something instead of expressing an interest in an opportunity, publicizing our accomplishments or asking for what we want. The residual effect of this is that many women over 50 are still more likely to believe others control our circumstances, while men are more likely to believe they can influence circumstances and opportunities through their own actions.

 Luckily, the younger, equally successful women at these events demonstrated a belief that they CAN and DID influence their circumstances through their own actions. They acknowledged that along the way they were met with resistance from men and even other women, yet they choose to rely on their own skills and talents to confidently and unapologetically take action to achieve their goals. They are the masters of their own domain, no matter what others in their orbits do. If we truly hope to achieve equality in the workplace, this is the message we need to be delivering to young women entering the workforce today and we must practice believing it ourselves!

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