WE STILL NEED TO TAKE OUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
A decade ago, the Ms. Foundation for Women created the innovative “Take Our
Daughters to Work” Day. Always scheduled sometime in April, the day has, by
now, touched 71 million girls between 9 and 15 who have gone into workplaces
to learn more about the options they will face as adults. No sooner than the
Ms. Foundation created Take Our Daughters To Work than the controversy began.
Some asked if such a day was unfair to boys, who also needed exposure to
career options. Others opined that, with gender gaps closing, programs
targeted toward girls had outlived their usefulness. Whatever the thinking,
ten years of nagging has produced a result that I think is corrosive and
narrow.
Coming off the high of 10 years of success, the Ms. Foundation says that
in 2003, they will launch Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work Day. While the
organization's President, Marie Wilson, says it is not about “add boys and
stir,” the fact is that the addition of boys waters down the important gender
focus of the initial program. The Ms. Foundation wanted parents to bring
their daughters to work because girls’ choices have, traditionally, been
narrower than boys' were. Girls still picked typically female professions,
teaching, nursing, and social work, and avoided scientific and computer jobs.
Some things have changed in a decade, but a numerical description of the
workplace suggests that more things have stayed the same – women are just a
handful of our nation’s top executives and earn 72 cents for every dollar men
earn. Indeed, some would say things are getting worse. A recent General
Accounting Office (GAO) study finds the pay gap widening in certain
industries for professional women.
Certainly, some women stomp with the corporate titans. Hewlett Packard’s
Carly Fiorina played hardball and scored a coup when she slam-dunked a Hewlet
t heir as she engineered HP’s merger with Compaq. Condoleeza Rice raises
eyebrows every time she runs the Bush hard line, and then she raises hands in
applause when she accompanies Yo Yo Ma on the piano. Karen Hughes has been
President Bush’s sidekick since his gubernatorial days, but now she says she
wants to leave her Washington power perch to go home to Texas. As long as
women like Hughes feel that they need to flee the power arena to return to
traditional roles, we need to keep taking our daughters to work so we can
reinforce the issue of balance.
When men say they are leaving their jobs to pay attention to work and
family, observers simply chortle and wonder what went wrong. When Labor
Secretary Robert Reich claimed family as his reason for returning to Boston,
most observed that he and President Clinton weren’t necessarily sitting
horses around issues like the minimum wage and welfare reform. Reich
confirmed his malaise in a book, Locked Out of the Cabinet (Knopf, 1997)
that combined humor, imagination, and self-serving spin to interpret public
policy. The bottom line, though, was that Reich was not much different than
Karen Hughes. He had teen sons and he said he wanted to experience their
pivotal years, not imagine them. Karen Hughes has said the same thing, and
the press corps has been empathetic and understanding. Until they can offer
the same understanding to men, we need to keep taking our daughters to work.
The subtext of understanding Karen Hughes is implicitly condemning her.
When she says she wants to go home for her child’s benefit, all the
gender-stereotype resistants utter a sigh of relief and say “good”. She
fought the good fight, won the tough battles, and at the end of the day she
went home. Those who cleave to stereotypes won’t say it, but they are
thinking “home, where she belongs."
After Hughes said she was returning to Texas, pundits started back on the
question “can women have it all?”. Some concluded that we can, just not all
at one time. Others spoke of the hours that women put into challenging
workplaces, wondering whether it is fair that those with children make hard
choices. Yet fathers make choices daily. Don’t their choices matter? If
women have a harder time making a choice, we still need to take our daughters
to work.
In the long run, both boys and girls will have a role in creating a
gender-neutral workplace. From that perspective, perhaps, it is important
for the Ms. Foundation to broaden their franchise and create space for boys
as well as girls in their brilliantly inspired career day. Still, girls face
higher hurdles and greater barriers to success than boys do. They still
confront a different set of choices as they struggle to juggle both work and
family. According to a 2000 Harris poll, 82 percent of young men say it is
important to have “a work schedule that allows me to spend time with my
family”. Yet, not many young men would shrug off the trappings of power as
easily as Presidential advisor Karen Hughes did. Until family has as great a
pull for men as it does for women, it is important to keep taking our
daughters to work.