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A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately, the

A great point you brought up. I know someone whose mother, by all intents, was cleared to get accepted to a PhD program in the sciences...but unfortunately, they didn't allow women into the program at the time. It was "simply not done." And this was a decade after the Civil Rights Movement!

HillRat 13y ago
Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her to take over a fairly critical position within a week. He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him that he would need to submit to them her husband's notarized approval in writing before they would allow him to hire a woman. To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in the workplace. In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish) governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a result, political agencies were deluged with a series of ad hoc restrictions that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in "traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.) If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a very short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent people who simply aren't aware of, but can be educated about, the superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.

HillRat 13y ago

Back in the 70s, my father ran a state government agency staffed primarily by economists, statisticians and modelers. One economist was a woman who was very highly credentialed -- multiple Ivy Leagues, quant-heavy background, extremely knowledgeable in her particular field. He tendered her an offer, expecting her to take over a fairly critical position within a week. He immediately got a memo from the governor's office tersely informing him that he would need to submit to them her husband's notarized approval in writing before they would allow him to hire a woman. To contextualize, this was a few years after a flurry of state ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment. A kind of proto-"Mens' Rights Movement" had, by the mid-1970s, coalesced against the ERA and legal protections for women in the workplace. In this state, a fairly prominent state politician had publicly taken the lead in trying to roll back protections for women (in part by arguing that the ERA would require public swimming pools to be topless!), and the liberal(ish) governor was fighting a conservative cultural backlash from constituents. As a result, political agencies were deluged with a series of ad hoc restrictions that basically made it impossible to hire or promote women unless they were in "traditional" roles such as the typing pool. (To his credit, my father fought through the strictures, using the same kind of cussedness that led him to take long road trips with African-American fellow military officers through the Deep South of the 1960s, in which they found out that, black or white, a military uniform didn't protect you from redneck sheriffs.) If you think about the sweep of history, four or five decades ago is a very short time, and even though gains for women and minorities have been very real and tangible, it's all too easy to see how fragile they are. Today, racism and sexism are generally more tacit than explicit (and often supported by decent people who simply aren't aware of, but can be educated about, the superstructural biases of their organizations), but the results are just as pernicious for those operating on life's higher difficulty settings.