Are Women Still Fighting for Equality?

I was recently responsible for coordinating Dana-Farber’s Women’s History Month celebration. It wasn’t something I felt strongly about heading into the month, but few others volunteered, so along with a great IS colleague, I jumped in. We had limited time and resources, but we pulled off a wonderful event including many lively book club discussions on The Feminine Mystique and webcast interviews with some very talented and successful DFCI women. Learn more about the events.

While coordinating the celebration, I felt engaged and inspired. The women I met were remarkable, warm, open, and insightful. It had me very energized but also puzzled. Why hadn’t this interested me much before? I could even go so far as to say that I was apathetic about topics related to women’s rights and equality until this point. How could that be? Is it something my generation of women takes for granted?

For the others I met, that didn’t seem to be the case. But for me, it was. I can’t recall it being an issue for me growing up. Perhaps it’s because I only had brothers – one biological, two step-brothers, and one adopted through the Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) program when I was in college. Though it sometimes seemed I had more chores than they did, what I remember most is trying my hardest to be as tough as them. I was quite proud of myself when playing tackle football at age 7 that I bloodied the lip of a much bigger boy down the street. I recall being successful at every sport I played. I think I got better grades than my brothers and I was the only one of us to go to college. (Now my brothers are doing well and my youngest through the BBBS program has since completed college.) So for me, being a girl didn’t seem to make it harder to succeed. If anything, my social economic status growing up was a much bigger hurdle. Thank goodness for a full-ride scholarship!

Reflecting back on more recent times, I see that perhaps women’s rights do currently play a role in my life. Despite my scholarship, I came out with student loans that I just paid off last year. My husband, on the other hand, took his second semester off of college to work and never went back. He had no student loans and is four years younger than me, but makes more money than I do. It could be his field and that he’s in the for-profit world. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s insanely smart and never forgets anything he learns.

But something dawned on me when I attended a Simmons’ Leadership Conference last month. During a session on negotiating, we were given a scenario to try to negotiate. In my group, we didn’t decide to march into the boss’s office and make our demands. We knew the company was in a hard position and wouldn’t likely give us what we wanted, so we negotiated down. The facilitators gave us stats and figures where men and women went in and negotiated for the same thing, but men came out much more successful and with much higher pay, despite no better bargaining chips or credentials. Of course I’ve heard before that women undersell their value, while men sometimes inflate it, but I wasn’t sure that was true for me, until this scenario.  I now recognize that women still have work to do if we want to be treated and paid fairly. This really simplifies things, but we have to know and be able to express our value, and perhaps be less concerned about the other person’s circumstances. Easier said than done, right? However, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received from a very influential woman in my life is, “You never know until you ask. The worst they can say is no.”