One of my first jobs out of college was as a receptionist at a privately funded think tank associated with one of the top business schools in the country. Our chaired thinkers would pop across the lawn to the school to lecture, and the students would come back over to work on their projects and flesh out their business ideas.
One day an MBA student showed up for a meeting of some kind and spoke with me for a moment. He quickly decided I wasn't suited to the secretarial role and suggested I go to college.
"I have a college degree."
"Oh, from..." (He named a nearby commuter college better known for on-campus violence than academic excellence.)
"No, from here."
He had no idea what to say next. He couldn't fathom how the two of us could both come out of top universities, one to be a secretary and the other to be among the next masters of the universe.
The thing is, I wasn't supposed to be a "secretary." I was a member of the administrative staff, doing the administrative work that kept the place ticking. Sure, I made the coffee and ordered the file folders, but with a degree in philosophy and an acceptable grasp of the English language, I started out with some copy editing. Then I moved into setting up elaborate Excel spreadsheets to track our Byzantine array of grant funding. And soon enough I designed a database to capture some of the unique intellectual capital that was laying around in card catalogs and graduate student projects. But even when I was done sitting at the front door and making the coffee, I could neither escape the vicious territoriality of the secretaries, nor enter the sphere of the male technical assistants.
I eventually used my new skills to escape the secretarial track and move to a new environment where my value is judged by what I produce. I could say that part of the difference is that no one in this industry ever saw me as the secretary. However, administrative assistants actually do move into professional and eventually management roles where I work. I could say that the difference is female management, except that at the think tank the top management and chairs included women and fair-minded men. In fact, these were men and women who I admire very much and who would likely be somewhere between hurt, offended, and baffled to realize that they had presided over a fundamentally sexist institution.
My current industry has a shortage of thousands of trained people and the shortage is only expected to grow in the coming years. We have no room for any employees that don't want to be anything else, and limitless possibilities for those who do. For any given corporation to survive, it has to take advantage of every skilled and trainable hand in the shop. Such a situation isn't limited to my industry: the sudden growth in the worldwide consumption of sushi means that suddenly females are welcome on many sushi lines, and the absence of male workers during the great wars brought women into the factories.
The difference between my two workplaces was about the scarcity of resources and the subsequent willingness to value the work contribution of women. The secretarial pool (and the nursing staff pool, and the teacher pool) has a limitless supply of women willing to sell their time and their dignity for a dead-end career path and bottom level payment for a variety of reasons. For as long as three years after I left my final secretarial track job, I could still go back to each place where I had worked and find women sitting at the same desks, involved in the same cat fights, saying that no one had given them a chance to be anything else. So long as they weren't willing to be anything else there would be no chances; so long as women are willing to undersell themselves there will be no equality in the market place and no respect for "womens jobs."
When the men returned after World War II, women did not leave the workforce; instead, they left their community and family activities. Volunteerism amongst women dropped significantly and never recovered. Despite a nation of women driven by uppers (as opposed to the downers required by the previous century of women) through a life of economic and community/family service, womens work output is actually not a bottomless resource. Something has to give. A woman who can't get ahead while simultaneously digging her grave under her own feet is seen as just not quite enough, but eventually there is just nothing else women can do and society as a whole suffers for it.
As I've mentioned before, this issue is taken as a point of national policy by the government of Singapore, which has realized that in order to get ahead economically the gifts of women must be mined along with the gifts of men (something other developing nations such as Afghanistan are ruthlessly pressed to do by the worldwide economic community). However, Singapore has also realized that in order to get the full economic contribution of women, their family and community obligations must also be shifted. This is about realizing the full economic contribution these woman can give: these are not matters of feminism and have nothing to do with the wellbeing of the women themselves. Nonetheless, the acknowledgment that womens work is limited and therefore has value is a precept required for any kind of feminist advance.
Just as the women and men at that think tank could not overcome the forces shaping the culture of the secretarial pool, well-meaning people have trouble countering those forces on a personal level. The New York Times reported that couples who try to create equal marriages find themselves swimming against the tide- both internal to the relationship and external. As one male friend put it, "I want to marry an intelligent woman with a good career, but I realize that I also expect her to pick up my socks." We don't expect a bachelor to pick up his own socks because he is busy, but we do expect a working women to be the only contact number a school keeps track of.
Now we are faced with a female Vice Presidential candidate who apparently has the career and picks up the socks. And she is hot (Although some of the hotness is apparently faked for various reasons, including a plethora of websites where you can now purchase swimsuits just like those shown on the VPILF!). This is a woman who can do it all, plus dress a moose, and "still look like she got her eight hours on a sleep number bed" (blog BwP). She is also in hot water for dismissing Obama as a "community organizer" in her convention speech.
Sarah Palin wasn't incorrect to highlight the difference between the community organizer and the person with real executive responsibility, however she was stupid to flippantly wave off community organizing experience rather than highlight her own growth from community organizer to mayor and state executive. In her dismissal of her own roots, there is an unspoken dismissal of the powerless which is inherently racist and sexist and, in its sexism, feeds the fear women have that a successful woman views herself as someone who has actual evolved out of her own gender. This is why so many woman hate Hillary Clinton: She wants to beat the boys at their own game and she has. However, her winning only serves to prove that women can be men. In the gender-neutral global economy, we already know that and it has made us tired and cranky.
Gov. Palin thinks to appeal to women voters through her insistence on her femaleness being primary even to her accomplishments. Blogger Alias Athena described it perfectly:
...she identifies not only FIRST as a mother but almost EXCLUSIVELY as a mother. It's a little weird, and a little hard to believe given that controversial plane ride, but the fact is she is not running as the Gov. of Alaska but as a "hockey mother" turned politician, phrased as though it were just a step or two away from the PTA. It's where her beauty queen status, reinforcing all the "transitional" stereotypes about what a really successful woman not only DOES but LOOKS LIKE, reminds people that she is "us" and furthermore, the "best" of us. It's where it starts to really matter that she's had as many kinds as she had and still manages a baby with Down's while does an incredibly demanding job. She isn't a super-politician, she's supermom from the paper towel commercials.
You know what the difference between a soccer mom and a hockey mom is? One is more similar to a pit bull than you are. Some women are starting to call Palin the "mean girl" brought in to be the pit bull for the campaign. She has better watch out: this isn't high school any more and women are tired of being run into the ground while simultaneously being told that they aren't good enough.
Gov. Palin needs to get back to talking about executive experience. Assumptions about the scalability of skills have always underestimated women's skills and dangerously overestimated those of men. Red Cross founder Clara Barton and Mother Theresa are viewed with amazed respect for their feminine attributes of caring and service, but their executive skills are rarely mentioned. Clara Barton ran the Red Cross for 23 years after founding the institution at age 60, after exhausting herself to near-death serving the wounded of the Civil War. Mother Theresa successful replicated her ideals into almost 6,000 nuns, brothers and priests and countless lay associates working in more than 100 countries worldwide. Both of these women had only managed classrooms prior to beginning their great works. On the other hand, the inability of a horse show organizer known to his boss as "Brownie" to manage the Federal Emergency Management Agency resulted in the death of almost as many people as the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. While the horrors caused by men advanced beyond their ability are countless, we have yet to get the female leaders from past centuries and millennia their due. Gov. Palin really cannot waste any time making sure she gets hers.
Andrew Sullivan has been on a multi-day tirade against Gov. Palin, posting so frequently that one wonders if he stops to eat and so voraciously that he will surely be embarrassed about some of his choices once he does. (Multiple posts about her rumored affair culminate in a post where the rumor is on the post and only after clicking the link do you find that it goes to the primary evidence that this is a non-story, and he's linking to "trooper-gate" even though he surely knows better by today. He is an intellectual, not a partisan fool, and these things are an embarrassment.). He made this offensive statement about the excitement over the Obama life narrative vs. that of Gov. Palin:
...Obama earned it; Palin was given it.
If there is one thing I can tell Mr. Sullivan with absolute certainty, it is that a woman does not develop from beauty queen to business woman, PTA president (word to the boys: "mean girls" wouldn't have let that happen if she wasn't someone special), mayor and governor, while having five children, because someone gave it to her. She may be a pretty face, but she's also a damn impressive human being.
Regarding the likelihood of Gov. Palin's ability to manage her aspired-to VP role (and the very real possibility she could end up as President), David Frum blogged a letter from an Air Force officer discussing his first experience of combat and ending:
In the end, no one can be prepared for the crucible of combat or presidential power and responsibility until they are in the role due to its dynamic and unpredictable nature. In the end we must base such a decision on potential.
It is legitimate to question the depth of Gov. Palin's experience. She has been governor of Alaska for less than two years. It is not legitimate to question her potential. A governor can become President; there is no legitimate reason to question whether one can become Vice President, especially when running against a Presidential candidate who himself has never been an executive. She is not the secretary of Alaska.