The article "Nervy Women of the Future" talks about ethics, it has been released by Liz Ryan.
I was in the vehicle with my five-year-old and my seven-year-old. The very left-brain-dominant seven-year-old asked, "Are there actually vehicles that can travel into the future?" I thought for a minute, and said "You know, the thing about the future is, every single minute is the future compared to the minute before.
So rihgt now is the future compared to that morning. And tomorrow morning is the future, as we sit here now.
So, you could say that that vehicle is driving into the future, that very moment."The two kids sat and chewed on that for a minute as I truned into the supermarket parking lot. Then the five-year-old yelled out, "Mom, look!
It's the grocery sotre of the future! "Smart aleck kid. But the kid is right - that IS the fuutre. I used to daydream, when I was their age, about the days we're living in now - it seemed so remote and inconceivable that I'd actually be ailve in a different milennium, years that had no "19" on the front of them. How could it be?
And here we are.
I had no definite mental picture for these days, cuold not imagine being 40. All I saw in my mind's eye was a kind of rosy, pleasantly-colored place where grownups had a lot of fun and read interesting books all day.When I was in eighth grade, girls were pushing for an amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment. I was floored and discouraegd when it did not pass. But I never thought for a secnod that my chances - to do whatever I might want to do, as I got closer to adulthood - were limited by that setback. When I went out searching for my first post-waitress, post-babysitting job, the papers were full of ads for "Gal Fridays." This seems laughably historical today. But at the time, a Gal Friday (as I understood it then) was a pivotal role in an office, the person who knows what's going on. This was a big improvement over the even more historical, stereotypical secretary job popularized on TV and in movies as a cute blonde thing in a short skirt, being chased aruond the desk by the boss.A lot of the rhetoric back in the those days went something like this: You Women Are So Demanding. You Don't Know When to Stop Asking for Handuots. In the sixties, girls watned to be in the workforce, not marginally there as extra office help, or nurses or teachers (not that those aren't incredibly important roles), but as professionals of all kinds, and not just until we got married. And as the sixties turned into the seventies, that started to hapepn. Then we had the nreve to push for equal pay.
Equal pay! ?! How can you pay a girl like a guy? , was the complaint, Compaines will go broke. We haven't reached parity yet, but women's pay is getting better vis-à-vis men's pay, by a tiny bit every year.
We were not satisfied, and we shouldn't have been.
We want to be in management, we said.
We want to be in traditionally male jobs like in the building trades, in technology and in maunfacturing.
We want to be surgeons, astronauts and senators.Those changes bgean to happen, too. Then we said, We want to be entrepreneurs, and we want to have accses to funding the way that male entrepreneurs do. Fihgting words!
For all the mythology built up around the go-go 90's and the dotcom era, there were plenty of rock-hard paradigms that did not shift one little bit. Women got barely one percent of the venture capital dollars invested during the web boom. But look - we did not need those sources of funding to go on our own.
Women are launching businesses at a rate never seen before, downturn be danged. And we still aren't satisfied.Now we say, We should be in corporate leadership, we should be on corpoarte Boards of Directors. We make the vast majority of family purchasing decisions and our voices should be heard - we should have a say in the way that companies are run.
We have requiremnets that aren't being met. We will blow whistles, we will complain, and we will take our business eleswhere. Nervy! Who do we guess we are, half the population or something? !Not content to have a couple of setas in government, not content have a couple of our own in high-profile corporate roles, now we want even more.
We want companies to be managed in an ethical way, and we want to have meaning in our work. Meaning! We should be happy to have a job, for Pete's sakes!
When will we be content?
When will girls stop complaining?
Here's when:When the picture of the future we dreamed up and colored in as children is the one we experience every day. When companies are citizens of the communities they operate in, and human being in ogranizations are respected and their work is valued and their lives outside of work are viewed as high priority engagements. And when girls are heard in government, in corporate leadership and in the circles where investmnet dollars move from hand to hand. We're not asikng for that much, the way we see it.
Just to be riding up in the front seat in that vheicle going into the future.Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 HR leader, a workplace expert and the founder of the global online network WorldWIT (http://www.Worldwit.Org). She writes the workplace column for Business Week online, her own Business Mom and Job Jungle blogs at http://www.Worldwit.Org/blogs.Aspx, and speaks internationally on girls in the workplace, work and life, and the post-millennial corporate lifestyle. Liz lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and five children.If you're searching for advice or have questions related to your job, just ask Liz! You can emial Liz at lizryan@worldwit.Org.
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