Job Desperation

Caroline was fresh out of college and sitting in front of the man who she hoped would give her her first teaching job. To her astonishment, he asked her if she was using birth control. “I was so stunned I didn't know what to say. If I said no, I probably would not have gotten the job, if I said yes, it was revealing too much. I finally caved in and said yes. I often think how I should have stood up and told him off, but I needed a job. Thank goodness times have changed.”

Interestingly enough, I was asked the same question as Caroline in the 70’s by a female interviewer. She owned a large business and had made it in a man’s world, so I suppose she had learned to think like one.

Caroline is a boomer, and her incident also happened many years ago, but still haunts her in a way. She wrote to tell me about this after my last column in which I championed the womens’ movement and reflected on the gratitude I feel for how far we have come.

Conversations I’ve had, and letters I’ve read in the last two weeks have me troubled though. The term sexual harassment didn’t even exist when we were coming of age, but it was rampant. Every single woman I’ve asked about this has experienced it in some form. I’m sorry to say that despite changes in laws and consciousness, it still exists. It has simply taken on some new characteristics.

I’ve long been haunted by the 2006 movie Sherrybaby starring Maggie Gyllenhall. Her character is a 22 year-old who is fresh out of prison, fighting to get custody of her young daughter. In one scene she is desperate to get help from a paunchy middle-aged bureaucrat who tells her his hands are tied. When she offers to perform a sex act, then and there, his hands are no longer tied.

Then there’s the scene from the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The man in charge of her trust fund won’t release money she desperately needs unless she performs the same act. And she does.

Both of these movies are set in current times, and reveal similar circumstances going on behind closed doors. Women in desperate situations, with no one to turn to, looking for help from men in power. Are these movies reflective of real life? I strongly suspect so.

As I reflect on my 40+ years in the working world, there are men who helped me enormously, asking for nothing in return. There are also men who attempted the same types of coercion that happened to my movie counterparts.

I told a friend recently that one of the things I liked about getting older was that I was no longer subject to street harassment. You know, the hooting out of car windows that some males think they are entitled to. Anyway, what worries me is the world in which young women seeking employment now find themselves.

Not in my lifetime have jobs been so scarce. When there is intense competition for an existing job, the stage is set for these types of abuses. Who would you tell now if this happened to you in an interview for a job you badly needed?

I’ll end this with a story that happened to me when I was 27, and a brand new flight attendant graduate. It was the night before I would fly to my new home base and begin my dream job. There was a knock on my hotel room door. It was the new chief of flight attendant operations who we had trained with for a month. I smiled as I opened my door, wondering why he was there so late in the evening. He pushed his way into the room and grabbed my shoulders and kissed me full on the lips, telling me how beautiful I was. Unbenown to him, one of my classmates was in the bathroom, and I called out to her loudly. He let go of me and made some limp excuse about seeing us all off and wishing us well, and quickly left. I told no one.