Seeing Women

I wasn't going to write anything for Women's History Month, but I couldn't help myself.

A father and son are in a terrible car accident. The father dies, but the boy survives and is rushed to the hospital. When he’s taken into the operating room, the surgeon sees him and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How is this possible?

I admit it: When I first heard this riddle years ago, I was stumped. It never occurred to me that the surgeon was the boy’s mother.

Would I see it differently now? Maybe. When I was a child, I didn’t know any women doctors. These days, I encounter as many women as men in that role. The percentage of women doctors in the U.S. has been rising steadily, with more women than men attending medical school as of 2019. In 2021, 37% of doctors in the U.S. were women.

Seeing them makes a difference.

Women becoming more visible

That’s on my mind this Women’s History Month.

If you’ve been following Flower Child, you may know how I feel about this month. I do not like it, Sam I Am. As I wrote last year, the problem with Women’s History Month is that we shouldn’t need a Women’s History Month.

But, sadly, we do. We need equal pay and opportunities way more than we need the month, but Women’s History Month can help shine a light on the issues that we must still address.

Although there are now more women doctors, women still face discrimination and a large gender pay gap, in medicine and in most other fields. Yes, in 2024. On average, women earn 84 cents to every dollar earned by men — up from 59 cents in 1963. The gap remains much larger among non-white women.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. Today, I’m writing about visibility.

I got to thinking about this on reading

Heather Cox Richardson

’s March 4 Letter from an American about the latest Supreme Court ruling. I was struck by seeing the names of Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett front and center. That’s four women out of nine justices, compared to zero in 1961, the year I was born; zero all the years before then; and zero until 1981. It was only in 2022 that we got up to four. Whatever you think of these individual justices, it makes a difference to see more women on our nation’s highest court.

In the four juries I’ve served on (yes, four! Why am I not excused from jury duty for life?), three out of the four judges were women. Some of the most prominent judges and attorneys in the cases against the former guy are women.

Women leaders are becoming more common around the world. Although the U.S. has managed to get a woman only as far as the office of V.P., it’s common now to see women mayors, governors, senators, and representatives. Men still far outnumber women in Congress, but the numbers are shifting rapidly; many women could be seen at last week’s State of the Union, some dressed in suffragette white.

No one bats an eye now at a woman running for president, something that was rare before 2020 and made major headlines just eight years ago — though I’m sure the headlines would ensue again if we had another woman presidential nominee. Still, things have changed. It was a really huge deal when Geraldine Ferraro ran as the nominee for V.P. on the Democratic ticket in 1984. Remember her? Or Shirley Chisholm running for president in 1972?

Some fields are still heavily male-dominated, including a couple I’ve worked in: tech and solar. But women are becoming more visible in many arenas that were formerly inhabited mostly by men.

Why it matters

Years ago, I took some editing classes taught by John Bergez, also known as the Bay Area editing god. In one of the classes, he told us a story about a time he’d been given the task to go through a science textbook and change all instances of “he” to “he or she,” or maybe alternate between “he” and “she.” At first, he thought the assignment was stupid. But by the time he’d finished this onerous task, he realized he was thinking about scientists differently: he was seeing both men and women in the role.

If those words can make such a difference, imagine the difference it makes for girls and young women to regularly see actual women scientists. Doctors. Engineers. CEOs. To see women in all kinds of jobs without it being something that needs to be commented on. To see it as the norm.

That’s quite a contrast to how things were when I was a child. Both my parents were professors, but many of my friends’ mothers didn’t work outside the home. People would ask what my father did for a living, not what my parents did. I remember bristling at the invitations my mother got to events at the university for “faculty wives,” with no acknowledgment that she might also be a member of the faculty. Needless to say, there were no events for “faculty husbands.”

Back then, there were so many places where we didn’t see women. The Watergate hearings were dominated by men, and it was male journalists who broke the story. As we watched male astronauts landing on the moon, we were shown rooms full of men at the controls — with no clue that women behind the scenes were also making the landings possible and sometimes saving the men’s butts. The people narrating these events on our television screens were men. (I could also get into the fact that almost all of them were white, and that the women behind the scenes were Black. Add race to the equation, and we have an even bigger invisibility problem.)

I’m quite sure that those of us who grew up during those times were affected deeply by this lack of visible women. For girls, not seeing women in most professional roles made it harder for us to envision ourselves in them.

We still have so far to go. Although women are making progress in the corporate world, they are vastly outnumbered in senior leadership — and we know how much power corporations hold in our society. I’ve already covered the pay gap. And women constantly face microaggressions and sexism, both subtle and overt, in the workplace and all other areas of life.

But I’m constantly reminded of how much the norm has changed, and how much more visible professional women are today.

A common practice during Women’s History Month is to highlight prominent women throughout history and in modern times. That’s important to do.

But women’s history is not just about a few remarkable women at the top of their fields, women politicians, women leaders. Women’s history is also about the everyday lives of women. It’s about how and where we see women. The fact that we’re seeing women in many more places these days shows that there’s been some progress since I was a girl. Girls growing up now will have a very different view of the world. So will boys. Maybe that will change their psychological makeup and perceptions in a way that leads to even more progress.

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My Women’s History Month posts from last year:

• The Problem with Women’s History Month

• Where Are the Women Artists?

• The Long History of Women’s Writing

• What They Didn’t Tell Us About Medieval Women