On the Cusp of Change

Jesse Ellison

Until recently, if you'd asked me what kind of change I wanted for women and girls in the next decade, I would have been hard pressed to answer. Like many of my generation, I was raised in a sort of idealized bubble, largely shielded from the notion that my gender would poise a problem, at work or anywhere else, and taught to believe that I could set my sights as high as I wanted.

It wasn't until I had spent a few years in the workplace, had begun to feel frustrated and stymied by a 75-year-old corporate culture and eventually discovered, along with several colleagues, that the first gender discrimination lawsuit had happened at my own employer, Newsweek Magazine, just forty years earlier, that I fully realized both how much progress has been made, and how much farther we have to go. In 1970, during job interviews at Newsweek, women were told outright that they were not allowed to write. In 2009, women wrote just three of the magazine's 49 cover stories.

Exploring the details of this lawsuit, and where women in journalism are today versus forty years ago, made something substantial happen for my colleagues and me. We realized that what we were experiencing in the workplace—frustration with a boy's club whose institutional knowledge spans more than seven decades; confusion about the fuzzy boundaries of sex and power; and watching ourselves grow slowly silent because our voices are neither as loud nor as valuable as those of our male colleagues—wasn't our problem, it was a problem. It was bigger than us. And it wasn't our fault.

But what was most surprising was what happened next: we started talking to the men around us. And they listened. What we realized in all of this is that the problem, as it stands today, is as much about complacency as it is about ongoing sexism. It's as much a result of our no longer challenging the status quo as it is about the persistence of patriarchal ideas and norms.

The good news: we are at the cusp of a seismic change. As the world economy has shifted, women and men are re-negotiating their roles and expectations in new and fundamental ways. And men can be as engaged in this discussion as women are—in fact, they should be. At the end of this, my hope is quite modest. It is simply that other young women don't have the realization I did, because women and men together are challenging established standards, seeing that progress for one is progress for all, and beginning to work together within a new and flexible framework.

Jesse Ellison is a writer and editor at Newsweek Magazine and co-author of the blog, The Equality Myth.