Has the Glass Ceiling Really Lifted or Are We Still Banging Our Heads?

As a teen in the 1980's I grew up hearing how women could do anything for a living and attain any job they set their minds to. In my "Generation X" age group we were touted as being fortunate for our foremothers and their work on equality. We were told that they had gotten the Gen X women to a point where could be counted equally amongst the men. We were equal. We could do it all. Or so they told us.

I graduated high school, spent some time in college and then joined the workforce full-time. To start out, I had a couple of very stereotypically female jobs. I was first a bookkeeper for a tire wholesaler, and then later became a PBX Operator for a large San Francisco Bay Area Hospital.

In my job as a bookkeeper I found myself surrounded by mostly male co-workers. I was the "girl in the office" and it was a role that I was okay with since I was young and was the only female in the office. While it was never a matter of "get my coffee" or anything that overt, it was clear that I was there to do the typical womanly things like answer the phones and clean-up after the men. At that time I was young and it was fine.

In my job as a bookkeeper I found myself surrounded by mostly male co-workers. I was the "girl in the office" and it was a role that I was okay with since I was young and was the only female in the office. While it was never a matter of "get my coffee" or anything that overt, it was clear that I was there to do the typical womanly things like answer the phones and clean-up after the men. At that time I was young and it was fine.

My next full-time job was as a PBX Operator. In this role I was surrounded by female co-workers. This was my first real experience of office politics and how catty women can be when they get together in groups. It was almost, dare I say, worse than high school. Yes, it really was that bad. Every day was a new drama. Every day was a new saga in our collective office's soap opera life. It was a simple, well-paying, union job that was made to be way harder than necessity because of the office personalities.

After working as an Operator I started working in Information Technology for the same hospital. I preferred my new role in the company for both the actual day-to-day work and the fact that my co-worker pool shifted to being mostly male again. It was in this position where I discovered a sort of "reverse discrimination." I had a supervisor who was female, but she was significantly older than I was. She was a woman in a leadership role, in a male dominated field, yet somehow seemed to feel like the rest of us women belonged answering phones and smiling a lot while the men did the actual technical work. I found it interesting that it was okay for her to advance her career, even into leadership, but I was supposed to answer the phones, smile and like it?

I now have another IT position with a large contracting company. The first week of my new "technical" job I inherited a clerical task that our clerical support person didn't want to do anymore. The way I understand it, she whined to the boss, he was tired of hearing it, and I inherited the task. Interesting because I can't help but think that if I were male and in this same job role (managing servers, PCs and about 80 end-users) that I would not be doing this task. It's clear to everyone that I got it because I am female and everyone knows us women like to do clerical work. We are good at it, smile and like it.
What my career experiences to date have shown are very contrary to that which I was raised to believe growing up; there really is a glass ceiling and in this day and age women are still banging their heads on it in record numbers. Sometimes men put up the ceiling. Worse yet, sometimes other women do.