Since then, there has been mixed progress. Women have inched closer to men in wages, surpassed them as percentages of both the professional workplace and college degrees, and increased their presence in Congress (if you consider the current 19.4 percent to be progress). But they have barely budged as a percentage of workplace managers (37 percent in 1990, 39 percent today) or as leaders of Fortune 500 companies (none in 1990, 21 in 2016), and they still lose traction in many of the highest-paying professions. (While women are now nearly half of all law school graduates, they are just 20 percent of law firm partners.)
Measures of more private interactions are more difficult to find. There has been an increase in reports of sexual harassment in the workplace and sexual assault on campus in recent years, but it’s unclear if this is an increase in frequency or awareness or both.
What is clear is that much of the conversation about gender has been oddly sanitized. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, for instance, forcefully laid out statistical evidence of how women are perceived differently in the workplace than men, and her solution was that women adjust their behavior to challenge those perceptions. Sexual assault awareness on campus, in turn, focused on what women could do to drink less, walk home in groups, and recognize assault so they could report it when it happened. And analysis of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was about how Clinton might overcome voters’ unconscious responses to the way she dressed, wore her hair, spoke and smiled.
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