My dad and I were in the car having a conversation. Somehow, it got to him trying to explain a situation to me. One of the examples he used was something along the lines of, “imagine a CEO of a company, and she has to pay her employees…..” and a second later, he stops. He says to me, “you know, I used ‘she’ to describe someone in power. When I was a kid, that would have been preposterous and even laughable.” He had used that pronoun on purpose to see if I would have noticed. Honestly, I didn’t even realize. It had never occurred to me (and will never occur to me) that it’s weird to have a woman in charge.
That’s the greatest difference in our generations; we’ve become (from what I’ve experienced) more aware of our sexism and have made it a NORM to have a woman in charge. Well, at least I hadn’t noticed. This whole experience has made me even more hopeful toward my future because I know I’ll have less of a struggle to become a leader than those before me.