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"When I was a younger woman, when I was in college, I worked for an oil company for a number of summers and when I moved to Reno when I couldn’t find a job in journalism, I worked for a mining company, and then I worked as a legal secretary. What my experiences were was simply being…expected to be competent and professional at my job, and at the same time, I was expected to accept treatment as a glorified maid or servant.
So, my male employers and bosses—and they generally were—would expect me to do remedial tasks for them and to have no opinion about that because that was simply how women in the workplace were viewed. So when I was in college and was working for the oil company, the man that ran the department in which I was a summer employee would walk past my desk and simply throw money on my desk. And the understanding was that I was then to get up and go out of the office building which was in downtown Houston, so it was a major urban center, and go down into the tunnels (because Houston has the worst climate in the world, so all the office buildings are connected by air conditioned tunnels) and to go to this particular little shop and get him his cigarettes, and bring him back his cigarettes. He would do the same thing with his coffee cup—he would walk by on his way to a meeting or talking with another man and would walk by and place his coffee cup in the middle of my desk and that meant, ‘bring me more coffee.’
It wasn’t that I was up for the same job as a man and I didn’t get it, or I was doing the same work as a man and was paid differently, but I was treated as a menial and at the same time was expected to do my job and do it well. I was supposed to put that all aside—this was the mindset at the time, nobody thought anything of it. I didn’t like it particularly, it felt disrespectful to me even then, but I was 18 or 19, and I didn’t have the standing or the self-confidence to say, ‘this is not okay with me,’ because I was working for him and that’s what he did.
When I worked as a legal secretary my boss did essentially the same thing—he would walk by my desk and wouldn’t even say good morning, he would just throw a Dictaphone belt on my desk. It’s just a constant put down. And the one time I did go in and I had found out that the two other secretaries in the office, both of them were making considerably more than I was, and I thought it was more about my age—because I was young, I was only 20 when I took this job. So I went in and I asked him for a raise, and it took me probably two weeks to get up enough courage to do that, and so he listened to my little spiel and said, ‘of course you’re entitled to more money, we’re paying everybody else more,’ and so then he looks at me and says, ‘so that wasn’t so hard, was it?’ And I felt like saying, ‘you a**hole! If you knew it was unfair to be paying me this, and you knew I was struggling to ask you for a raise, why didn’t you just offer it?’ So that kind of thing.
‘Because you’re female you serve us’—that absolutely happened all the time. ‘Go get me coffee, go get me cigarettes, go get me this, make my travel arrangements, do that...’ It was pretty much a constant, and so much so a constant that I never really thought twice about it. Like I said, I didn’t like it, I had a gut reaction to it, but that was the way the world was and I needed my job—it was how I was paying for college. So I kept my mouth shut, and smiled, and went and bought cigarettes.