dawn ostroff

1. Women in Business: Are We Any Further Along? How Popular Culture Sees the Businesswoman From Gloria Steinem to Gertrude Stein, women have been standing up for and supporting women along the way for many decades. How much progress have they made that has affected the bottom line for women in pay and promotion? There have been many pioneers in the business world and the gender gap is slowly closing, but the reality may surprise you. As a woman business person, I have run into many obstacles along the way. My career is over 30 years long and I have covered many miles of the work world. But, I still get the sense that men are still doing better than I am. I was born in the late 60s so I am considered a GenXer and while I wear my title proudly, I am not sure if it defines where my generation stands in regard to women in business. In this article, I have chosen the portrayal of women in business through popular culture, mostly movies and television. During the eighties I watched "Working Girl" (1988) and "9 to 5" (1980) which both addressed how women were under-appreciated and underpaid at that time. Their characters were made out to be

2. either sexy or bitchy or murderers. In the eighties, that is the way it seemed that you had to behave to gain any kind of respect from the men in the office and there was no opportunity to get into the men's room in order to get the "real" story of what was going on company-wide. One of my favorite feminist romps was "Don't Tell Mom, the Babysitter's Dead!" (1991) The movie included Christina Applegate as a teenager who accidentally found her way into the business world as the executive assistant to a powerful woman in the garment industry. The portrayal of Applegate's character was always saying, at her bosses request, "I'm right on top of that, Rose!" anytime she was on the phone needing something done. The nineties pop culture revealed through "Ally McBeal" (1997-2002) that never-ending torture that women supposedly go through when trying to decide whether to have a career or children. The show cleverly removed the men's room boundary by having unisex bathrooms instead of divided ones. The two-thousands have yielded a few more powerful women business owners, entrepreneurs, and office personnel in popular culture. Well, "The Office" (2005) helped a little bit with Steve's boss being female. The majority of the female staff in the office, excluding the brilliant but underutilized, Pam, appeared to be all in the same pay range with their male counterparts. Thanks to Fortune's 50 most powerful women in business, there is a good chance that women are coming into their own. The baby boomers, who remember the beginning of the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies are faring quite well in spite of being bombarded with images of "That Girl" (1966-1971) and "Gidget" (1959) when they were growing up. dawn ostroff