Daughter’s Day ‘Take Our Daughters To Work’ Day Gives Young Girls Needed Special Encouragement

What about our sons? That’s the question many parents of boys asked last year as workplaces were flooded with daughters for the highly successful “Take Our Daughters to Work” day. As the third annual TODW approaches April 27, many employers and parents are wondering if it shouldn’t be renamed “Take Our Children to Work,” to include our sons.

For social scientists, especially those who research girls’ developmental issues, there is no debate on this issue. They make a cogent argument for why girls need a special day set aside for them.

“Boys grow up assuming they will have value in the workplace. Girls don’t,” says educator and author Mindy Bingham.

That’s a broad generalization, one that many parents, particularly working mothers, have a hard time believing. But Bingham and others argue that girls today are at risk to be economically disadvantaged when they are women.

At 7, 8 and 9, girls are confident, enterprising and direct, with high expectations. “They no longer want to be a princess; they want to be president,” says political scientist Heather Johnston Nicholson, who researches girls’ development. That doesn’t last, though, says Lisa Sjostrom, a researcher and project associate at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. She says girls stop thinking about what they can do in the world and concentrate on how they look.

“They get the message that they are not actors in this world, but adornments,” especially if they are white, middle-class girls, says Sjostrom.

“Take Our Daughters to Work” takes direct aim at this loss of selfesteem, which researchers say is unique to girls. Sponsored by the Ms. Foundation, the day is designed to restore self-confidence, open a dialogue for girls about the working world and give them support for achievement.

That girls begin to feel less good about themselves is the result of developmental and cultural influences.

Schools, for instance, are a major source of gender bias, according to a report released three years ago by the American Association of University Women. Even though many systems are working to correct this, girls continue to tell researchers that they are uncomfortable raising their hands in school and that they don’t feel they are valued in the classroom. Sjostrom says girls continue to drop out of math and science courses “not because they can’t do the work, but because they don’t get encouragement to continue.”

Developmentally, girls 13 to 15 begin to feel differently about themselves. “Their bodies are changing. They are aware of their sexuality and their vulnerability,” says Sjostrom.

Cultural messages about femininity and sexuality that once rolled off their backs now cause angst: If I’m smarter than the boys, will I still get dates? If I’m not skinny and blond and beautiful, can I be happy? If I’m a feisty social critic, will I be branded a troublemaker?

Many girls even turn the positive role model of a working mother into a negative, according to Bingham, who is co-author of “Things Will Be Different for My Daughter” (Penguin, 1995).

“There’s a real backlash,” she says. “They see their mothers struggling with their dual roles and say, ‘I don’t want a life like that.’ Affirmative action rules may have opened the doors for women, but the girls aren’t going through them.”

With so much dissonant information, Bingham says it’s no surprise girls may come to conflicting and negative conclusions about work. For instance:

Girls are economically unrealistic. “Many of them grow up not understanding that they need to be economically self-sufficient,” says Bingham. Statistics indicate, for instance, that 50 percent of young women today will at some time support a family on their own, and U.S. Census figures show that 54.8 percent of women work before their child is 1. Yet fewer girls than boys participate in career education classes in high school, and teenage girls typically say they do not expect to be working outside the home when they have children under age 6.

Girls limit their own expectations. When asked to name the job they think they will have, girls typically list the jobs traditionally held by women: secretary, nurse, teacher. When asked to name their dream job, they list professional and technical jobs traditionally held by men.

“They dream of one job, but settle for another,” says Bingham, an issue she says TODW addresses.

Of course, there are girls with high career aspirations, girls who do achieve. But they pay a high price, says Nicholson. “Every girl who wants to be a scientist has to jump up and down a lot more times than a boy,” she says.

While a special day to take daughters to work is not a panacea, researchers say there is evidence from the first two years that it can be an antidote.

And what about our sons?

No one argues that boys shouldn’t accompany their parents to work. “All children need that exposure,” says Bingham. But she would prefer it happen on a different day.

Making “Take Our Daughters to Work” coed would dilute what girls need to get from it, says educator and social researcher James A. Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at Families and Work Institute in New York City.

Besides, he says, what boys really need is something entirely different.

“In the same way that girls are dissuaded from the world of work, boys this age get dissuaded from the work of caring,” Levine says. “They get the sense that it isn’t cool. That isn’t good for them. It doesn’t bode well for today’s girls either, who will be the women these boys marry.”

ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by A. Heitner