Someday, This All Will Be History

Dear daughters of the Inland Northwest:

Welcome to our workplaces. Hope you enjoy your day at work with your mom or dad or any other grown-up who invited you to peek into the adult world today.

You might be spending your day in a corporate office. Or at a factory, university or fast-food restaurant. Wherever you are, take a good look around. Workplaces probably will look and feel a lot different when you arrive 10 to 20 years from now.

They have changed dramatically in the past 20 years, especially for women. If you had visited some workplaces in the 1970s, you would have seen fewer women and very few women bosses. Many of those women bosses would have been man clones, wearing prissy bow ties to soften up the power suits. It would have been hard to have found a family picture anywhere. Or a woman talking about her family on the job. Women in those “early days” read self-help books on how to get ahead. They were told: Don’t put pictures on your desk. Don’t talk about your kids. You’ll look weak.

Things are looser now. And in 20 years, imagine the possibilities. Here’s hoping your workplaces all will have on-site day care, flextime and job sharing. Here’s hoping women’s pay will be equal to men’s and women bosses will be just as common, too. Here’s hoping that things such as sexual harassment and glass ceilings will be nonexistent and will even seem quaint, like disco.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rebecca Nappi/For the editorial board