Today, a little boy named Joshua called me Ma’am.
I didn’t expect to hear that. For all of my adult life so far, kids, cabbies, customers at the Gap, and lost tourists have all addressed me as ‘Miss.’ In the unfamiliar, it carries a note of affection. Compared to that, ‘ma’am’ sounded so impersonal, disinterested.
And so I felt compelled to follow Joshua to the conference room where he and nine other kids were building a space station out of leftover cardboard boxes, empty poster tubes and tangled ribbons of clear packing tape. I had something to prove. I am not some faceless she-drone at your dad’s office who provides construction materials without seeing to it that they are put to use with the best of your imagination. Now you look me in the eye and you tell me where you want this fake asteroid missile launcher!
And then it was time to clean up, so I took off. I have a job to do, after all.
It’s Take Our Daughters To Work Day—I’m sorry, it’s Take Our Sons and Daughters To Work Day. I was in third grade when The Ms. Foundation for Women created the first incarnation of the career exploration program to promote self-esteem and show little girls what they could do when they grew up.
It was the early nineties, the movement for equal rights for men and women in the professional world was still trucking, and even as a nine-year-old, I understood that I was going with my dad to his office to see for myself that some day I could, and would, have a job and an office of my own.
The program was called Take Our Daughters To Work Day for a reason. It was designed for young girls.
For ten years, The Ms. Foundation resisted pressure to open the program to boys in the name of their original initiative. But in 2003, they’d listened to enough outcries from parents, teachers, employers, and young men themselves to see that their message was being lost on all. “My son deserves to explore careers!” “Why does my sister get to miss a day of school and I still have to go?” They decided to officially expand and include little boys, too.
The people cried “Equal Rights” and the very sociological paradigm that sired Take Our Daughters To Work Day castrated it. So to speak.
The Ms. Foundation gave it a new name and tacked on a new mission statement. There is currently no mention of the original, single-sex oriented purpose of the program on its website. The focus has changed and so has its scope. Boys and girls, together, are supposed to visit a professional setting to see how work and home life are balanced. In reality, parents show off their sons and daughters; kids learn magic tricks, build forts, and play on mom or dad’s computer; somebody gets bored; and then everyone goes home tired, frazzled, and more frustrated by the divide between work and family than before.
I’m standing on a soapbox right now not because I’m a feminist or because some third grader stole my scissors today. I’m questioning the value of Take Our Whomever To Wherever Day in its current state. I’m even questioning the validity of the Take Our Daughters To Work Day I knew in the mid-1990s. Maybe the goals of the program were misguided from the beginning.
I think children should visit their parents’ offices. They should see how Dad spends his day while his kids are in school. They should see what Mom actually does and see where she does it. They should see their framed school photos on a parent’s desk and see what the grown-up version of lunchtime is like. Instead, they get corralled into corporate day camp.
I got the most out of going to work with my dad when it was just the two of us in his office. For a little while, he was productive and he loaned me a laptop so I could type up a project for school. We were both working, but we kept each other company. I asked him how to type the symbol for temperature degrees in my lab report. He didn’t know. We were both stumped. I don’t think we figured it out. I think I was drawing the little circles in on lab reports until I graduated high school.
I wouldn’t recognize any of my father’s co-workers. I didn’t know his official job title until some time last year. But I know what it’s like to be completely flummoxed by a superscript symbol and see my dad scratch his head over the same thing. And look at me now.
Further reading . . .
Thank you, Gawker, for backing me up on this one [in a sense]: Happy Take Your Inescapable Realization That You’ve Failed Your Children To Work Day
Take a look at Take Our Daughters To Work Day back the day (1994) with the Times: A Day Daughters Skip School and Go to Work
Thoughts on work-life and life’s work in last week’s Times: Prepping Children for the 9 to 5
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