WRY BREAD: A Slice of My Life

in Pursuit of Dough

What Are the Unwritten Rules When You

Compete Against a Man for the Same Job?

By Gail Harlow

 had been working as a fact checker for my first employer, a magazine publishing company, for about three years when I applied for a position as a writer/reviewer in another department. I’d beaten out more than 100 applicants to win the exalted position of fact checker, and I’d been praised as a talented and hard-working performer since then, so I felt I had a pretty good shot at the coveted reviewer’s job. That was the good news.

On the negative side, I had to admit that when I looked around me at the rest of the members of the fact-checking department, I saw that three of my four partners in our pursuit of Truth (or at least Accuracy) had toiled in the department for more than six years. The head of the department had been there for 20 years. If anyone had left a trail of bread crumbs, which, like Hansel and Gretel, I might follow out of the department, it was one that led to hearth, home and motherhood. That was not in my game plan at the time.  I wanted to be a writer or an editor, and while I saw the entry-level fact-checking position as a great experience—a place to learn the discipline of communicating clearly—I also assumed that it would be a stepping stone to more creative work.

So I threw my hat in the ring for the writing slot. I interviewed with the department head who would make the hiring decision, and I took a writing test. It was considered a glamour position in this highly competitive company, and all of us who applied for it avoided each other in the halls and the elevators, as we politicked for the job with the higher-ups and spun dreams of becoming the next Siskel or Ebert. 

A week after taking the test, I was called in to the department head’s office. He asked me to close the door, and I knew this was it—my moment of truth. In a minute, I would know whether I had the job.

Professorial, stern, bearded, this man sat down in his chair, looked over his bifocals and told me that I had done well in the writing test and that I was qualified for the job. I had, in fact, made it into the top two. But . . . he had decided to give the job to the other candidate. We were equally qualified, but the other candidate was a man “with a family to support, and he needed the increase in pay more than I did.”

This was 1979, 15 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed, Title VII of which offers protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion or national origin.  Feminists were making headlines as they lobbied for support to adopt The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. And yet in this very well-educated man’s eyes, the words “breadwinner” and “head of the household” still had a specific sexual connotation. I don’t remember what I said to him. I don’t even remember what emotions I was feeling, other than disbelief and confusion (What did sex and family responsibility have to do with job qualifications, anyway?) as I left the office to go back to my desk (no cubicle walls behind which to hide my disappointment) to check more facts. Not long after that, I was given the opportunity to head the copy-editing department at a new magazine and I took it.

  My tenure as a fact-checker taught me that success lies in the details. To this day, in my larger pursuit of truth, I break problems and paradoxes down into facts, hoping that the things I know will lead me to understand those I don’t.

FACT: I later returned to my first company in the position of editor.

FACT: The “family man” who won the coveted writing position stayed in that job for a very long time, and eventually welcomed an adopted child into his family, while I moved to another magazine, where I was promoted to the No. 2 editing position, and later to yet another, where I became editor in chief.  I chose not to have children.

FACT: Years later, the department head and I competed for the top position at a start-up magazine, and I was hired for the job. A talented writer and published author himself, he is retired now and writing a travel book.

Happily, we each have found our own versions of happiness. Looking back all these years later, while I can’t in any way justify the rationale he used to make his decision, I am thankful that he didn’t give me that reviewer’s job. It wouldn’t have led me where I wanted to go.

 Could this sort of unabashed, overt discrimination happen today? It’s probably not as likely now that duel-income households are the norm. But women still earn only 73 cents for every dollar that men make—and even I can't kid myself into believing that when I beat out the department head for the job, it wasn’t in part because my “salary requirement” was lower than his.

OPINION: Though less can sometimes mean more (you can use that 73 cents to your advantage in the job market), it doesn’t add up to what we deserve.

We’ve still got a long way to go, babes!

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Gail Harlow is the Founding Editor of MAKING BREAD: The Magazine for Women Who Need Dough. E-mail her at gail@makingbreadmagazine.com with your comments.  

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