Women in Business an
annual Overview Of Business & PrOfessiOnal wOmen - PuBlished sePTemBer 2016
SONOMA WEST T
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The Healdsburg Tribune
THE WINDSOR TIMES
It’s not your mom’s workplace nowadays by Rollie Atkinson
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t wasn’t as long ago as we might think that “women in business” referred to switchboard operators or stenographers making coffee, taking dictation and facing gender barriers. The 1960s workplaces depicted on TV’s Mad Men, where the men smoked cigarettes in the office, drank martinis and ogled the women comes to mind when someone now says, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The modern workplace has changed in many ways, due mostly to technological advances that Mad Men characters would have never imagined. The definition of today’s workplace could now encompass a table at Starbucks, a home kitchen, a telecommute connection to downtown San Francisco or even a Skype conference session across the globe. These are not your mother’s workplaces. And how we got beyond them is a multi-path story that is still unfolding, with plenty of glass ceilings yet to be broken, perhaps even at the White House. The stories about women in business today are about business owners, advanced professionals, CEOs and working mothers who have achieved a very modern balance between career and family. Not all of the collected profiles in this edition of Women In Business would make good TV drama. But each tells a unique success story about the expanding roles and accomplishments women professionals and
The all-female switchboard operators of a small town telephone company (above) are the forerunners of modern women-owned and operated businesses, like Job Tango (center left at a ribbon cutting for their incubator office). business owners have achieved. Behind each of these stories is an untold story about previous generations of mothers and grandmothers. It wasn’t that long ago that (mad) men ruled and drooled their way around the office. Women were forced to put up with sex jokes, comments about their anatomy, unwanted physical contact and worst of all, the prevailing belief that they were somehow less capable than men. And, these mothers and grandmothers had to endure it all at low pay and in a business culture that believed women could never be promoted to bosses or CEOs. Our modern stories of women in business are as complex as their subjects. Barbara Mills is a former flight attendant who now wOmen in Business continues on page 4