Ginger Rogers, as the saying goes, did everything Fred Astaire did, only she did it backward and in high heels. It has such resonance because it’s not just about Ginger Rogers, and it’s not just about dancing.
Women face obstacles to professional success few men can even imagine, from areas as seemingly divergent as affordable child care and sexual assault. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s rollout of her childcare plan and reports of musician Ryan Adams’ predatory behavior toward teenagers are among the latest stories highlighting how many women face gendered challenges that could keep brilliant careers from ever getting off the ground. And the fact that flamboyant, horrific predators aren’t the only or even the main threat to women’s success reminds us what’s really going on here: When you take out the individual villains and the obstacles come in the form of unreliable or unavailable child care, you see that there’s a system holding women back from opportunity and success—particularly women of color, and especially black women, who disproportionately experience workplace sexual harassment and struggle to find affordable child care given a wage gap that’s more of a chasm.
We’ve seen time and time again as women’s stories of sexual assault and harassment have come out through the #MeToo movement how women targeted by predators see their careers derailed or ruined, their opportunities foreclosed, by men’s abuse. That’s been glaringly visible, and much commented on, in the stories of entertainment industry predators like Harvey Weinstein and Leslie Moonves, who actively ruined the careers of women who fought off their assaults. It’s been more subtle but ever-present in the stories of many, many other women, from the teenage musician who never played another gig after sexual communications from Ryan Adams to every woman who ever skipped a networking event or office happy hour because of the creep she knew she’d face.
But as the introduction of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s childcare plan has showed, women’s opportunities face threats that go beyond predatory men (as if predatory men aren’t enough). Warren has told two stories of how, at critical moments in her career, the lack of reliable, affordable child care threatened to derail her.
When she was about to enter law school, she recounted in her announcement speech, the most promising daycare she could find, one that had “a cheerful teacher, nice little play area, no funny smells, in my price range,” required that her not quite 2-year-old daughter be “dependably potty trained.” Which she wasn’t. “I now had five days to potty-train an almost 2-year-old,” Warren said. “All I can say is, I stand before you today courtesy of three bags of M&Ms and a cooperative toddler.”
Warren’s childcare struggles weren’t over, though. As she wrote in a recent Medium post, when she was teaching at a law school and her babysitter quit, she struggled to find acceptable care for her kids, going through option after option before, “At the end of my rope, I called my 78-year-old Aunt Bee in Oklahoma and broke down, telling her between tears that I couldn’t make it work and had to quit my job.” Warren got the relief so many women don’t get when “Aunt Bee said 11 words that changed my life forever: ‘I can’t get there tomorrow, but I can come on Thursday’”—and went on to stay with her family for 16 years.
But Warren’s career—a career that, even if she had never been elected to the Senate or run for president, had taken her to Harvard Law School as a renowned teacher and expert on bankruptcy law—could have ended before it began, or in its early days, for a reason that threatens the careers of vanishingly few men: child care. She’s proposing a policy to fix that, to make high-quality child care available and affordable for everyone. It’s a policy that could make it dramatically easier for women to grab opportunities and achieve more. Naturally, it’s a policy that addresses something that lots of men don’t even understand is a problem.
As conservative commentator Mary Katharine Ham wrote in 2017 about her own #MeToo experiences and those of her friends, “It was our way of life that was disrupted. It was our plans that changed, our career trajectories shifted. We made adjustments, physically and emotionally, while the offenders went unpunished, and sometimes got promoted.” (Emphasis added.) While rape by powerful men draws the most attention, these less flashy stories all too often shape women’s professional lives from day to day, and not for the better, while men’s lives roll on unimpeded. The same, minus the offenders in need of punishment, is true of childcare struggles. Women’s lives are the ones that are disrupted: It’s their plans that change, and it’s they who make adjustments.
There’s rarely one villain in stories of women’s opportunities cut off by lack of child care. There’s no vindictive rapist or barrage of suggestive comments creating a hostile workplace. There may be husbands who don’t do their share and bosses who demand long hours and daycare providers who leave children in dirty diapers for too long and insurmountable wait lists and enormous costs for the bright, clean, stimulating daycare where you want to send your children, but the ultimate cause is policy. It’s about decades of politicians refusing to take action on this basic need.
But, like #MeToo (and more), this is a reminder of how much women,—and in particular women from marginalized communities—have to overcome that would never occur to most men to worry about. This is a reminder that every woman who succeeds has gotten past obstacles her male peers not only never even knew existed, but may have helped reinforce.