What Does Take Your Child to Work Day Mean in 2012?

The day was originally born of a time when girls seemed to be stalled and floundering. "A national intervention" was what Marie Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, called it -- one that "sends a positive message to girls and focuses on their potential.'' It came at a time when books like"Reviving Ophelia" worried for girls' futures, and when experts told us that young women lacked for self-confidence, strong role models, and solid opportunities. Bring them to the office and show them what is possible, the thinking went. And do so without boys around to steal their spotlight.

 

By 2003, however, times had changed. We were beginning, then, to think of boys as the problem children, or, more accurately, the children with problems -- more likely to be victims of violence, or suffer from learning disorders, or to be diagnosed with ADHD. At the same time, we didn't see our girls as quite so helpless anymore. Shouldn't all our children have a chance to see what Mom and Dad do all day, we wondered. Don't both sexes need a glimpse of what their futures might hold? Even "Reviving Ophelia" author Mary Bray Pipher came out in favor of adding boys to the day.

 

Fast forward another decade, and "The Flip" is all but complete. (That's what Liza Mundy calls it in "The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family," a chronicle of how dramatically gender assumptions have changed.) The kids who attend this year's incarnation of TYCTWD (Take Your Child To Work Day) will find themselves in workplaces where, nationwide, 50 percent of the jobs are held by women, and 40 percent of those women earn more than their spouses. Women are doing better in universities and graduate schools than men. Girls have steadily closed the math and science gap with boys. And the worries of the founders that girls will assume that they can only grow up to be nurses, while only boys can grow up to be doctors? With 57 percent of today's pediatricians (along with 70 percent of pediatric residents) being women, odds are that a male doctor is the exception in your child's world.

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