Eight years ago, on a Qatar flight to Bangkok, I watched the first few episodes of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. I absolutely loved it: it was funny, set in New York (one of my favourite cities), and the main character wore the most beautiful clothes. Back home, I wanted to finish the series, but I couldn’t find it on any streaming service. A few months ago, after we subscribed to Prime, there it was – a full five fabulous seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel for me to watch. When I get home from work before my husband, I sneak a few minutes of an episode until he arrives – my guilty pleasure! Amy Sherman-Palladino, who wrote series such as The Marvellous Mrs Maisel and Gilmore Girls, is known for her rapid-fire dialogue and strong female characters. In the worlds of characters like Miriam (Midge) Maisel and Lorelai Gilmore, women can say and do what they want. It’s not that they don’t face hardships, but the message of these stories is that if you try hard enough, you will eventually succeed. The Marvellous Mrs Maisel tells the story of Midge Maisel, a Jewish woman and aspiring comic living in New York City in the 1950s. She performs stand-up comedy wherever she is allowed, trying to carve out her place as a female comic in a male-dominated arena. For me, the punchline of each episode is when Midge looks at her manager, Suzie Myerson, before she goes on stage, and Suzie sends her into the limelight with a “Tits Up!” I’m not sure if Amy Sherman-Palladino intended this line to be a pun, but I interpreted it as one. Ostensibly, Midge would then take a deep breath, straighten her back, and thrust her chest out as she walked onto the stage; however, given the expression on Suzie’s face, the line had more to do with Midge’s struggling career as a comic. This punchline might not be appropriate in a professional context and is slightly vulgar. Still, it resonated with me because it so aptly describes how some professional women in male-dominated fields feel about their careers. There are days when I feel my career as a female cardiac surgeon can be compared to something that rolled over and died.
I wish brilliant women had the confidence of mediocre men – Marilyn Monroe
There is a riddle that goes like this: a father is taking his son to a job interview. The son is applying for a position at a large stockbrokerage in the city. As they arrive at the company’s car park, the son’s phone rings. He looks at his father, who says, “Go ahead, answer it.” The caller is the trading company’s CEO, who says, “Good luck, son, you’ve got this.” The son ends the call and looks at his father again, who is still beside him in the car. How is this possible?
The answer to the riddle is that the call came from the son’s mother. The company’s CEO is a woman.
This riddle is used in a Mindspace ad campaign that offers an eye-opening look at the unconscious biases that shape how we see women, leadership, and the workplace. During the campaign, people were asked, “Can you solve this riddle?” and their answers were filmed. Some of the answers participants gave were “maybe he has two fathers”, “maybe his name is Son”, “maybe it’s his grandfather”, and “maybe he made a recording”. When told the answer, the participants were astonished by how much bias they still had to think that the CEO must be a man. Some were embarrassed, realising they were not as progressive as they had thought. The one male participant said that he never thought of himself as sexist, yet he now realised that there are subconscious biases in everyone’s mind. Another male participant reflected on his answer and said: “Why can’t women also be CEOs or doctors, right?” Astonishingly, one of the female participants is a CEO herself, yet she also thought that the CEO in the riddle must be a man.
You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone – Françoise Gilot
Today, women are allowed to do the same jobs as men – they can be surgeons, pilots, policewomen, CEOs and comics. Yet even though they can hold the same qualifications as men, they still do not receive the same opportunities or support as their male counterparts. Mary Ann Sieghart explains in a TED talk that it all boils down to how we perceive, react to, and interact with women. Studies show that 70% of men will rate a man more highly than a woman for achieving exactly the same goals. Men are still perceived as the natural holders of certain jobs, and appointing women to these positions is seen as risky. South Africa has sought to rectify this inequality by implementing the Employment Equity Act in 1998, which requires the corporate sector to ensure women are represented at all occupational levels, especially managerial ones, and addresses unfair discrimination in the workplace. However, it is not equality if a woman is employed in a man’s job and does not receive the same respect and opportunities that a man would in the same position. It seems to me that equal employment is just that – a woman is employed in a post historically reserved for a man, but that is where the obligation of equality stops. There is very little governance over what happens to a woman’s career after her employment. I recently came across an information video on YouTube from a cardiothoracic surgery department boasting about the number of female cardiothoracic surgeons training in their unit, and the first thought that crossed my mind was not “good on you” but rather “what price will these women pay?” It doesn’t help to train and appoint a woman but not give her the opportunities to flourish in her career, and I wondered whether these women are aware of the difficulties awaiting them in the male-dominated field of cardiothoracic surgery.
“I am a woman” – because a man never begins by positioning himself as an individual of a certain sex, that being taken for granted – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Growing up, my dad told me I could be anything I wanted to be. And so I did. I became a cardiothoracic surgeon. It was the 2010s, and society had moved towards accepting women in fields dominated by men. What neither my dad nor I realised was that holding a qualification in a male-dominated field and having a successful career were two very different things. I never knew I would be sitting in a meeting next to a cardiologist, listening to him congratulate my male trainee on the life-saving surgery I had performed the previous day, even though he knew it was me who had operated on the patient. I never grasped that I would not be given the same respect, support and benefit of the doubt as male surgeons. I sometimes wish someone had told me that it’s not possible just to be what you want to be. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if someone had lowered my expectations and shown me which career paths are more acceptable for a woman. While watching The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, I longed for a time like the 1950s, when women knew their place.
Unfortunately, I’ve realised that women across the ages have always wanted more. The first wave of feminism began in the mid-1800s, as suffragettes campaigned for women’s right to vote. They also addressed women’s property rights, the right to education and marital laws. The second wave of feminism spanned the 1960s to the 1980s and focused on a wider range of issues, including workplace discrimination, reproductive rights and family roles. Betty Friedan’s research for her book The Feminine Mystique drew on interviews with 1950s housewives who described a nameless dissatisfaction with lives that looked ideal on paper. In the 1950s, the era in which The Marvellous Mrs Maisel is set, women’s roles in society were shaped by a strong postwar emphasis on domesticity, reinforced by advertising on television and in magazines. During the 1940s, women had to do men’s work while men went to war, and in the 1950s some resented being pushed back into domestic roles. The most famous concept in The Feminine Mystique is what Friedan called “the problem that has no name” – a deep, unspoken malaise she found among women who had everything the culture told them they should want (a husband, children, a nice home) but still felt empty, restless or unfulfilled. Friedan argued that this wasn’t personal failure but a symptom of a life that suppresses women’s intellectual and creative potential.
If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair – Shirley Chisholm
In the second-to-last episode of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, Midge’s dad is having dinner with friends and muses that “everything feels upside down”. His friends try to lift his mood by agreeing it’s because everything is changing at a rapid pace and they were born in a different century, after all. But Abe Wiseman can’t be cheered up. Taking a swig of his wine, he says that his dilemma is that he fears the world is as it always was – he just didn’t see it, as many men didn’t. He explains to his friends around the table that everything he thought about the roles of men and women is completely wrong. His daughter, instead of collapsing after her divorce (which was a big deal in the 1950s, especially for a woman without a job), emerged stronger, a new person, or so he thought; however, he wonders if that was who she was all along. He says that he never really took her seriously – he gave his son opportunities and nurtured his interests, but he never did that with his daughter Midge. Still, she managed to carve out a career for herself on her own. He muses into his glass, “Where did this strength and fearlessness come from? A strength that I never had?” The scene ends with his friends looking at him, mouths agape, as he asks himself, “I wonder what she could have become if I hadn’t ignored who she really is?”
Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Women’s equality is not as equal as it appears. Even though women can now occupy the same roles as men, they are still undermined by their male peers and by societal norms. It’s backhanded equality. It reminds me of Detective Gracie Hart, played by Sandra Bullock, in the movie Miss Congeniality, who was given a pretty hairstyle and had her bikini line waxed to participate in a beauty pageant as part of an undercover operation. After the case was solved and the criminals were apprehended, Detective Gracie Hart was promoted to handle media relations. She now had to attend career days at preschools because she had been made the face of the LAPD. That’s where the movie ended, and Detective Gracie Hart’s career went the proverbial “tits up”. I wonder if the screenwriters were men? Did they think for one moment about the message this ending sends?
Each time a woman stands up for herself, without necessarily knowing it or claiming it, she stands up for all women – Maya Angelou
I realise we need trailblazers to pave the way for those who come after them, but these women pay a price. No woman wants to be the face of feminism after years of training and sacrifice when appointed in a position that naturally belongs to a man. Looking back on a career that could have been so much more, these women might feel like collateral damage in the pursuit of women’s equality. I fear that Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” has not been eradicated. On paper, these women are equal to men and have equal employment opportunities, yet their careers are not necessarily flourishing. Many professional women are still being intellectually suppressed, and I, for one, feel at times empty, restless and unfulfilled, as Friedan describes. I don’t always feel like a trailblazer claiming my seat at the men’s table, reminding them that women can do what they do; there are times when I wish I had a clearer sense of what is possible for a woman in a male-dominated field.
Today, feminist campaigns such as #MeToo and #TimesUp focus heavily on sexual violence, workplace harassment, and reproductive rights. While I’ve had my fair share of inappropriate behaviour from male colleagues, I want to propose a movement for fair opportunity in the workplace. Women should not be reduced to quotas reflecting the implementation of the women’s empowerment law or be the face of feminism showing how progressive a workplace has become; they should be given real opportunities. #trueequality. Women deserve the same respect and the same opportunities as their male colleagues. They also want thriving careers. Unfortunately, subtle workplace discrimination and subconscious bias are very hard to address and cannot be forced. Women will have to wait patiently for the trailblazers to hopefully crack through the ingrained gender bias in male-dominated fields. In the meantime, all I can say is “Tits up, Ladies!” (pun intended).
