How much has she been drinking?

A couple of days ago I was trying to write something about women in the workplace and how we've come so far - and yet haven't. My husband's aunt faced a similar work situation 32 years ago: she'd been working happily part time, a new manager came in, decided part-time didn't work and pushed her out of her job. Deja vu! At any rate, what I was writing wasn't coming together. It remains in fragments.

This evening comes word that the wife of a fairly notorious Supreme Court Justice has contacted a woman who testified at that Justice's confirmation - and asked her for an apology. (Read the comments - some are really funny in that sick humor sort of way. And all the ones that note the grammatical error.)

When I saw the news come up on my screen, I told my husband about it and his first response was, "How much has she (the wife) been drinking?" I thought that summed it up pretty well. But there are, obviously, deeper issues.

This wife has been in the news recently anyway. She has become active in some lobbying efforts and questions have been raised about the ethics of her activities. The recipient of the call has led a mostly quiet life since those confirmation hearings years ago. She's now a law professor.

The news did get me thinking about that whole event. The confirmation hearing, the testimony, the controversy - and the arguments I had over it with my dad.

It really doesn't matter to me where you come down on that whole issue. I will tell you now that I believed the professor. Surprise, surprise, my father believed the judge.

I mostly think that my father's belief had to do with his stubborn loyalty to the Republican party - though that wavered just slightly in following years when he realized that his beloved GOP wouldn't support the research that might slow his Parkinson's disease (typical scenario, yes, of believing in something until it actually affects you personally) - and his inherent optimism and belief that people are good and will always do the right thing. The later was both an endearing and infuriating quality. You'd think his years on the bench and what he saw during that tenure would have changed that, but no.

At any rate, we argued over this. I remember one conversation in particular. He was sure that in several of the testified incidents that the good judge was just joking, and the young woman (now professor) was just too sensitive and misunderstood. No harm done!

Well. At the time of these confirmation hearings, sexual harassment in the workplace was pretty well entrenched. I was "checked out," as it were, on numerous job interviews, and regularly at this one job. I was adept at dressing work-appropriate but not slimey-VP-attractive for that job. My college classmates regularly went to interviews where young male associates of whatever firm "interviewed" them, but rarely seriously considered them. Then they received letters saying things like, "Successful applicants to Goldman Sachs will be able to type 80 words per minute..." I'm not joking.

Just because it was entrenched - and, yes, likely improving over what it had been - doesn't mean it was right. It was certain of that, and told my father so. It's not about joking, I told him, but about feeling like an sexual object when I was supposedly hired for my mind. I then informed him of the ways in which I had been sexually harassed in the workplace and discriminated against because of my gender. I offered several specific examples from my then short work experience. I offered that every woman I knew had been harassed in some way, including his other daughter, his ex-wife, his girlfriends, and so on (this was before the step-bitch arrived on the scene). I didn't need to know the details, I just knew they had been. We all had been.

I think he was pretty shocked by what I told him. It's different when it's your daughter being treated in that way. I think it opened his mind a little to what some of the bigger issues were for women watching those confirmation hearings, though it did not change his view that the judge should be confirmed (which he was). It was another one of those topics about which we never spoke again.

But it ties back, in some ways, to what I was trying to write about a couple days ago. How we've come so far in the work force - yet, not. Two women get pushed out of jobs in very similar scenarios 32 years apart. Sexual harassment and discrimination still happens at an alarming rate. I'd even say it's on the rise right now as employers take advantage of anxious workers in a down economy. Women - including moms like me - still have to do battle to stay employed. We are paid less, diminished, and all that...and yet some of the most amazing, smartest, innovative, hardest working people I know are women and moms. The business world is losing out on so much of that. Why? What are they afraid of?

And now, in this climate Ginny Thomas wants Anita Hill to apologize.

No.