Career Barriers Quotes

There's also, I think more so in the music business and especially for women, this ceiling that people put on you if you have children or a family and decide to spend time with them.

I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.

The biggest obstacle I've had to overcome is being a woman in a man's world.

Our goal in the '70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women, policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes. And the stereotypical view of people of a world divided between home and child caring women and men as breadwinners, men representing the family outside the home.

There is a ceiling to it and there's a stigma. Billy Crystal as brilliant as he is, he's never going to be thought of as a contemporary like Alan Arkin.

This is still a man's profession, with a lot of men who intellectually and emotionally have not accepted that the military could be women's work.

I became conscious in later life that I had been given an education that enabled me to do all kinds of jobs, but often, jobs weren't open to me.

There aren't more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren't more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers.

In those same 10 years, women are getting more and more of the graduate degrees, more and more of the undergraduate degrees, and it's translating into more women in entry-level jobs, even more women in lower-level management. But there's absolutely been no progress at the top. You can't explain away 10 years. Ten years of no progress is no progress.

When I first left university, I thought about going into the private sector. But I discovered when I went to interview that I could only have a career in the back office, or doing HR. The attitude was, 'My dear lady, you cannot possibly think about going on the board.'

When I grew up I assembled my role models à la cart. I wanted to be an astrophysicist. If I tried to find a role model who grew up in the Bronx with my skin color who was an astrophysicist, I would never have become an astrophysicist.

I speak to black and ethnic coaches who ring me, or write to me, for some advice. There is a frustration from a lot of young, very able, black coaches to find that pathway that will get them into full-time positions.

In 1967, my mother - then Francie Weinman - graduated from Northwestern University with a degree from the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. But because she is a woman, the only television news job she could get in her hometown of Chicago was as a secretary at a network affiliate.