Maybe. Or, perhaps, it's just that the women, some of whom are highly perceptive, correctly see who gets the gold stars and who is expected to be good and do what they're told and wait. After a while, you know, they get tired, and they give up.
Erwin Griswold was the Dean of Harvard Law School (my alma mater) when women were first admitted: in 1950. During my 3L year, Dean Griswold returned to be feted as a hero of women's rights. I was a 3L and editor-in-chief of one of the law reviews. That made me a "woman leader" on campus and so, I was invited to meet with him.
Dean Griswold was very proud of himself on this august occasion. He told us selected few "women leaders" how, as a result of WWII and the important work that women did filling in for men who were fighting on the front, society widely perceived that women's roles had changed. As Dean Griswold explained, he precociously understood that, at long last, the time had come for Ivy League women lawyers (never mind that Yale had accepted women since 1919).
Given that realization "during the war," I asked why it had taken until 1950 for the first women to be admitted. A softball! Dean Griswold knew the answer to that one. Naturally, they couldn't admit women right away in 1945. That would have been terribly unfair to our boys, to have to give up their slots to women! They had had to wait three, four, even five years for this chance. (How many decades had the women been waiting?) So, Dean Griswold did the right thing, the fair thing, and made the decision to defer women until 1950 so that even more boys could go to law school. He was very self-righteous about that, and couldn't see any irony at all.
Things like that used to shock me. But I've grown up a lot since then. And yet, are there colleagues of mine who, perhaps, still cannot see the irony?
We have come far. And yet, there are still miles to go before we sleep.
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