During WWII, female employment jumped from 27% to 37%. These women were paid 55% less than their male counterparts. With America's WWII factories, civilian population, and electrical supply lines under no risk of aerial bombardment, the US tapped the female labor pool so as to ramp up military-industrial production. At the same time, European countries were busy bombing and sabotaging each other’s infrastructure and industrial capacity. Some things never change. The US emerged as the victorious superpower capable of projecting kinetic force anywhere on the planet.

Women’s entry into the workforce naturally spurred an interest in higher-paid professions. However, the female path to higher education was a bumpy ride. Since college tuition was expensive, many families in the 1950s only sent the boys to college. Women who attended college were often offered two options; nursing or teaching. Upon graduation, women received a lower salary than men for the same work, the argument being that men were supporting a family, but women would get pregnant and quit. "The pill" and declining fertility rates helped women pursue their goals of equal pay and legal protections.  Fast-forward to the Women's Movement of the 70's and 80's which favored women in career roles. Workplace female figures such as Mary Tyler Moore appeared routinely on TV and in movies. This encouraged even more women to enter into the educated workforce, where they demanded equal treatment. The net effect was a gradual acceptance of women in the workplace as co-equal to men (Traditional roles still play an equally strong and often fulfilling role in many women's lives). As a result, college-educated women in American society have achieved remarkable progress in creating a path into the once-hostile workplace, similar to the achievements of minorities and gays. Nonetheless, the gender-based pay gap still persists. As well institutional racism and sexism are still present, but they are no longer omnipresent and unchallengeable. Troubling and destabilizing class, gender, and race-based wealth inequalities are widening.

My medical class of 1982 was 45% female. OR signage back then indicated Doctors' Changing Room and Nurses' Changing Room. It didn't seem that big a deal to me at the time; it took decades for me to understand the institutionalized nature of sexism. It was against this background that I first attended an ASOPRS meeting in the late 1980’s. Though women were common in medical school, it was rare to see women in Presidency or upper leadership positions, but I remember many notable and esteemed exceptions such as Barbara Beatty and Eva Hewes of Hewes flap fame, charter member Virginia Lubkin, and of course, Bernice Brown. My interaction with Dr. Bernice Brown concerned my OPRS journal manuscript entitled "Does Decompression Diminish Dysthyroid Discomfort?" I was jazzed that every word in the title began with the letter "D."