Women continue fight to break molds

I was scrolling TikTok last week, browsing trending videos, when a video came across my feed that made me stop.

The caption said, "POV [point of view]: your [sic] the only girl in a tech class." The video was in selfie mode, showing just part of the user who uploaded the video's face looking around the room. You could hear a conversation among the male students making appalling "jokes" about sexual assault and consent. Her eyes looked scared. I was shocked.

At the end of the video, one student remarked that they're "going to hell" for making and laughing at the remarks. Another student replied: "We're already there."

What was also mind-boggling was the comments section of the video, which has since been removed: dozens, if not hundreds, of women commenting that they, too, have experienced incidents like this and regret going into their male-dominated career fields.

One user commented she's in her second year of engineering and regrets it. Another user said she studied computer science and people would threaten to follow her to her car. "My computer science class was this exact same way," said a user. "The other woman dropped after 2 weeks and I never stayed in the room during breaks/before/after class because of convos like this," another commenter said.

Comments flooded in from women: "Computer science engineer here. I graduated 15 years ago and still think about many interactions/convos between men in my classes." "Me too, I was in a welding program and it got out of hand and I can handle a lot." "Yep, I can't wait until I graduate. I considered leaving the field on many occasions bc [because] of this s--t." "This is EXACTLY why I dropped my engineering degree."

"WHY IS THIS SO COMMON??" another commenter asked.

It's 2021, four years after #MeToo became a viral hashtag and movement. Why is this so common? Why do women still experience such harassment, sexism and double standards, not only in the workplace but everywhere?

In the 2020 documentary about Taylor Swift, Miss Americana, cameras follow the award-winning singer-songwriter as she writes and records her seventh studio album, Lover. One part shows the behind-the-scenes process for writing one single titled "The Man."

"You are kind of doing a constant strategy in your head as to how not to be shamed for something on any given day. But then you get accused of being calculated for having a strategy," Swift says during the songwriting session. "It's just a lose-lose situation," replies songwriter and producer Joel Little.

The song explores double standards held against women. The animated lyric video features women in the workplace walking up Penrose stairs, also known as the impossible staircase, symbolizing the struggle to get ahead or reach the top.

"They'd say I hustled/ Put in the work/ They wouldn't shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve/ What I was wearing/ If I was rude/ Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves," she sings.

"I'm so sick of running as fast as I can/ Wondering if I'd get there quicker/ If I was a man."

The music video shows Swift dressed up as a man in various settings to satirically highlight the inequality between men and women in society — in the workplace as a boss à la The Wolf of Wall Street, manspreading on a subway train, on the tennis court throwing a tantrum. The ending has Taylor Swift portraying a director — the music video is actually Swift's first solo directorial debut — telling her male alter ego to be "sexier" and "more likable this time," something female public figures hear endlessly.

Swift is no stranger to being held under a microscope and constantly plagued by double standards.

During a 2014 Australian interview, Swift was asked how she feels when people say she just writes about boyfriends. Swift, who has been in the spotlight since age 16, said she writes about her life as she sees it and feels it.

"You're going to have people who are going to see the depth from which you approached a song. … And then you're going to have people who are going to say, 'Oh, you know, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends.' And I think frankly that's a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says that about Bruno Mars," Swift replied. "They're all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life, and no one raises a red flag there."

Plastics News has been highlighting women in the industry with its Women Breaking the Mold special report since 2015. We've profiled presidents and plant managers to founders and engineers — all with unique experiences and stories to tell.

Like PN Assistant Managing Editor Rhoda Miel said, "Too often we're still seen as an exception, rather than a regular part of the workforce at every level." Countless nominees have shared how they were often the only or one of few women at their workplace.

Theresa Healy, business director of Reedy International, said she remembers going to conferences and feeling intimidated.

Healy shared a story about going to a customer trial and the engineer she was meeting looked down at her and said, "When is your technical guy going to show up so we can get started?" She replied, "Sir, that technical 'guy' is me."

"It wasn't until I worked with him on the machine, explained my experience and background in foam, and showed him how our products worked, that he apologized to me for assuming I wasn't technical enough," she said.

Barbara Walker, senior director of global IT operations, security, privacy for Avient Corp., said that when she started studying chemistry, she was in a class of roughly 250 students, "mostly male, just a [few] females."

"When I graduated with my Ph.D. seven pretty tough years later, there were only three who graduated that day from our class, all women, and I was one of them," Walker said.

Women are significantly outnumbered at the managerial levels. According to a report by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.org, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women are promoted. Broken down even further, that number is only 71 for Latinas and 58 for Black women. At the beginning of 2020, women held 38 percent of manager positions while men held 62 percent.

In the consumer packaged goods industry, 30 percent of C-suite positions are women. In engineering and industrial manufacturing, according to the McKinsey and LeanIn report, just 16 percent of C-suite roles are women.

And with the coronavirus pandemic, even fewer women are working. This is the first time the study found women were leaving the workforce at higher rates than men. (Previous years of the study found men and women left their companies at similar rates.)

NPR reported that more than 2 million women left the workforce in 2020. Of the workers who left the workforce in September 2020, 865,000, or 80 percent, were women, including 324,000 Latinas and 58,000 Black women, according to the National Women's Law Center and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Four times more women than men dropped out of the labor force that month alone.

Women are faced with the challenges of child care — with so many children having virtual classrooms the past year — housework and burnout, in addition to the job losses in female-dominated industries like hospitality.

Some strides are being made for women in the workforce, however. The Fortune 500 broke three records in 2021 for its annual list that ranks the largest corporations in the U.S. First, the number of women running businesses that appear on the Fortune 500 hit a record-breaking 41 names. While that has come a long way since the three women who appeared on the list 10 years ago, there's still a lot of progress to be made to lift that 8.2 percent.

Second, this is the first time two Black women are named, Roz Brewer of Walgreens Boots Alliance and Thasunda Brown Duckett of TIAA. Third, the highest-ranking business run by a female CEO is Karen Lynch of CVS Health at No. 4.

This issue of PN celebrates the women who are rule-breakers — and glass ceiling-breakers. We had a record number of entries and nominations for our special report this year. We profiled 50 women who have already made significant contributions, who continue to make a difference in the years to come and who have changed the industry for those that follow.

Because we could not fit all the achievements in these pages, there is more to see online, where we have added some questions and answers with this year's go-getters.

And don't forget to sign up for the 2021 Women Breaking the Mold Networking Forum, held Nov. 11-12 in Austin, Texas. The event includes speakers, workshops and networking for young professionals to industry veterans to help grow the plastics industry.

Jordan Vitick is the special projects editor for Plastics News.