I just have to blog about this. I was on the launch team for the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day in 1993. It was a marketing concept, actually, to promote the Ms. Foundation for Women, which many people were confusing with Ms. Magazine. Ms. Foundation had a very savvy director in those days who understood the power of visual, who admitted that "Thelma and Louise did more for the women's movement than all the research reports we've put out in the past 20 years."
TODTWD (as we called it in beta form) was meant to change the way women were viewed in this country by providing a powerful visual: females in places where they were rarely seen, in boardrooms, CEO offices, the front page of the New York Times (where, bogglingly, girls had never appeared), even the Oval Office. The day wasn't designed to "leave boys out." In fact, we designed school curriculums for K-12 boys which addressed the value of "homework": childcare, housekeeping, etc, work that is usually associated with women.
The next year boys (and parents of boys) claimed it was sexist to let girls get the fun jobs, while boys did the drek. So, now we have Take Our Children to work day. The purpose of which is...to give teachers a day off?
