The Perils of Possible Buns in Potential Ovens

Back in the late ‘80s when I was in my mid 20s (OMG, have I really been in this business that long!) , I interviewed for an estimating position at a well established local commercial printer with a good reputation. I was excited at the opportunity. My interviewer was a good ole boy and about 25-30 minutes into the interview, he says that I'm well qualified for the job but he is hesitant to hire me because "every woman I put in that chair gets knocked up." I jumped up and asked if I might have a different chair, just in case it was contagious. I made a joke out of it, but I couldn't wait for that interview to be over. What a jerk he was!

C.R.’s above anecdote is from a discussion within the Linked In group Mary Beth Smith's, Girls Who Print.

 The topic was What's the weirdest work-related moment you've ever experienced as a woman in the printing industry? The baby maker bit came up frequently.

Another woman spoke of a male interviewer who rejected her application with this, ‘he felt like I wasn't serious about my career, and that my husband probably made a lot of money so I was just looking to fill some time.’

A woman who’s now Director of Development at a large university spoke of her first post college interview -- 'the interviewer asked if I wanted to have children because he didn't want to invest in someone who was only going to quit after a few years.' She replied that it none of his business and left the interview.'

A teen in trade school, learning and preparing for the print universe had this experience -- an instructor stopped his presentation to say. 'You girls are just here to find a husband you can use as a meal ticket!'

An inkjet chemist spoke of a vendor, visiting her site who remarked, 'I don't believe that women should work in a lab. There are harmful chemicals and they are the ones that bear our children.'

Right, gotcha. Men are immune from the harmful chemicals in our environment so their biological contribution to a child will always be pure. Do I have that about right?

Maybe this this sort of thing happens in all industries. Printing doesn’t have the corner on thoughtless, crass, behavior.

My experience with the I’m-not-hiring-you -- you’re-just-a-sprog-bomb-waiting-to-go-off attitude came before I entered the print mines.

It was 1981 and my interview was in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Lab at Harvard. The gig -- lab assistant. Now, I totally understood this would involve, primarily, low level grunt work tasks -- I was fine with that. Seemed to me that data entry, record keeping, washing and sterilizing test tubes were très reasonable duties to perform while learning, growing, getting to be in a cool science environment all while earning the rent cheddar. I’d spent a lot of my last three semesters of college in the biology labs. What was an art major doing there? Drawing the cadavers and making watercolors of all the wild things visible only through a microscope. Fabulous stuff!

The professor who oversaw the lab took me into his wonderfully book strewn office for our chat. So far so cool. Right from the start though he was trying to talk me out of wanting the job -- he stressed all the hard, distressing and totally un-girly labor. After ever so much flapdoodling, came this last I’m-only-interviewing-you-for-show statement:

‘You’ll have to lift and carry very heavy trays of test tubes every day.’

‘How heavy? Weight lifting’s my thing and I’m currently benching 135 pounds (I was too) -- will the trays be heavier than that?’

 I knew the job wasn’t mine and there was nothing left to lose so I went on:

‘I’m smart, strong, upbeat and a hard worker but you've been dismissive from the very beginning of the interview. Why is that?’

‘I want to hire a young man for the job -- someone who will stay, learn, grow and have a career.’

 Crotchety Dickwad to human translation? ‘You’re just gonna get hitched in another year or so and start cranking out brats. We don’t hire Uterus Americans here.’

Boyhowdy I was stunned down to my silver toenail polish. I stopped at the first pay phone (remember pay phones?) and called the Employment Office who’d set up this debacle of an interview. I told the nice woman on the other end of the line exactly what happened. She was supportive and said she’d file a report or something. I knew nothing would happen though. At most the prof would get a memo saying ‘try to be more subtle in your dickishness next time.’

And then, a few weeks later, I got my first job in the Wonderful World of Print Technology. I became a plate maker at Gnomon Press. Yea me!