I know workplace sexism is not over, but I also know that most millennial women I know have had to slog through less of it than previous generations. As a GenXer I am part of the last wave of women to come into their careers in the twentieth century. We were still dealing with the hangover of the influx of women into the workplace that started in the 1960s. Men were still not fully on board with it, even when they thought they were.

The legacy of Mad Men

Mad Men, of course, is fictional. I think a lot of millennials who watched it probably did so with the same kind of awe as I did Game of Thrones. Dragons! Incest! Unexpected assassinations! How provocative. But even in medieval times, this would have been largely fantastical.

Mad Men is not fantastical. While the specifics are imagined by the excellent writers of the show, it pretty accurately captures the reality for women in the workplace in the 1960s. The constant sexual advances, the devaluing of their work, the sidelining and even blatant relegation to “women’s work.”

Maybe the most alarming part of watching this portrayal of the decade before I was born is the degree to which the female characters don’t really seem to mind the constant, erosive devaluation and objectification.

As a young feminist, it was easy to assume that women of the 1950s and 60s were all in the fight for more agency, but the fact is that many of them didn’t want it. Women had become so adapted to being infantilized and controlled by men, the idea of autonomy was scary for some.

But in the 1990s we did want autonomy. In fact, we had been promised autonomy. We were told from day one that girls could do anything boys could do, only better. We listened to Free To Be You And Me and believed that we already lived in that world, where boys could play with dolls and girls could grow up to be presidents or firemen.

The Mary Tyler Moore show poked fun at workplace sexism to the point that we could believe that Ed Asner represented something oldfangled and laughable. The truth is, most workplaces were still hostile to women, and they would continue to be that way for decades.

Girls are perky

In one of my early retail jobs I had a six-month review with the store manager, which would lead to a pay raise from $6.25 to $6.50 per hour. I knew I was doing a good job. I calmly dealt with customer service issues. I was efficient on the register and went above and beyond to solve problems.

Indeed, I got a good review and a quarter raise, with one caveat: The manager wanted me to be more “perky” when greeting customers. What?

I smiled and said, “sure thing!” in as perky a fashion as I could muster. Inside, I was seething. This was the first time I had experienced this kind of sexist “feedback,” but it wouldn’t be the last.

I didn’t find a way to be more perky, but I did find a new job, where I thought women could be creative and cool, but we were still objectified and sexualized by the creative and cool men. One of the founders knocked up the summer intern.

Maybe my lack of perk had been cultivated in my early retail jobs, where the mere hint of friendliness toward male customers or coworkers could be taken as a sexual invitation. It was stressful and dull being hit on by all the entitled boys and men who thought they had some right to the body of a young woman, simply because she had the nerve to be young and in public. I learned to reserve my smiles, to avoid eye contact.

The creative geniuses

Once upon a time, I was hired by a pair of friends who had a thriving digital agency in the late 20th century and fancied themselves to be creative geniuses. One was the writer, the other was the motion graphics and video director. They were both men who were some combination of scrappy, talented, and privileged.

I was hired to do the books and admin work, but it soon became clear that I had some talent as a copywriter. I was smart and creative, and with the right opportunities, I could have become another self-proclaimed creative genius. But a few things were not working in my favor.

Timing was not on my side. The Dotcom bubble burst and soon our agency closed, creative geniuses scattered to the winds of change. One of the creative geniuses started his own thing, out of his own house, and I started coming over once a week to do his bookkeeping.

As his business picked up, he offered me a full time position, with a strong caveat: I would not be doing any creative work. He had another creative genius he partnered with on the copywriting, and my talents were not needed, he made perfectly clear.

I would become a producer, he told me. He would get one of our freelance video producers to show me how she did her job. Because in his world, that’s what women did: the project management, the admin work, the budgets, the food. Women were not the creative geniuses.

I worked with and for this creative genius for eight years, all told. We became friends. I gained responsibility and took the lead on lower stakes projects. I even got the odd creative task. But I always knew where I stood. Somewhere near the bottom of the totem pole.

If I had been encouraged at all to use my creative talents in that business, I may have built a portfolio of client work that I could use to catapult me into a career. I could have added more value to the agency and eventually brought in more work. I could have been a valuable asset.

Instead, I was let go at the verge of an economic crisis, and my resume put me into a certain category. I was a producer—a “production manager,” to be more vague. I handled the spreadsheets and project management tools. I did the women’s work, and that’s the work I continued to do at the next agency that hired me.

In a way, I liked it. I was competent and respected by the creative geniuses who made the beautiful designs and gave the Don Draper speeches to win over clients. I had my own part to play in the song and dance: I was the one who would keep the creative geniuses on track and the budgets in check.

I didn’t fully grasp that I had more to offer, so I never offered it. I was grateful to be employed during the tenuous economy of the 2008 financial crisis. But in 2009, the creative geniuses could no longer afford someone like me. I was the first to go, while the creatives stayed on for a few more months.

Power and money

During the years that I worked for a petulant billionaire at a couple of mobile app startups, I realized how power dynamics can keep women in supportive roles. All things revolved around the whims and opinions of the billionaire. He had come up in a world where men were heroes of intellect and innovation, and women were in supporting roles.

My first boss in my petulant billionaire years was, in fact, a woman. She was my 3rd female manager at my 7th job. Reporting to women had always felt less fraught to me. For one thing, they never asked me to be perky, or to smile more. So it was a relief, but a couple of months later she had had enough of the petulant billionaire and accepted a job at a big tech company.

I was left reporting to a sort of geeky (male) Stanford grad who put a lot of value on intellect. We got along, and he never got in the way of whatever creativity I could bring to my role. I was a content curator, writing headlines and choosing images to accompany trending news topics in our app. It was a low stakes kind of creativity because the company was so tech-focused.

The problem with a petulant billionaire is that he may be fickle with his billions. The startup failed to release a groundbreaking app, and we also failed to find a big tech company to acquire us, so the startup was shuttered. A handful of employees, including myself, became employees of a different startup funded by the same billionaire.

The CEO of the second startup was the kind of guy who became infatuated with smart women. This dynamic ended up making my work life pretty emotionally complex over the next two years. When I asked him if we could change my job title from “data curator” to “content strategist,” he just shrugged and said, “whatever you want.” Sure, I was allowed to make up my own role, but was that role valued?

By now I had had enough jobs that I could see both my own limitations and the limitations of a culture that still favored men. I was in the tech space in the 2010s and all of the CEOs and VCs were dudes. Mostly dudes younger than me, as I pushed past forty.

Becoming myself in middle age

When the second startup shuttered I thought perhaps it was time to strike out on my own. I had never had much say in the course of my own career in the jobs I had collected over twenty years. Like most women, I only applied for jobs I was 100% qualified to do, and without hard skills those roles tended to be supportive generalist roles. Women’s work by many different names.

I tried consulting for awhile, but I found that hustling for business was even more off-putting than job hunting, so I eventually took a content strategy job at a library system.

Working in the public sector was much more stressful than I had expected. There were the layers of bureaucracy, the weird union labor battles, the public records requests, PR scandals, and a fair few internet trolls. I kind of hated my job for the first time in my life, which is ironic because I loved libraries and had assumed this would be a low stress environment.

Still, the library was a space where I could step into my creative genius role. I conceived ad campaigns and website redesign strategies. I did marketing and user research, and I was respected by my peers. The man who hired me left, and I was soon reporting to a saucy British woman who brought humor and fierce intellect to our team.

We were encouraged to work on our own professional development, and I got to go to several interesting conferences where I began to feel that I was filling my own shoes as a senior level professional, rather than a supporting role in someone else’s genius play.

I am a creative genius

Maybe not. But I’ve got as much capacity for creative genius as any of the men I have worked for who think of themselves that way. But I am a woman who came of age in the 20th century, when women were not really allowed to be creative geniuses in most workplaces.

Today, I work with mostly millennials who have experienced the workplace somewhat differently. The behaviors that were considered just part of the deal in the early nineties are now reasons to call HR. Having worked in pretty progressive organizations for nearly a decade, it is now hard for me to imagine a work environment where women are not valued and promoted as much as men.

I realize that are still issues with pay inequity and sexism is not going away, but it is so much better now. I haven’t had a single request from a manager to be more perky in this century. My current manager respects my creativity and intellect and allows me to pursue my own ideas and implement strategies that I thought up without the help of any men.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the creative geniuses in my life. They demonstrated the attitudes that allow a person to be seen as the creative genius in the room. They also lit a small fire of resentment in me, that made me want to prove that I am worthy of being the one with the ideas.