One of the strange things that happen when you are getting older is that they change the rules while you are playing the game.

One of the things that happened while I was not looking is that the playing field for women in male-dominated roles does seem to have improved a bit.

If this has happened any in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, then we have not yet heard anything about it.  A lot of women are behaving as Oprah eloquently reported in what I consider one of the great feminist speeches of all time; the one she made at the Golden Globes.

Maybe Hollywood is a little different from the mainstream.  I figured early on I would never get anywhere by my looks.

If I had any doubt, my own mother of blessed memory had told me very early on that the only way a woman like me was going to get anywhere was by doing really well in school.

But I suspect the sexually degrading way men treat women is prevalent in other industries.

Even I had a brush with this sort of thing.

I really want to use the past tense now, when I talk about that sort of thing.

I really believe what Charles Darwin wrote about in the Descent of Man.

The human race can improve, morally and ethically.  By reinforcing and publically acknowledging higher standards of human ethics and behavior.  What I did not expect is that including women and different races and the general idea of “diversity” could be self-reinforcing.

Not all the work is done, by any means.  But it makes sense that as the world “shrinks” and increasing numbers of companies go global, business will be more successful and profits will increase as increasing amounts of folks become increasingly involved at all levels of the business hierarchy.

The thesis of the above article — the more diversity, the more profit, the better the business works.  Intrinsic validation for the abolition of prejudice.

This can only be good.

I know little about the business sector as opposed to the healthcare sector.  Coming up, I saw nothing but sex roles delineated crystal clearly.  Females in the female locker room, and all the surgical cases in the (far more elegant) “lounge for male staff.”

I saw things change as male nurses who had been in the military entered the workforce.  I saw the social status of physicians decline as the number of female students in medical schools in America slowly crept over 50%.

For most of my career, academic and administrative posts in healthcare seemed just out of reach in established institutions.

Guess it’s time to build (and run) an institution.

Stay tuned.