Member-only story
A Different Kind of #MeToo Story
Workplace abuse doesn’t have to be sexual to be abusive.
“I hired you for your brains.”
It was his mantra. My new boss was so excited to learn that I was a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, just across the bay. His wife, he told me during our interview, was a professor there. He informed me on my first day of work that that was why he’d hired me: he liked smart women. He bragged about my brains to the whole office as he introduced me around.
Soon, all too soon, the unspoken second half of his mantra became painfully clear: “…so why don’t you use them?”
It was a starter job, but a pretty good one; I felt lucky to have landed it so fresh out of college, with a résumé short on work history. The office was on the top floor of a tall building in downtown San Francisco. I would be paid an okay salary, but the benefits were generous even by the standards of the day (the very early 1990s): plenty of vacation and sick leave; the company matched 401(k) contributions dollar-for-dollar; and the free, excellent health insurance even covered psychotherapy, if you can believe it.
I commuted downtown on BART, carrying my high-heeled pumps in my handbag, like the rest of the skirt-suited, sneaker-shod ladies. I even wore panty hose (yes, my young friends, the eighties…
