My first female boss was in 1985 at a big tech firm at the time, Tektronix. Her first question to me was “can you work for a woman?” Hmm, I think HR would get upset at that question today.

On our first press tour, she asked me to run out and grab some breast pads because she was still nursing, needed to express on the road, and could not leave her room. I obliged her because I had already gone through this with my wife and my boss was a human being. Was it belittling? Probably not, and it didn’t seem belittling to me. It certainly wasn’t sexual, although it might be considered some level of harassment today, but it was definitely an odd request in business and on the road.

Since then I have had both male and female bosses, but far more female than male, some of them at the VP level at other tech companies, such as Intel, where I worked for ten years and spent 8 of those years working for female managers.

Like I said, you have a point and history leans heavily to your view, but there are other stories that are not necessarily shared nor considered cause for complaint–and those stories may not be as rare as one might suspect.

This is an update to my recent post, Five White Men Talk About Social Media. When last we visited the little drama surrounding our local Chamber of Commerce event with a surprising lack of diversity, I had been invited to be on the panel. The fol…