Erasing Feminism From Take Our Daughters to Work Day

very year, on the fourth Thursday of April, thirty-nine million children and adults participate in Take Our
Daughters and Sons to Work Day, a shadowing program that introduces children of all socioeconomic
backgrounds to a wide range of work opportunities. It’s hugely popular, but very different from the
female-empowerment program it was initially intended to be. The event began, in 1993, as Take Our
Daughters to Work Day, started by the Ms. Foundation’s then president, Marie Wilson, and its founder,
Gloria Steinem. After reading about research published by the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan on
girls’ loss of self-esteem in adolescence, Wilson conceived of the program as a way to inspire confidence
in young women.

Take Our Daughters to Work Day was almost immediately successful. By the program’s fourth year, five
million girls in fourteen countries were participating. Keli Goff, a writer and political analyst, told me
about the experience of visiting her mother, an accountant, at work in the early years of the program.
“When I arrived at her office the first year, I asked her who was in charge,” she said. “She told me her
boss’s boss, and I said, ‘Well, that’s who I’d like to spend the day with.’ ” Although Goff did not become
an accountant, she said that the event benefitted her in other ways. “Seeing my mom work in a
professional environment and respected by others sent a powerful message regarding what was
possible for me to achieve,” she said.

The Ms. Foundation planned to create an equivalent eye-opening experience for boys, but it never got
off the ground. “We always envision that the equal or other half of this was ‘Take Our Sons Home Day,’
since they have been equally deprived of exposure to what work the home requires,” Steinem has said.

From the start, the day was met with angry outbursts from men who objected that Take Our Daughters
to Work Day excluded their sons and that Take Our Sons Home Day would punish them. “We were at
120 Wall Street at that time, on a high floor, and men gathered out there one year in great proportions
to actually taunt the young women that came into our offices,” Wilson told me. In 2002, Joe Manthey, a
men’s-rights activist, filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors,
arguing that the county should not support a sexist event with public funds. The case was dismissed
because Manthey was not an employee of the state and therefore was considered unable to have
suffered damages.

More problematically, the program had trouble finding corporate or governmental sponsorship without
the inclusion of boys. So, in 2003, the foundation relaunched the event as Take Our Daughters and Sons
to Work Day, with a new emphasis on inclusion, rather than on feminism. Many companies had long
been inviting boys anyway, but the official change helped to attract more participants, including the
White House, which signed up for the first time in 2004. In 2014, more than 3.5 million workplaces were
involved, including Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, and AOL.

In the wake of this expansion, the event has been faulted for straying from the Ms. Foundation’s original
goals. “There are so many issues still in the workplace, whether it’s pay inequality, or glass-ceiling issues,
or gender expectations, maternity-leave issues, sexual harassment, sexual assault,” Athanasia
Papaioannou, the assistant director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Women’s Leadership and
Resource Center, said. “I’d like to say we’ve moved past that, that we’ve addressed all these issues in
society, but we haven’t.” Even after the day was formally changed, the center continued to host its own
Daughters at Work Day, when the university’s faculty and staff would invite girls between the ages of
nine and fifteen to learn about notable women in history and to participate in planned activities in the
academic department of their choosing. “It’s a place where they don’t have any sort of gender
dynamics,” Papaioannou said of the program. “It’s about letting young girls experience anything without
any sort of doubt.” The event was cancelled in 2012, because of a lack of funding and an impending
office relocation, Papaioannou said, but they hope to restart it soon.

Julie Drizin, the former director of the Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of
Maryland, has also criticized the rebooted event. In 2012, she penned a frequently cited blog
post noting that it was not feasible for low-wage workers to participate in the day, making it “a feel-
good exercise for the privileged.” Without its feminist leanings, Drizin argued, the event’s principles had
become diluted and it wound up reinforcing the elite class.

This year, however, the White House used the event to speak to the American ideal of equal opportunity
for everyone. About a month prior to the event, President Obama released a video in which he
announced that the White House would, for the first time, expand the event beyond the children of
White House employees and invite children in need from the community. He urged corporations and
other branches of government to do the same. On April 22nd, the White House partnered with the Boys
& Girls Club and the Washington D.C. Child & Family Services Agency to bring in twenty-five kids from
the area. When Michelle Obama addressed the two hundred and ten visiting children, she said, “There
is nothing magical about sitting here other than a lot of hard work, okay? You don’t have to be born in a
special place or come from a family that has a lot of money and connections. You can just be a regular
little girl who works hard and tries hard at what she does.”

Upon learning of the Obamas’ approach to the event and their appeal to businesses, Drizin sounded
impressed. “That’s exactly right on,” she said, adding that the shift marked a kind of awakening about
the issues that impact us today. “Our culture has changed, our economy has changed, and the project
now in this country is not about making sure that girls know that they can be anything they want to be.
The project now in this country is making sure that all children have equal opportunity to thrive,” she
said.