So time is really the solution, and older women who have experienced more direct discrimination in the past will move through each cohort taking their historical discrimination with them until they retire or die
Yes, and having just turned 56, believe me I know all about it.
Although I do think that part of the issue (for me personally) was also about expectations of somebody from my sort of working class background as well as being a woman.
When I took my O-Level exams at the age of 16 in 1981, around 85-90% of people would leave school at age 16. Boys who had done particularly well might get apprenticeships as apprentice toolmakers or engineers (coincidentally enough, at the very same engineering firm that I mentioned above where my DH now works); for most girls getting a "nice" office job was seen as a real prize.
Although, please don't think that the school was responsible for this gender divide. I went to a school that was in a very working class area and it was set up to teach practical skills as much as academic ones.
Certainly, everybody was required to do both metalwork and woodwork; cookery and needlework. However, my attempts at both a wooden aeroplane and a stuffed soft toy were equally terrible.
But, despite this, it was very clear that, when given a choice, boys overwhelmingly chose technical drawing and girls chose typing. (by the way, can you even imagine nowadays a secondary school offering technical drawing and typing as subjects in their own right?).
Even in the Sixth Form there really wasn't much in the way of role models (for boys or girls actually). The only two people I can remember with a clear goal was the Head Boy who wanted to become a lawyer (he ended up getting an unconditional offer to study law at Cambridge and did go on to be very successful) and a girl who wanted to become a doctor ( but her father was a GP anyway - actually our family GP).
However, things really changed when I got to university. For the first time in my life I came across people who were extremely focused and driven, they knew what they wanted out of life and believed that they could get it (although there were equally a number that were just out for a good time and a number of girls that were there to "catch" a potential husband - not joking).
What was the difference? Well, a lot of the people I met at university came from much more academically focused schools, private schools or just generally from a very upper-middle class background. They certainly hadn't learnt that a good job for a girl was a "nice" office job and they certainly hadn't been taught needlework or typing at school.
For example, in the Hall of Residence where I stayed in the first and third years there were quite a number of students from the various London medical schools. The one thing that they all had in common was a belief that any job or profession was open to them if they simply tried hard enough - I think that there were actually more women than men studying medicine, even back then, and it simply didn't occur to these girls to think any differently than that she could and would become a doctor. What they also had in common, was a rather different family and school background to mine
All very different from the sort of environment I had grown up in prior to going to university where, rather than aspiring to be a doctor, most girls would have thought of nothing more than becoming a nurse or dental assistant.
The sort of expectations and role models that you have when younger really can make a huge difference to believing what you are capable of doing. It really can be hugely difficult to even comprehend going to university when you’ve never met anyone who has.
This is the background to what it was like for very many young women back in the 1980s.
I was really lucky, I managed to get into a very good London university, from there I started working for Arthur Andersen, moved into the consulting side and while I had a lot of success, I saw for myself how sexist things were - but back then it was just accepted that that was the way things were.
I later moved into a different area and eventually set up my own business. But, believe me, yes things really were so different 40 years ago when I was taking my O Levels.
It was even worse in the generation before me.
My mum is incredibly intelligent - she's where I got whatever brains I have from.
My mother left school at age 15 without any qualifications and started work the very next week in the typing pool at the offices of the local gas board (what later became British Gas). She later went on to become a computer. Yes, that's right, people who worked with computers in the early days were called "computers" themselves.
This was very much what was "expected" of young girls of her background in the 1950s. After she married and gave birth to me and my brother in the mid 60s she didn't work again until the late 70s (at the time, this was not unusual).
My mother has long since retired but, for her generation, the thought of even getting promoted to a management position was simply unthinkable.