Too Pretty A Picture

And yet in 2000, two-thirds of U.S. working women were still crowded into 21 of the 500 occupational categories, with the top 10 including receptionist, secretary, cashier, sales worker, registered nurse, elementary school teacher, nursing aide, bookkeeper/accountant/auditor and waitress. Women still make up only 2 to 20 percent of all engineers, police officers, firefighters, mechanics and construction equipment operators.

Perhaps such jobs would never be 50-50 male-female, even if men behaved collegially toward women in every mine, factory, police force and stock brokerage in the country. But keeping women's numbers below 2 or 3 percent takes real effort. And sexual harassment has a proven track record in keeping women out. Consider the case of one Muskogee, Okla., woman who, as was shown in a public investigation, was driven off that city's firefighting force, even though she had the highest scores in her class on the entrance exams and physical tests. Being a firefighter had been her lifelong dream. But after her experience, she went pure pink, becoming an office manager and considering going to nursing school. As she told me with concentrated fury, "I never, never want to work in a male-dominant facility again."

Men who use sexual harassment to drive women out of previously all-male workplaces are often quite open about what they are doing. They are documented as saying that women don't "belong" in the mines, or in securities trading, construction, correctional work -- because women can't "handle" the dirt, the pressure, the criminals. Many of these men then enforce that belief through a brutal, persistent campaign of sexualized violence. Men who object are frequently ostracized or face retaliation themselves, which silences any others who may also disagree. Those who could put a stop to such treatment -- union leaders or company managers -- either approve or are indifferent to it. So after a burst of job desegregation in the late '70s, enforced by courts and executive orders, nonprofessional (and some professional) women who tried to break into blue-paycheck jobs have been driven back into the lower-paying world of pink.

Lawsuits haven't made things much better. Even leaving aside the retaliation for filing a complaint, the legal process itself can be as emotionally brutal as a rape trial. Plaintiff lawyers talk about something called "litigation damage"; some of these women (including Lois Jenson, the woman who sued Eveleth and the real-life counterpart to "North Country's" Josey Aimes, whose case dragged on for 15 years) end up more damaged than when they started.

I had hoped that "North Country" would help expose all of this. The real women at Eveleth Taconite Co. worried about being "Silkwooded." In 1974, you might recall, Karen Silkwood -- who tried to expose dangerous safety violations at the nuclear plant where she worked -- was killed in a late-night car accident that many people believe occurred under suspicious circumstances. Most of us know Silkwood's story from Mike Nichols's 1983 movie, a belated gasp from the 1970s filmmaking impulse to tackle harsh social issues.

By contrast, "North Country" is a sanitized fairy tale, made by Hollywood executives who apparently believe that we Americans have lost our taste for reality. Will someone please make the Grimm tale that we really need?

Author's e-mail:

journalist1@brandeis.edu

E. J. Graff, a senior researcher at the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism, collaborated on former Massachusetts lieutenant governor Evelyn Murphy's recently published book, "Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men -- And What to Do About It" (Simon & Schuster).