Women and the Workforce Assignment- Working Girl

Working Girl- (1988)
Working Girl is the story of Tess McGill who comes from a working class town, but dreams of being something big. She gets a job working for Katherine Parker, a high profile business woman and and after reading an article tells Parker about an idea for a business venture she thinks could be profitable. Parker takes the idea no where and after she breaks her leg while skiing out of the country Tess takes the idea to another company while posing to be taking Katherine's position. 


This is one of my favorite movies, and in my opinion it is a perfect example of women in the work place. 


In Working Girl Tess is seen as a nobody. The women that surround her in the town she is from are only concerned with getting married and settling down. Tess is proposed to in the movie and turns it down because she wants more then that. She sees marrying her boyfriend from her town as settling, but even if she did want to get married I get the impression that she wouldn't because she probably thinks that in order to really make it in the fast paced New York City business world she would need to focus entirely on that and forgo a family life of any kind to focus entirely on her career. 


To the women that she surrounds herself with back home they get the impression from her that she thinks she is better then them and the people she finds herself working for see her as brainless. In the beginning of the movie Tess turns to a male co-worker to help teach her things about the industry that they are in even though she is just a secretary and this co-worker tells her that she should meet with a friend of his. This friend and Tess meet but his only intention is to sexually harass her and when she doesn't give in to his advances he actually kicks her out of his vehicle. This just shows how this man saw her as nothing but a sexual object and never as a person with feelings or aspirations. 


After getting a new job she gets the idea for a merger that could very profitable but no one wants to listen to her because it is assumed that because she does not have a college degree she does not know what she is talking about. It is only once she pretends to be a high powered business women and present her idea that people start to take notice. The work that she is doing at this point is seen as important, but the effort that she took to have the work recognized as important was far more then perhaps a man would have had to undergo. 


Women in this movie are shown as being able to do both spectrums of work, high level executive work and entry level work however the majority of the women in the offices that are shown in the movie are doing entry level or secretary jobs. Only Tess and Katherine Parker are shown in any position higher then that. The only other people in the high up positions are men.


I believe that this movie very well ties to the issues discussed in the Making a Home, Making a Living chapter in the text. Tess choses to forgo a family life to try her hand at having a successful career, but that should not be a choice she has to make. It is unfair to not be able to do both, but to avoid "mommy tracking" she had to make a decision (Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 309). In the text book being mommy taxed could cost "between $600,000- $700,000" (Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 309). That is ridiculous! It is so unfair to think that just because a person choses to have a family and care for them that they would be penalized by their employer. All those people who would impose this "mommy tax" on women in the work place have mothers themselves so I can't understand why there is not more tolerance for that job. 


Even though in the movie Katherine Parker is in the position that Tess would like to aspire to, as I said before she and later Tess are the only women in a position of power. Other then them there are only men that are in powerful positions with them. Having said that it is never stated how much money Katherine makes or let alone Tess, however I would be willing to bet that they make considerably less then their male counter-parts. "Women who worked full time year round earned 77 cents for every dollar that men earned in 2006" (Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 310). That was in 2006, so I can't imagine how much less women were making in 1988. Something else to think about was that that figure was for white women and if Working Girl were filmed today that would be the figure to go by roughly because they were white. For women of color though it is even sadder. "African American women the figure was 70 cents and 58 cents for Latinas" (Kirk, Okazawa-Rey, 310). 




Work Cited: 
Kirk, Gwyn and Margo Okazawa- Rey. "Women's Bodies, Women's Health." Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Kirk, Gwyn and Margot Okazawa- Rey. McGraw Hill, 2010. 309, 310.