A Woman’s Story: Jill Brzezinski-Conley, Breast Cancer Patient, Stars In Stunning Paris Photo Shoot By Sue Bryce
Women’s News: Top Job For Women Is Secretary — The Same Today As It Was In 1950
Women’s News: Top Job For Women Is Secretary — The Same Today As It Was In 1950
The Huffington Post | By Christina Huffington
If you were asked to picture the average working woman in the 1950s or early 1960s, chances are you would picture a secretary — think Mad Men’s Joan or Miss Moneypenny from the Bond films. Asked to picture the average working woman today — the day Hillary Clinton steps down as Secretary of State and a month before Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s memoir hits bookshelves — and you would probably come up with something a little different.
According to the U.S. Census, however, the most common job for women todayremains the same as 60 years ago. Between 2006 and 2010, about 4 million people in the United States worked as “secretaries and administrative assistants” — and 96 percent of them were women.
This skewed gender ratio made sense in the 1950s when fewer career options were open to women and when under 10 percent of women didn’t have college degrees. But today, with women earning more graduate degrees than men, why don’t the demographic of secretary positions reflect this increased gender parity?
Dana Greenberg, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Babson College, told Yahoo! Shine that “young women, women reentering the workforce, and women in career transitions [are] still getting the advice that the best entry into a field is through an administrative position.” She added that, “We would never tell a 21-year-old male college grad that the way into a job is to start in an administrative position. But we’re still, unfortunately, in this country, still stereotyping it as a fashionable place for women to start.”
The position of secretary may have stayed steady as the most popular job for women, but the way we discuss and value the work secretaries to has changed for the better. In the early 1970s, impacted by the feminist movement, workplaces began changing the title of “secretary” to “administrative assistant,” thereby giving the job a greater sense of professional gravitas. “Increasingly women in the 1970s were demanding the opportunity to be treated as equals. All of a sudden you have fewer secretaries and more executive assistants,” Ray Weikal, spokesman for the International Association of Administrative Professionals, told CNN.
The trend shows no sign of abating with the labor department predicting a 12 percent growth in the number of administrative assistants between 2010 and 2020.
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/01/top-job-for-women-secretary-same-as-1950_n_2599560.html?utm_hp_ref=women&ir=Women
A Woman’s Story: Jill Brzezinski-Conley, Breast Cancer Patient, Stars In Stunning Paris Photo Shoot By Sue Bryce
Jill Brzezinski-Conley
The Huffington Post | By Emma Gray
A beautiful woman twirls in front of the Eiffel Tower, decked out in a pale pink gown that makes her look like she stepped out of a fairytale. She smiles brightly and laughs as she gets her picture taken by Australian portrait photographer of the year Sue Bryce. But this is no ordinary fashion photo shoot.
The “model,” Jill Brzezinski-Conley, was diagnosed with breast cancer a day before her 32nd birthday, underwent a double mastectomy — and now, at 35, has incurable stage-4 breast cancer which has metastasized to her bone.
In late August, Brzezinski-Conley, who lives with her husband in Kentucky, went to visit her childhood friend Nikki Closser, a wedding photographer in Seattle. “[Nikki] took pictures of me, and I was like, ‘Nikki, I want you to take pictures of my breasts so that maybe we can send in the photos to magazines for breast cancer month [in October],'” Brzezinski-Conley told The Huffington Post. “[The media] never shows what breast cancer looks like.”
After the session, Closser emailed the pictures along with Brzezinski-Conley’s story to Bryce, whose work she had admired. Inspired, Bryce contacted both women right away and invited Brzezinski-Conley to Skype into a CreativeLIVE workshop where she surprised her with the offer of a photo shoot — in Paris. Three weeks later, Bryce, Brzezinski-Conley and Closser were off to the City of Light for five days, with a videographer in tow.
“It was a million times better than what I ever dreamed of,” said Brzezinski-Conley. “For the first time, in those five days, I felt like Cinderella. I didn’t feel like a cancer patient. They made me feel like a supermodel, and it was the nicest feeling … I didn’t want to go back home.”
She hopes that her story — and the images that accompany it — will inspire other women to feel good about their bodies, regardless of how they look. She especially hopes that they reach other women in their 20s and 30s who are battling cancer. “I wanted the photo shoot to be for women who look like me, [to show them that] they can still feel sexy and beautiful,” Brzezinski-Conley told HuffPost.
But she doesn’t want the only message she gets across to be about beauty. She’s also passionate about educating young women about breast cancer, since she put off seeing a doctor for a year after she noticed that she had an inverted nipple. “If I would’ve known [that] an inverted nipple was a sign of breast cancer, I would’ve gotten checked up right away,” she told HuffPost. “I always wonder if my cancer would have been at a different stage [if I had].” Her advice to young women is simple: “Be educated, learn your body, learn the signs of breast cancer.”
Brzezinski-Conley wants us to start seeing breast cancer instead of just talking about it — and these personal photos are certainly more memorable than a pink ribbon.
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/01/jill-brzezinski-conley-sue-bryce-breast-cancer-photos_n_2599843.html?utm_hp_ref=women&ir=Women
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