Finance and economics are both male-dominated fields that have an enormous effect on the kinds of laws and policies made in Washington, D.C., which ripple out and shape all of our lives. As Heather Boushey writes in this forum, Alice Wu’s study of a popular jobs site revealed that economists often discussed their female colleagues in crude, sexualized ways. Other economists have published papers detailing how women need to be better writers than their male colleagues, and how few women make it to tenure-track academic positions. These trends are of a piece. Women are sexualized and objectified, and their male colleagues take them less seriously at work. They have to work harder to advance. No wonder so many women drop out or choose not to pursue careers in male-dominated fields such as economics or finance.

And if they do, they’ll still be dismissed. Born wasn’t the only female expert in finance and economics to worry about what was happening, unchecked, in the financial markets in the boom years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sheila Bair, as George W. Bush’s head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, saw in 2006 the mortgage crash was coming and was similarly rebuffed. Elizabeth Warren had spent a career documenting the ways in which middle-class families were in over their heads. Yet they were unable to help us avert the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Discrimination against women in the workplace leads to a shortage of women making decisions, and that reverberates through the economy, government, and policy circles. The current reckoning with sexual harassment and discrimination shows that ignoring women’s perspectives and expertise is harmful to everyone, and isn’t just about who touches whom on what body part.

My Year Zero By Jill Abramson Former Executive Editor of The New York Times

It was November 1994, and I was seated in the office of Kaye Savage, a Washington civil servant, watching as the fax machine slowly printed out a written statement filled with lies that might cost me my career. Kaye was a key source for Strange Justice, a new book on the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation battle that I had co-authored with Jane Mayer, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal. The Journal, whose editorial page had championed Thomas and relentlessly attacked Anita Hill, had rather amazingly published excerpts from the book, including details from Savage about Thomas’s keen interest in pornography, a critical aspect of Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the sexual harassment she experienced while working for Thomas.

When Strange Justice came out, Thomas’s supporters hastily tried to discredit it. David Brock, then a conservative author who had blasted Hill, describing her, in a 1992 article for the American Spectator, as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” had gotten hold of the details of Savage’s messy divorce and child custody case. Brock told Savage that if she did not publicly recant what she said in Strange Justice, he would release damaging personal details from the litigation. In a recent interview, Brock told me he assumed Thomas had arranged to have the damaging personal information about Savage leaked to him. (Thomas declined to respond to requests for comment.)

Tipped by another source to Brock’s blackmail plan, I literally ran from the Journal to Savage’s office. The written statement claimed that Jane and I had misrepresented her account. If she signed it, the credibility of the book would be destroyed, and the Journal would probably fire us both. Savage was almost in tears, worried that the information Brock had on her could ruin her life. I made the only appeal I could: Kaye owed it to history to stand by the truth, as Hill had done, despite the consequences. Before I left, she threw the statement into the garbage, giving me the answer I hoped for and lifelong admiration for her.

When the Hill-Thomas hearings ended, everyone who mattered in Washington said the truth would never be known. It was a case of he said, she said. Jane and I spent three years reporting and unearthing new information that shattered this silly myth, which was just Washington’s way of avoiding painful truths, like the fact that a sitting Supreme Court judge had perjured himself.

Washington is still a town that avoids painful truths. The recent deluge of sexual misconduct revelations has swept away powerful Washington figures like John Conyers, Al Franken, Trent Franks, Blake Farenthold, and others, in ways that clearly weren’t possible during the Hill-Thomas hearings. Big names in D.C. journalism have fallen, too. Leon Wieseltier. Mark Halperin. Michael Oreskes. These are men I knew and admired. I assumed they were feminists. Oreskes hired me in the 1990s in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. He championed my career and those of other strong women. I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

Associated Press

There were a lot of great women reporters back then working for powerful male editors. That hasn’t changed. I became the first woman at The New York Times to be Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor. During the short two and a half years that I ran the newsroom, half the masthead—the most powerful editors—were for the first time female. But that sort of progress seems to have subsided. According to the Nieman Report, as of 2014, women led fewer major U.S. newspapers than they did ten years earlier.

Back in 1991, Maureen Dowd sat across from me at the press table when Anita Hill introduced America to phrases like “Long Dong Silver” and “Who put pubic hair on my Coke?”—topics neither of us expected to hear about in the rococo setting of the Senate Caucus Room. Our eyes locked in disbelief, and a friendship was born. Unlike the rest of us, who simply reported who said what, trying to be evenhanded, Maureen saw in real time the big story unfolding: how ill-equipped and cowed the white men in power were to conduct a hearing into sexual harassment and the treatment of women in the workplace. She wrote with moral authority instead of bland balance. She also did a lot to help change the culture for women.

Six years later, I ran into her at a Washington book party. The Times had hired a new bureau chief, Oreskes. Did I know any good women he might hire? I gave her my best, “What am I, chopped liver?” look. A few years later, I succeeded Oreskes as the bureau chief, and Maureen hired one young woman assistant and then another. She trained them to report, and I eventually hired them both onto the full-time staff. One of them, Ashley Parker, who covered the Trump campaign for the Times, is now on the White House beat for The Washington Post. Jane Mayer produces some of the highest-impact investigations of Trump’s Washington for The New Yorker. That’s real progress.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what has changed over the years and what has not. With the determination for “zero tolerance” on matters of sexual misconduct, and with so many women running for public office in 2018 and, one hopes, in 2020, I desperately want to believe we are on the cusp of a new era.