Like most kids of my generation, I took a required typing class in the early 90s. Our teacher was a lecher who walked around peeking down girls' shirts and putting his hands on our shoulders.
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Only a generation before me, typing class was a same-sex class offered to girls.https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-gendered-past-of-typing-education/504572/ …
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Girls' typing classes were seen as essential career prep for the only kinds of jobs white, middle-class girls were expected to want or need: secretarial positions they held until marriage. Typing was about taking down mens' words and doing work on the behest of male bosses.
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So I took my typing class—mixed-gender in a public school in the early '90s. All those drills worked and I became relatively proficient.
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Then, in college, I took a job working at a workers' compensation defense firm. For some reason the partners had decided to staff their office almost entirely with smart college-age students. I took a typing test and was hired.
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I took to transcription pretty quickly. Little tapes would get delivered to my desk and I'd type them up. I liked pressing the pedal and watching my typing progress.
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The firm's attorneys were largely male. One of them took a shine to me; he liked my speed and accuracy. He sent over lots of tapes summarizing depositions he had just taken. The deponents were working-class people trying to get the workers' comp to which they were entitled.
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This attorney fancied himself a novelist of some kind, and he would start every tape with a lavish description of the deponent. This was completely unnecessary, but he insisted it was important in case the deponent's physical appearance changed during the case.
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He began to describe the looks of every woman deponent in great detail. "The deponent stood at five foot three and had a flat chest and hips." "The deponent stood at five foot seven and had large breasts and a charming demeanor."
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I couldn't not transcribe the tapes; it was my job. But he knew he had an audience of one and kept doing these intense, discomfiting physical descriptions despite the fact that they weren't needed. It made me extremely uncomfortable, but I was 19 and I said nothing.
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I mastered typing at that job. I began to type almost as quickly as I thought. After school, I translated that into a job in the word processing department at a larger corporate law firm.
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My job was still the same: Transcribe the words of men. Their words had stopped being salacious—this was real estate law—but I was still working at their behest and had to abide by their whims.
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People knew I was a fast typist, so I'd get their rush jobs. The male lawyers would come stand behind my desk and watch me transcribe their words, tapping their feet and making impatient noises. My accuracy fell apart as they towered over me. It was completely nerve wracking.
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That's about the time when I started writing for myself. I could type so quickly that it was easy to slip a snippet of a novel into an email and send it to myself. I snuck my own work into breaks and lulls.
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Eventually I fell in love and moved to a new state, where I wowed every temp agency with my typing skill. I ended up becoming a floater legal assistant at huge corporate law firms. I'd show up and fill in for whomever was gone, doing her (always her) dictation, forms, etc.
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One day I was assigned to the desk of an older male attorney. I went to the desk and hung up my sweater, put my purse away, and sat ready to work. The lawyer came out of the office.
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He did one of those full-body scans—head to breasts, breasts to head. Then he smiled really wide and said "You're my girl today, huh?"
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This was 2005. He must have made over $100,000 a year. I was a low-paid temp trapped at a desk. I didn't know anyone in HR there. I didn't even know who this guy was. Anyway, I said "I'm a woman, not a girl" and he sneered at me and the next day I was transferred.
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I still took advantage of the lulls at my legal jobs to type for myself, and I sold my first article at that job. I started sneaking more and more writing in and eventually I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I was done using my typing for other people.
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I quit and became a writer and I use my hard-earned typing every day for myself. But women still are expected to fill the office underclass and use their fingers to uphold a largely male establishment. Over 80 percent of paralegals and legal assistants are women.
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I've worked for myself for 14 years now, and I'm lucky that my fingers work for me. But I'm fascinated and dismayed to see the ways my story—starting all the way back in junior high—intersects with a history of pink-collar work and structural inequality for women in the workplacepic.twitter.com/Ywma1PmxCw
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