How far have we come?

How far have we come, are we there yet when it comes to equality is a question I am frequently asked. I always answer the same response. The fact that we are talking about it means things have changed. Ends up the data is starting to shift too as women are starting to outnumber men on US payrolls.

We watched Remember the Titans the other night. The film hit the theaters in December 2005 and was based on a true story from 1971 of a football team that brings on a black football coach changing the team and certainly changing the high school. I am quite sure that many of the comments in this movie and how women were shown could not and would not be made today. We all commented on how old it seemed.

I am a crossword fanatic. I do the NYTimes daily, either in pen or on my phone but I do prefer the physical contact of pen to paper. When I am bored, instead of scrolling through Instagram, I do a puzzle from the archives.

It has been a lesson in how far we have come and how we will always be evolving. I started doing puzzles from 2017 then 2015 then I got back to 2003 and then I went all the way back to November 1993. That is as far back as they go. There are so many clues in these puzzles with answers that are just not ok today. For instance, the question of Madison Avenue Exec answers today would be adperson but then the same question’s answer in the early 2000s is adman.

There are others but it has been an exercise in change. The crossword doesn’t change but the questions and answers change with the times. We have come a lot farther than we think.