After watching “Shooting Women” and reading “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” I now realize that although women are often told they can do whatever a man can do by parents, teachers, and mentors when it gets to doing the job there are obstacles that the trusted adults in our lives had never warned about.  In “Shooting Women” several of the women said that they had been sexually harassed while on set.  They felt like men were bothering them because they felt that the film industry was still a man’s domain and they didn’t want women around to screw it up.

In “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, Slaughter says that no matter how high up a woman gets in her career she will still be expected to be the primary care giver to her children and if she failed to do so that might her career even more.  Slaughter has now begun to telling ambitious, young women that they can have it all, but not all at the same time.  It is possible to have a successful career and a happy family life, but they can’t exist at the same time as they do in a man’s life.  She says that telling women that you can have it all only sets them up for disappointment in the future.

My question is: What should we be telling the girls of today and the women of tomorrow? Should we tell them that they can have any job they want and risk that they may be harassed or abused at that job? Or do we warn them that harassment may happen and allow them to choose a career with that in mind? Both options have both negative and positive outcomes, but being honest about the potential problems down the road, as Slaughter does, may discourage women from following their dream job.  However, hiding the fact that harassment is a possibility may lead women in to danger.  Neither option is good, but one must be chosen until women are seen as equally capable of every job that a man has held in the past.