WomensStuff

I want to preface my experience by saying the wage gap is a serious problem and women deserve to be paid the same as our male coworkers for the same job, not to mention women being overlooked for raises and promotions.

Early in college, I took a job working summers at a newspaper manufacturing warehouse for $7.50 an hour to try to get my foot in the door in the journalism field. The starting pay and job titles were the same for all the entry-level folks, but the actual work was sex-segregated, and they put me with the men, which really sucked. For the cis women, it was mostly standing in place, feeding newspapers into a machine and making sure there weren't any jams. On one occasion when I got randomly put on the elusive morning shift (which never happened again), I was put on the feeders, and it was pretty easy; the worst part was pulling out a paper jam since that would halt the whole production line, but that rarely happened. Otherwise, for the cis men and one trans woman (me), we would do the packaging and loading. It was two or three people doing a physically strenuous job that required more workers to perform optimally, with one person frequently calling in sick, constant multitasking/running back and forth, lots of overtime and a handful of OSHA violations, including me being expected to operate a forklift without being certified. I don't know why they didn't hire more people with certifications or spread out the tasks more evenly. Things were so frantic all the time I'm glad I never got hurt on the job.

It was a lot of overtime, with random scheduling often landing me in the graveyard shift, so I didn't have a social life during that time and I wasn't sleeping very well. I put my two weeks' the moment I was offered an internship writing and editing for a local magazine. The one positive is that I was in really amazing shape for those summers.