Kim Painley Interview, History 150 Spring 2016, Conducted by Morgan Painley, Gender, March 9, 2016
a. This interview was conducted in person over spring break and required little editing. I used my phone with an app that recorded the conversation and converted it using GarageBand. I made sure the interview space was quiet so the audio was easy to hear.
b.My mom, Kimberly Leffers Painley, grew up in Charlottesville most of her life, attended PVCC, and went on to the UVA McIntire School of Commerce. She also had a child by this time as well as a part-time job. She worked several jobs in male-dominated fields before deciding that she wanted to be her own boss and start her own very successful marketing company after having two more children.
c. It’s very obvious that over many years, people have watched as the gap between the two genders has narrowed. There were many catalysts for these changes, including when women began to work in factories during the Industrial Revolution as well as when they began to hold positions of power in politics and large corporations. Despite this large change, there is still a very obvious divide between the opportunities that men and women receive as well as some problems with how women are treated in the workplace. From the time that my mom attended the business school, the gap between the amount of men and women in the program has narrowed significantly, with a 2015-2016 undergraduate class consisting of 45% women.
MP: State your full name, when you were born, and where
KP: Kim Painley, September 5, 1960, I was born in Lynchburg Virginia
MP: When did you graduate high school and college?
KP: I graduated high school in 1978, but I didn’t go straight to college, I actually didn’t graduate from college until 1990.
MP: First question: did you feel a lot of pressure to not even continue your education after having a child and a husband working a full time job?
KP: Well, I actually had a child after I graduated from high school and before I went to college, and the attitude was that I really didn’t need to go to college at that point, and I actually had a couple of pretty good jobs. I was a head teller at a bank and I worked at a stock brokerage, but what I found when I got to the stock brokerage was that I would not be able to advance my career without going to college and they weren’t really encouraging me to go to college and get my degree so that I could continue my career, they kind of liked me where I was. But I wasn’t satisfied with that.
MP: Did you feel more empowered or disadvantaged when working in male-dominated fields? What were the pros and cons?
KP: There was a lot of frustration, working for- and it really depended on the man I was working for. It was very personal as to if I felt empowered or disadvantaged. When I was at the bank, it was very male dominated and although they gave lip-service to fact that they wanted women to advance, the men found it much easier to advance their career within the bank, and that’s actually why I left the bank, initially. Even though, at that point I was not ready to go to college and continue my career.
MP: Okay, did you face a lot of opposition from starting your own business and from who?
KP: Well, I faced a lot of doubts. I have never been one to pay a whole lot of attention to what anyone else thinks of me, but there were a lot of people I encountered who thought I was just crazy for striking out on my own, because I was a single parent with young children. So it wasn’t so much opposition as it was doubt.
MP: Do you think that these doubts can be attributed predominantly to the fact that you’re a woman or just the fact that it was a big risk?
KP: I think that mostly it was probably that it was a big risk. I don’t think that- I’m sure the fact that I was a woman weighed into it, but it was a huge risk.
MP: By the time you started your own business, you were a single mom with three children and two of them were under the age of ten, did you find it hard to manage your time between work and family?
KP: Actually, ironically, it wasn’t as hard to manage my time once I started my own business because then, my time was my own. One of the primary problems I had with working for someone else in a male-dominated business, was that there was no acknowledgment of the fact that I was a single parent with two children, and when they got sick or needed to go to the doctor, I took them and I took vacation time to do it, but it was very much frowned upon, and it was one of the primary reasons that I decided I would take the risk in the first place. I needed to be with my family, and my family needed me, and I didn’t have any help. So, by starting my own business, I could control my time and I didn’t have anybody hanging over me, threatening to fire me because I wasn’t working 20 hours a week.
MP: Do you think that if you had a female boss they would have been more understanding of your situation with your children?
KP: Maybe, but it all depends on the female. Ironically enough, I felt as much discrimination because I was a woman sometimes working for another woman. It may have been a matter of them being intimidated or not wanting me to advance to the same level that they did, but I unfortunately got as much of a feeling of being held back from women as I did men when I was working for other people.
MP: Do you feel that the women of your generation have better opportunities than your mom or her sister, and if so, why do you think that is?
KP: Oh, absolutely. I mean, when my mom went to college, but the minute that she got married, she quit college. You know, that was what they did. College in my mom’s day was all about finding a husband, and that was in the 50s, you know, there was a distinct division between women who were single and worked and women who were married and raising families and therefore not working. And I think that changed a lot with my generation, I think my generation tried to do it all, we tried to be career women and raise families, and in many cases, it didn’t work very well. I think that now there may be more of a balance with your generation.
MP: Alright, do you find that even though you’re your own boss now, male clients and the men that you work with still treat you differently than men that have the same job as you?
KP: Sometimes, and it does depend on how old they are. The older ones still treat me- you know, I still get the feeling that they’re patting me on the head sometimes. Even though I clearly know more about what I do than they do, even though that’s why they hired me in the first place, there is a generational difference between the way that men who are in their 20, 30s, or 40s treat me and the ones who are in their 50, 60s, there definitely is a difference.
d. I felt that this interview went very well and flowed nicely. I think that I learned a lot about my mom and her experience with gender equality within her own field. I didn’t have problems sticking to the script and felt that my questions as well as her answers were very succinct.