I recently watched the movie Barbie, a fantasy comedy that highlights what it’s like to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Around the same time I was reading The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (Loren Grush), the real-life account of six women who had to overcome gender discrimination to achieve their career goals.

Recent attention given this important subject encourages me to share my own experience of dealing with sexism at work.

Back in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties, I was working as a sales representative for a large company. All the sales reps were young women, and all the managers and executives were men. With no women in the upper echelons of management, there were no role models for us. Every woman in our company navigated the sexism inherent in this type of gender imbalance in her own way, knowing that her job might be on the line if she didn’t go along with certain unwritten rules.