Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success. I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This time we're looking at the way women are portrayed in the media and how that potentially affects our thoughts about what we're capable of in life and our careers in particular.

The difference between a TV situation and most women's workday reality can be as gaping as the female character's cleavage.

She was dressed as though she were going to a party,

when you would not expect the vice president of the United States

to be sitting in his or her office in a party dress.

And later in the show, we look at a genre that's colonized a lot of screen time in the last

decade.

You don't have, you know, America's next-top business leader competing right next to America's

next-time model.

You don't have women on The Apprentice being treated like solid players.

You have women being chosen because they look like corporate Barbie.

Coming up on the Broad Experience.

This episode of the Broad Experience

is sponsored by the Town Night Center

for Entrepreneurial Journalism.

When Gloria Felt was a child in the 1950s, June Cleaver, the wife and mother in the series Leave It to Beaver, was her ideal of womanhood.

She knew what she'd be doing when she grew up.

I was going to be vacuuming in my high heels and with a perfectly starched apron on at all times,

and my makeup on, of course.

It didn't work out that way.

Gloria is a long-time activist for women's causes and an author.

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