Three construction workers are laying cement. No, not in a bar, but stay with me. One is flattening the cement with a shovel, one is using a broom to sweep the cement into a pattern, and one is "supervising" the other men's physical labor. The "supervisor" says to a young woman walking past, "See him sweep? He's gonna make a real good wife someday."

In reality, this isn't a joke. It's what the supervisor of the men laying the sidewalks on my street said to me last week. I admit, I laughed at first. By telling me this joke, the supervisor was including me in his upper crust. We, together, could laugh at the man who was sweeping, clearly a weak, submissive job.

Seconds later I thought my suffragette grandmothers must have been rolling over in their graves. How dare I be so arrogant in my virtually non-challenged young womanhood to laugh at a woman joke. I, so pampered by the benefits that my sisters and mothers battled misogynistic iniquities to bless me with, just laughed at a woman joke!

For anyone who would say that complete equality for women has been achieved, consider the situation just related. Now, I'm not a sensationalist so I have to confess that I didn't really beat myself up for laughing at a joke. But it did make me alarmed by my own subconscious. I began to wonder if, in the backs of our minds and even further back to our subconscious, if John Lennon was right. Is woman still "the nigger of the world"?

According to a study done by the Bloomington Commission on the Status of Women, Indiana ranks 24th in women's health and well-being, 36th in women's economic autonomy and 47th in equal earnings of women to men.

"It takes a certain perspective for women to feel that they can do something grand," said Charlotte Zietlow, Bloomington's first City Councilwoman way before my time, 1971 to be exact.

Zietlow co-teaches a start-up business class, where her students are generally evenly split between males and females. She says women students often tell her they are glad a woman is teaching the class.

"I think that less often than men, women see themselves starting businesses even though, statistically, more women are starting small businesses than men," said Zietlow. "There's still that, 'Am I in the right place? Is this what I'm supposed to do, and is this going to get me anyplace?'"

The contradiction of the attitudes of my predecessors and my peers is important in understanding the remnants of sexism. I am proud to introduce myself as a product of a new credo reared just in time for my generation of women. We are smart, ambitious and assertive. We're at the top of our classes, often leading men. We take men out on dates, and we take the check. In short, we think we're set. But there's something still beneath the surface.

"I grew up in a traditional family," said Frona Powell, an assistant professor in the Kelly School of Business. "I went to college and majored in music first, then English education. My mother stayed at home and my father was a pharmacist. You know, thinking back, I was very good at math and the sciences, ... but it never occurred to me."

Powell married and while pregnant with her first child, she said, she realized, "I'd like to know a little more about how the world works."

Powell had her first child in July and began law school in August. She completed the grueling regimen of law school and graduated cum laude, while nursing a newborn.

I propose that you consider for a moment a scenario under which Powell hadn't pursued so satisfying a life course. In that unfortunate scenario, it is possible that science was the love of her life she never discovered, simply because it never occurred to her that she could. If this is in fact the subversive form sexism now takes, then we've got a problem.

Zietlow has sought job equality for women since the 70s and feels that, in Bloomington, development is key.

"When I hear conversations about economic development, I do not hear these concerns being addressed, at all. And I think that's too bad because the fact that we won't even discuss them in terms of economic development means that we're not thinking beyond what we've always known."

Studies confirm that Indiana is lacking. A report commissioned by the City of Bloomington Community and Family Resources Department, gives Indiana a C- in female economic autonomy and a D- in employment and earnings for women. Habits, even if self-limiting, are hard to break.

"We need to start something really big with lots and lots of really good jobs for women, but I haven't gotten that far yet," Zietlow laughed.

"We tend to get stuck in our tracks and that, of course, will not lead us to new things. So maybe that's the problem. And maybe the answer is to get unstuck."

I think it's telling of how liberated I feel that, thanks to the work of my mother, I'm reminded of a metaphor from the utterly chauvinistic Woody Allen.

Woody says to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, "A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies."

We don't have a dead shark on our hands, but we do have a problem. And for American women of all generations, standing still is not an option.

Elizabeth Dilts can be reached at edilts@indiana.edu.