Thank you?

Forgive me for saying this – and please give me the chance to explain – but maybe we women owe the GOP presidential candidate a word of thanks for putting the topics of sexual assault and workplace harassment front and center in our national conversation.

Astonishing numbers of women have come forward over the past week, whether to tweet about their experiences as sexual assault victims or to speak with the national press about being the target of unwanted advances by the GOP presidential nominee. And today, First Lady Michelle Obama delivered one of the most eloquent condemnations of male sexual aggression and that man’s despicable behavior that we will hear this year – if not ever.

While I’m fortunate not to have personally experienced the kind of degradation and humiliation so many women have described, I’ve heard similar stories throughout my 40-plus-year career in American business. Maybe I “missed out” on those experiences because early on, I proudly identified myself as a feminist -- participating in the effort by NOW, NWPC and other women’s organizations to ratify the ERA, and speaking out about equal opportunity in the workplace. Maybe it’s because I spoke enthusiastically and often about my feminist husband, his career and the equal partnership we were building in our lives.

At the same time, though, I remember those “moments.” One occurred early in my career during a lunch meeting at a private male-members-only business club in downtown Los Angeles with an executive who seemed interested in mentoring me. The lunch was pleasant enough and we spent much of the time talking business. But I also remember feeling a twinge of discomfort when the conversation turned to my husband and our marriage: it felt as if my mentor, who also was married, was “testing the water” on a more personal level.

A year later, that executive hired me to work at the Los Angeles office of the international public affairs agency of which he was an officer. A year later, he unexpectedly promoted me into a manager’s slot, leapfrogging me over another woman with whom I’d gone to grad school and who had worked at the agency for two years before I’d joined the staff.

It took years for the full picture to emerge. Several of the women I’d worked with there shared their stories – at different times and for different reasons – of their own lunches with that executive at that same business club. For each of them, that lunch had been prelude to a sexual proposition or unwanted physical encounter. In the case of my grad school friend, her refusal to “go along to get along” had, in her view, squelched her career trajectory at the agency. She thought, and I readily understood why she did, that it had been the reason I’d been tapped for the opportunity instead of her.

Whether or not that was true isn’t the point – my friend and I shouldn’t have found it necessary to have that conversation in the first place. Workplace opportunities should be offered on the basis of skill, experience, competence and on-the-job performance – not on one’s willingness to “perform” in private.

A gender neutral workplace doesn’t just benefit women. Early in my tenure at the last corporation for which I worked before retiring, I led a “virtual” team of writers and online course developers. Each of them worked from home in a different corner of the country, and all of them had proven through positive attitude, a high level of productivity, and consistent delivery of top-notch work product that they could be trusted to do right by our employer without showing up in an office every day.

One of them – a married man with a grade school-age daughter – called me one afternoon. He and his wife had decided it was time for her to return to work, but the job she’d been offered would require her to be on the road on an almost daily basis. The only way she could take the job was if he assumed responsibility for taking their daughter to her dance classes, art lessons and Brownie meetings. Could he tweak his work schedule by stopping work at 3 and then finishing the last two hours of his workday from 5 to 7?

Here was a reliable, responsible employee, someone who was often still online at 5 p.m. my time – 8 p.m. for him – putting in extra hours because he knew our internal clients needed a quick turnaround. I’d had to chide him on a regular basis to “step away from the computer and go help your daughter with her homework!” I knew I could count on him to do whatever was required to get the job done. My response was immediate: of course you can.

It was his response that taught me a lesson about the unique value of having women in leadership roles in business.  He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said, “You know, I’m so glad I’m working for a woman. If I’d been working for a male boss, I wouldn’t have even asked for this.”

Looking at the strange, distressing turn this year’s presidential election has now taken, I consider Hillary Clinton’s candidacy an aspirational example of why women SHOULD be considered for career opportunities -- and view her GOP opponent as the ultimate object lesson for why we MUST be.

So, perhaps we should thank Hillary’s opponent for starting this conversation. But given the absolutely deplorable part he’s played in it, I will not.