Barbara Hines is familiar with tough choices. Growing up in Kansas surrounded by three brothers and a father who said he wasn’t going to pay for college because “women should be bookkeepers and secretaries,” Hines needed to decide if she had the stuff to run her own company.
She does. For 28 years Hines has been the owner and president of SSD Technology Partners in Wilmington. Compensatory inequality, she says, is particularly apparent in her industry of IT. Nonetheless, she’s hopeful that time is going to finish bridging a gap formed long ago.
“I think it’s going to take just a little more of the younger generation to end this whole discussion,” says Hines. “Some still have that older mindset that men should make more. That they are the breadwinners. If you’re my age or older, you may have been brought up that way and think that way, so when a woman comes in the door you think of Suzy Homemaker, not a primary breadwinner. But that’s not going to last much longer. At least I hope not.”
