She told me about her son, who had begun asking what she did at work.

For years she had answered vaguely because she was too exhausted to explain.

Now she showed him a picture of the team she coordinated, and he had announced that she must be the boss of everything.

I laughed.

Then I thought about how invisible costs accumulate when people are told that their dignity matters less than somebody else’s convenience.

There were still problems.

A new reporting system did not make every complaint easy.