I wanted my sons, aged 10 and 13, to see Parton’s star turn in the 1980 social satire 9 to 5. It was a small, private tribute and honestly, I had expected the dark comedy about office life to feel a little dated. After all, it came from a time before #MeToo, before terms like “glass ceiling” and “glass cliff” became shorthand for the limits and pitfalls women face as we try to progress at work.

Instead, the movie felt unnervingly current. The crackling comedic chemistry between Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin remains a pure delight, and the zany plot holds up. So does the film’s indictment of male chauvinism and structural sexism at work.

Parton plays Doralee, a glamorous and supremely competent secretary constantly fending off the advances of her boorish boss, played by Dabney Coleman. Fonda is Judy, a newly divorced former housewife making her anxious entrance into the workplace. And Tomlin is Violet, the office’s indispensable, world-weary single mother—passed over again and again for a promotion by a man she trained, who blatantly takes credit for her good ideas. “I have never seen anyone leapfrog so fast to the top in my life,” Violet wisecracks, “and I have the bad back to prove it.”

Four years after the movie was released, Fortune examined the real-world conditions that gave Violet’s joke its bite in Susan Fraker’s April 1984 cover story, “Why Women Aren’t Getting to the Top.” “Ten years have passed since U.S. corporations began hiring more than token numbers of women” in management roles, Fraker wrote. A decade in, women had made some progress at the entry level and in middle management—but precious few had made it to senior roles.

“There is an invisible ceiling for women at that level,” Janet Jones-Parker, then executive director of the Association of Executive Search Consultants, told Fraker. “After eight or 10 years, they hit a barrier.”

Indeed the numbers were brutal: Only one woman, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post Co., ran a company on Fortune’s list of the 500 largest U.S. industrial corporations, and no other woman appeared to have a plausible path to the corner office.

That needle has moved only incrementally in the four decades since: 55 women are CEOs on this year’s Fortune 500 ranking—a record number, but still just 11% of the list.

Meanwhile, women are still paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, as of 2024; Black women make 63 cents on the dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. And at a moment when affirmative action has been struck down by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration has moved aggressively against DEI in any form, companies are retreating from programs promoting diversity and equity.

As Parton lamented in the song “9 to 5,” “It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it!”

She didn’t let it. Instead, after growing up in hard-scrabble Appalachia, she carved her own path as an artist and businesswoman. Parton built an IP empire, fiercely protecting control of her songs through her publishing companies. And she used her wealth and platform to help others: Her Imagination Library has distributed more than 330 million books to children, while her philanthropy and public advocacy supported LGBTQ rights, vaccine research, pediatric health, and families devastated by natural disasters.

“I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else,” Parton once said. It’s a mantra that holds just as much power today as it did in the 1980s.