In the last 60 years, women's rights and female equality have made enormous strides. Perhaps nowhere is this better exemplified than in the workplace, where women make up nearly half of the total workforce and are no longer expected to be stay-at-home mothers at a relatively young age.

Yet there are still tremendous advances that need to be made.

One example in popular culture where this societal progression — and the need for more change is shown is the TV drama "Mad Men." The show is mainly about the ups and downs of 1960s life at an advertising agency in Manhattan, but it also touches on many more themes related to society and change during that time.

The first season of AMC's critically-acclaimed, award-winning show is set in 1960. At that time, less than a generation after World War II, just 37.7 percent of all women aged 16 and up were part of the American workforce.

As the show comes to an end on May 17, the second half of the show's seventh season takes place in 1970, by which time women's labor participation has jumped nearly 6 percent and the second wave of modern feminism has started. As of 2014, that number reached 56 percent, actually marking a small decline in recent years.

In the show, the majority of female characters are either stay-at-home moms or secretaries. However, Joan Harris (nee Holloway) and Peggy Olson, the show's two female protagonists, show that times were changing and that women were being entrusted to bigger and better roles.

When we first meet Joan in Season 1, she is head of the secretarial pool. By the start of the series' final half-season, she is a partner in the Sterling Cooper & Partners agency and an account executive.

We meet Peggy as a somewhat-awkward new secretary to "Mad Men" lead Don Draper. By the end of that season, she is promoted to copywriter, and by Season 5, she takes an offer to join another agency as chief copywriter before returning to the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency in a senior creative role after it merges with the rival Peggy has joined.

But Peggy and Joan's advancements in the show aren't indicative of the general population, even in today's era. In the U.S., women hold only about 15 percent of executive positions, even as women are 33 percent more likely to graduate college than men if born in the early 1980s.

Even if you've never watched a single episode of "Mad Men," you're probably aware of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, philandering ways of its male characters, who don't shy away from harassment and sexual objectification.

In Season 5, Joan receives her partnership stake in the agency after negotiating an arrangement where she would sleep with a man with the Jaguar Dealers' Association in order to secure the British automaker's account for SCDP.

In the beginning of Season 1, account executive Pete Campbell seduces Peggy, resulting in a pregnancy unbeknownst to either until Peggy goes into labor. The baby is given up for adoption without Pete knowing. Examples of further harassment or sexual advances in the workplace are strewn throughout the show and in more episodes than not.

While this behavior is less common or overt in workplaces nowadays, 52 percent of women still reported workplace bullying or harassment in the last three years as of 2014. A Cosmopolitan magazine survey reported in recent months that 1 of 3 women aged 18-34 has been sexually harassed at work, indicating that it's not solely a generational problem that will simply go away as the years pass by.

"Today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns," President Barack Obama remarked in his State of the Union address in 2014 on the gender pay gap in America. "That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. ... It's time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a 'Mad Men' episode."

When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the average working woman made 59 cents for each dollar a man made. Significant progress has been made on that front, and the real gap may be less than 23 cents on the dollar when adjusting for certain factors like experience levels. Yet, the fact that one exists at all is a sign progress needs to continue.

It's a testament to show creator Matthew Weiner that he included strong female characters like Peggy Olson and Joan Harris despite the culture of the time and the state of the advertising industry back then. If Joan and Peggy had been born 50 years later, they'd have opportunities to be even more successful than they were. Unfortunately, they still wouldn't have the same footing of their male colleagues.