Feminism? Ha!

[andrewducker]

Some delightfully retrograde replies to the BBC's article on glass ceilings here.

Everything from:

I can only speak on behalf of my wife but I feel there is quite definitely career discrimination against women going off to have a family. My wife lectured at a college of further education and the availability of meaningful career opportunities changed radically when she told them she was pregnant. It was clear that this was all a major inconvenience and my wife is convinced to this day that had her job not been protected by law, she would have been obliged to leave.

to

I used to think that the glass ceiling was a load of nonsense but now that I am in early 30s, I have seen first-hand evidence that it exists. Business has been a traditionally male domain so the qualities that are seen as desirable in order to succeed are male - aggression, single-mindedness, ruthlessness, inability to admit to mistakes. Traditional "female" qualities such as good communication skills and multi tasking are valued but are simply not given as much credence as male ones so the cycle persists.

and

As a research biologist, I found that running a home and doing full-time productive research are incompatible. I could not put in the hours required to furthering my career without entrusting my child to a carer. As I didn't want to have someone else bringing up my child, I elected to put career on the back burner. I'm now fifty and looking for a research position! I would do the same again. I do not know what the answer is - women have the babies.

with the occasional ray of sunshine like:

I'm a male working for a major multinational household brand, and have to say I think this is nonsense. Most of the high positions in management, as well as directorships, are held by women in our company. This doesn't bother me in the slightest, but I don't see any evidence of this so-called glass ceiling here.

Which indicates that there are places where women managers are commonplace.

All three of my managers in my current job are female, as is the head of the company I'm part of. I don't know what the overall situation is like though.

Comments

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Part of it is lazy short term managers. It's true that an employee who will be looking for time off to have a baby is more work for the manager than an employee who won't. But that's why managers are paid more. To deal with these things. Unfortunately, many companies aren't run by good managers.

Also, companies that have lots of women managers will tend to attract women who want to progress which sets up a positive feedback loop. There are a fiar amount of female managers here but they tend to either not have kids or have older kids. The one exception I can think of is someone with a stay at home partner.

I have no solution here, I'm just rambling. I find it depressing, especially as someone who is planning to have kids. Should I stay at the level I am now where I get a fair amount of responsiblity but don't have to work insane hours and accept my pay will stagnant or should I continue to push for progression and expect work to be flexible around me when the kids do come along?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Having had good and bad women managers, and having see others in the good and bad manager situation, and having watched my wife and mother get whacked hard by the glass ceiling, I can say that from my own view, the glass ceiling is still around and very destructive.

What happens is that managerial skills are things that require purpose, planning and a balance of sensitivity and 'people skills'. To get to a managers spot, if you're a woman, you end up overloading on the purpose and planning to the detriment of the other skills.

[code-delphi.livejournal.com]

Australia is surprisingly (?) conservative in this regard, none more so than in the defence industry in which I currently find myself working. The "old boys club" is actually real; not only does it keep the same clique of individuals circulating and in control, but it's an all-male group. No female over teamleader level, and even that was a one-off. Oh, except for HR, of course; plenty of women there.

I've been raised in the generation that gets cognitive dissonance with respect to the concept of sexual discrimination. It just doesn't make sense. I believe that once the current older generation die off or retire, things will equalise in management and in boardrooms.

My own opinion is that gender is generally irrelevent. Men and women are different, with capabilities that complement each other... but that can be extended to individuals of the same gender, too. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Diversity delivers the widest range of talent. Perhaps natural selection will eventually demonstrate that companies with a multi-gender leadership are generally more effective.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Although this may start a flame war... I have been wondering about this issue. It's true that as a society we want women to have babies, it's a fairly important thing... but then we also want an efficient productive workforce.

Let's assume that men and women are equally able throughout the seniority scale in a company. However women are more likely to take large periods of time off than men.

Time off is a natural part of running a business, you can compensate for it in all kinds of ways - but it becomes more and more costly the higher up in the company it occurs. While you can reasonably easily replace someone stamping out widgets on the factory floor with someone else making widgets, someone who has had a ton of cash and time invested into them so that they understand the market, the way the industry is going, etc... has a lot of knowledge and stuff that can't be replicated quite so easily.

So at those higher echelons it naturally means that from a companies perspective women become more costly to them as they get higher and higher in the company. For various (good I think) reasons lobbying and so on has led the government to try to combat this kind of discrimination against women, which by and large companies have been adapting to - but as you get to more senior positions (say 1-5% of a companies employees) it becomes more costly for a company to comply, and also easier for them to ignore (as if they were discriminating against the other 95% of their employees it would be more obvious).

This leads me to conclude that this kind of discrimination is understandable, and a good move (from a game theory perspective for the company itself).

Comments, and flames please :0)

[communicator.livejournal.com]

In life it often occurs that actions which are rational from the point of view of each individual 'game player' result in a composite result which is negative for the system as a whole. Your case would - in my opinion - be an example. So, you are right, that it superficially makes sense to promote those who have long unbroken service. The result though is that you end up with less 'intelligent' (I know that's a problematic term) people in more senior positons, making crucial corporate decisions, because of the accidents of personal circumstances whch have given them long unbroken service. These factors are not only related to gender of course. A lot of able people, for one reason and another, don't get selected under this system.

I think the low quality of senior management in the public and private sectors is a serious issue for western countries (I don't know about other countries). The glass ceiling is an easy to spot manifestation of this wider talent problem.

I don't think this is a flame, though of course you may disagree :-)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, but I still think two things may well be true which still make it a good move for a company.

The first is that while it might not be a good move for the system as a whole (say society), that does not mean that it isn't a good move for the individual company. Of course there is a whole debate here about selfish behaviour and altruism within game theory - but sometimes it pays off to be selfish.

The second is that I don't think its a problem to reject some people on the basis of 'broken service'. As a general rule I'm assuming that men and women are equally capable, but there is a high chance that a woman will at some point in her career take a period of extended leave. This either isn't true for men at all or if it is then the risk with a woman is [number of extended leaves]+1 (or more). If people capable of being managers etc were an extremely rare resource then the additional cost of taking women on board would be compensated for, but I don't think this is the case.

There are a lot of potentially good managers out there, that the training, etc could be invested in - this is improved further by the way that because it is not considered proper for a woman to have such a position women as a whole use up less of these resources (at university, training, etc...).

You say that there is a low quality of senior management in the west. What are you comparing this to? As I see it the companies in the west dominate the global market, so I'd like to see how you're judging that the management is poor.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see how you're judging that management is poor.

Just work for a few years with senior managers, it will be obvious to you. I'm comparing them with the talented and intelligent people whom one encounters in other walks of life. Simple measures like levels of literacy, numeracy, IT skills etc. Not to mention strategic and creative thought, which are obviously more difficult to measure.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I have encountered bad managers myself, but whatever the reason is that there are bad managers it isn't because of a glass ceiling for women. I've seen bad male and female managers, gender doesn't appear to be the cause.

I think the cause of bad management is mainly due to the Law of Crappy People (no internal anchor, sorry you'll have to find for it).