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Sunday, August 7. 2011Permanent gender gap in incomeKay Hymowitz on Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever. Women prefer the mommy track. A quote from her myth-destroying essay:
This did apply to me:
Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss
in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation
at
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Vicki Hearne's Bandit (ignore awful cover blurb - Hearne takes no prisoners) has a chapter "Beastly Behaviors" that is unsurpassed in original male/female differences.
Chiefly that women are not uncomfortable with complexity in the form of unresolved issues. Soap opera depends on it, in fact. Guys are maniacal in abstracting and resolving things. It keeps the wild animals away. You know, if most men in companies even breathed this at work under their breath, they would be hauled up before the company's Sensitivity and Diversity Committee for discipline so fast it would make your head spin.
I myself was banned from attending the mandatory annual consciousness raising seminars.
Bet there is an interesting story or two there.
There was a school principal of the female persuasion whose four year contract was not renewed. The District did not want to reward incompetence. This particular principal didn't worry about the non-renewal, because she was moving on. She had just finished a doctorate in education. She was correct. Those who proved they can't administer can teach it, if they have the proper credentials. Ironically, the subject of her doctoral dissertation was about how difficult it was to be a principal and be female. Staff consensus was that a better phrasing of the problem was that it was especially difficult to be a principal and be female when one was also incompetent. I'll bet you could supplement your income substantially by giving seminars on how to be banned from those things. Good work.
I am the only male nurse in an oncology clinic with 15 female nurses. I can't tell you the amount of overtime I have received because the "girls" have had to leave early to pick up a kid, get a kid to "practice" or just because. Every week I can expect to have the supe frantically scramble to my desk and ask me to stay late. It's gotten to the point that I think the "girls" just expect me to pick up their slack.
Steve Raising children is not only the greatest responsibility in life, it is the most satisfying. And I say that as a man.
As someone said long ago, children are a practical immortality. In my firm, unfortunately men and women attorneys are treated under entirely different standards. Even the staff notice it and negatively comment behind people's backs.
My personal run in was when one of the associates conveniently extended her maternity leave so she wouldn't have to come back and do a trial on one of her cases. The panicked partner in charge pulled me in at the last minute to help him out at the trial, which meant I had to give up my vacation for the year. But hey I'm a guy, so unlike women we are expected to make sacrifices like that. We settled the case on the courthouse steps the first day of trial, and the associate subsequently let the firm know she would be coming back to work after all. Not a damn thing we could do about it. But I will never vote for her for partnership. But I expect she will be gone at that point, or be on a part-time Mommy of counsel track. See similar things all over the place, starting with the "corporate dress code" which usually is far more strict for men than it is for women.
One company I worked at decided to introduce a "dress code" from one day to the next, requiring all male employees (from janitors to the CEO) to at all times wear a 3 piece black or dark blue suit, white or light blue long sleeve shirt, black or brown leather shoes, black or dark coloured long socks, and a monotone dark coloured tie. Announced on a thursday, everyone was expected to comply by monday at the latest. Women were told they could not wear skirts above the knee or sleeveless shirts, that's all. Employees of course ignored this completely, and we got together and sent an email to the board and HR departments that the thing was illegal (as by law, disparate treatment of men and women is illegal and that was clearly the case here). As it was announced by the CEO who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt at the time, with tennis shoes, we also added that we'd dress like board members if we would be paid like board members (on estimate, each of us would need to spend several thousand Euro on suits etc a year, a sizeable portion of our income, this was no lawfirm but an IT firm where hardly anyone except sales staff and board members ever had contact with customers except through email and occasional phonecalls, so noone had more than one suit for special occasions). As to pay, women often get paid more for the same work as compared to men, when taken on a per-hour basis. But as stated they tend to work fewer hours, thus bring in less at the end of the month. This is true whether they have children to raise or not (seeing where I work not, 90% of women work part time, irrespective of whether they have children, vs. only about 10% of the men). |