We need more women....

[coleyfish]

If we still had a "grumpy" board I'd put this there, but there isn't so I'm afraid you're stuck with it here.

Is there any end to this never ending plea for more women (enter occupation, sportsman, activity of choice)

I'm getting pretty bored with it all now.

Honestly, women are endlessly butting n on any subject, activity going and claiming that we need more women to do whatever it is and claiming that the main reason don't take part in the first place because men make it so difficult, that it is an intimidating atmosphere etc etc

One of the latest was about Wikipedia.

There aren't enough famous women on Wiki apparently and not enough women wanting to be editing contributors, because its male dominated and intimidating.

Really?


So it isn't because men are just interested in trivial or not so trivial general knowledge stuff?

Just like men are generally more interested in sport.

It's naff all to do with male domination and intimidating atmospheres. Yes, OK women were subjugated for great swathes of history and that is why there aren't as many notable women as men, but what do you expect to happen? Invent loads of women who did loads of important things or what?

I mean really quit it with the endless whinge about subjugation and accept that women aren't actually as bothered about certain activities, occupations, interest etc as blokes.

Coleyfish

[orchard101]

Could agree more Coleyfish and, I am a woman.

As far as I am concerned the best person for the job, male, female, black, white, inbetween, sky blue pink with blue dots is the one who should be chosen.

[Diziet]

All this - 'the best person for the job' is great in principle. In practice 'the best person' is in the image of the person doing the selection, and until we actively challenge this, nothing will change.

The selection bias works in both directions (for example, the overwhelming majority of primary school teachers are women) but in most cases of representation the status quo still overwhelmingly favours men.

[UncleEbenezer]

Your friendly quack UncleE prescribes less Radio 4.

Radio 4 has a quasi-religious mission to promote women everywhere, in all walks of life. They've found some very interesting women, along with others noone would've paid any attention to if they'd been male.

BTW, I concluded quite a while ago that, by Radio 4 standards, I'm clearly a woman. That is to say, I find their tired old stereotype of the male of the species quite repulsive (perhaps I should say offensive), and usually identify with the refreshing contrast they put forward as the female.

The BBC have some rather unflattering stereotypes of young and old people too. The difference is that Vicky Pollard and Victor Meldrew are obvious comedy caricatures rather than something put forward as a serious portrayal.

[Slarti]

Two things on this subject that crossed my radar in the last couple of months.

One was a study of scientists at conferences where they recorded how many follow on questions were made by men and women, how many were actual questions compared to how many were "look at me" comments and forms were completed by all delegates as to how they thought the gender balance of questions was.

Even where there were actually more women at an event, me spoke more.
Men's "questions" were much more likely to be look at me comments rather than requests for further information.
No matter how many women spoke, even if far in the minority, they were perceived as being over represented.


The 2nd was a report on gender neutral recruitment where only candidates initials were shown on application forms and all reference to anything that could give gender clue was removed. Women candidates getting through first level selection increased to on par with men in cases where it had not been the case, allowing for the numbers of each applying.

There is no question, there is bias, unconscious or otherwise, out in the world.

Slarti

[Rhyd6]

It's not just Radio 4 that's on a mission to promote women, it's the new religion on the BBC. This accounts for unfunny women comediennes shoe horned into each and every quiz show, yakking madams on Loose Women and the extremely boring Emily Matlis on anything with a hint of politics.
As a woman I want the best person of whatever sex, colour or creed for the job not mediocreties chosen to fill a quota.

R6

[Slarti]

It's not just Radio 4 that's on a mission to promote women, it's the new religion on the BBC. This accounts for unfunny women comediennes shoe horned into each and every quiz show, yakking madams on Loose Women and the extremely boring Emily Matlis on anything with a hint of politics.
As a woman I want the best person of whatever sex, colour or creed for the job not mediocreties chosen to fill a quota.

R6

I haven't noticed a higher percentage of the women comediennes being unfunny, than men.

As for Loose Women, you can't blame the BBC for that.

Slarti

[Rhyd6]

Of course I can blame the BBC for Loose Women Slarti. If BBC hadn't decided to foist television onto the public in the 1930s and persist with it after the war then there'd be no ITV and we'd be out doing things instead of stuck in front of the gogglebox. In the interest of grumps I can blame everyone.

R6

[Lootman]

we'd be out doing things instead of stuck in front of the gogglebox.

My parents would complain (as we all sat in front of the gogglebox) that it was the death of entertainment and family because, in their day, they'd tell stories or do barn dances or whatever it was they did.

But at least we sat around the TV as a family. Now everyone is on their own "device", typically in different rooms, and I'm the grumpy old fart talkng about the good old days when the entire family watched TV together.

In the interest of grumps I can blame everyone.

And you should. Everyone but yourself, obviously.

[UncleEbenezer]

I'm reminded of my little blog piece, which is almost word-for-word what the press were reporting after one of those studies said we needed more women in top jobs. Oh, and of the fact that the feminists would not be entirely wrong if they were to complain than men have hijacked the feminist Agenda, though it would be most accurate to observe that it's a trough at which both sexes feed.

Equality

Today’s press is full of a report from Lord Davies (for example here and here). He is concerned about the lack of women in the most elevated positions in society, with too many institutions being heavily male-dominated.

Lord Davies, a former boss at Standard Chartered, said recently: ‘If prisons don’t take a radical change in attitude, and intern more women, then we will have to introduce quotas.’ To the disappointment of feminists today’s report stopped short of calling for legal quotas, but where the imbalance is biggest he expects there to be 20% of women by 2013 and 25% by 2015. Our prisons need to improve the diversity of their populations, particularly by recruiting more women inmates.

“Radical change is needed in the mindset of the prison community if we are to implement the scale of change that is needed.”

Prison Federation chief executive Ruth Notaman said: “The news that prisons will not be forced to adopt female inmates to the cells by quota will be widely welcomed by nervous prisons.”

“However, a concerted effort still needs to be made to use female talent, otherwise prisons will be missing out on a vast array of talent at their disposal.”

As well as calling for greater female representation in our prisons, the Lord Davies report asked police and courts to sign up to a code of conduct to increase the number of women on candidate lists.

[Diziet]

As a woman I want the best person of whatever sex, colour or creed for the job not mediocreties chosen to fill a quota.

Do you apply the same 'mediocrity' sieve to men? Given that women are 50% of the population, why not aim to have equal representation? There are plenty of mediocre men out there and we don't seem to cry out about them quite so much.

[coleyfish]

A good example of the sort of bonkers thinking and logic used in this vein.

I was listening to a woman journalist rabbiting on about 18 months ago about the woeful lack of women up for an award at the UK journalist awards.

The logic applied was roughly as follows - the numbers are not accurate but the gist is.

There are 30000 journalists in the UK of which 95% are male i.e. around 28500 to 1500 women.

Remarkably enough the people up for gongs were weighted quite heavily towards women at the awards with something like 20% of the nominations.
Now to me this looks like women are doing well and this should be cited as inspirational to other women who could consider a career in journalism.

But no, apparently because women make up 50% of the population they should have made up 50% of the nominations. Yup that's right I kid you not. The idea that this would have led to female domination of the nominations by a ratio of 19:1 didn't even get an airing. As it was women dominated by a ratio of 4:1, despite the number of journalists being 19:1 in favour of men. No the logic was that the awards should reflect the proportionate potential readership not the proportionate membership of the profession.

The reasons why they didn't?

Go on have a guess?

Hint : Male dominance, unpleasant working conditions, intimidating atmosphere etc etc

Honestly, it's amazing how logic can be skewed when someone is determined to get a bee in the bonnet view across.

Coleyfish

[coleyfish]

Rhyd6 wrote "As a woman I want the best person of whatever sex, colour or creed for the job not mediocreties chosen to fill a quota."

Do you apply the same 'mediocrity' sieve to men? Given that women are 50% of the population, why not aim to have equal representation? There are plenty of mediocre men out there and we don't seem to cry out about them quite so much.

Well I'm a bloke and I most definitely do apply objective equality when considering the abilities of people.

One should never generalise of course but my conclusions in relation to this lead to the following observations

Women do present in different ways to men. They do generally appear less self-confident and less self-assured. One tries to allow for this, as men are often not as capable as they would have you believe, whereas women tend to naturally play down their ability and therefore worth.

Women are more likely to deny responsibility for something that goes wrong. On the other hand men are more likely to claim responsibility for things that go right.

Women tend to come across as more intelligent but more manipulative than men.

These are not value judgements as such, rather they are conclusions reached over many years of experiencing of working with and employing both genders.

That said, everyone starts from the same equal base as far as treatment goes - one simply cannot make the assumption that every man and woman is going to confirm to the mean average.

Coleyfish

[Diziet]

Trying to be objective and actually being objective are very very different things. Unconscious bias is almost impossible to eliminate. When orchestras started doing blind auditions, where the performer was not seen, the number of women musicians in orchestras climbed up. There are stacks of studies with similar findings.

[UncleEbenezer]

Trying to be objective and actually being objective are very very different things. Unconscious bias is almost impossible to eliminate. When orchestras started doing blind auditions, where the performer was not seen, the number of women musicians in orchestras climbed up. There are stacks of studies with similar findings.

It works both ways. In my business (software, if I may oversimplify just a little) people are desperate for more women. So when we recruit, we sometimes see a subconscious process like:

Male Candidate: He's good, but the other candidate was better for the job. So that's a no.
Female Candidate: She's good, but the other candidate was better for the job. Let's see what strings we can pull to fit her in somewhere that'll suit both her and us.

Another blog piece on a not-totally-dissimilar issue (the racial one), when I was recruited to work for an Indian boss:

My recent recruitment to $bigco was, as close as possible in the real world to a perfect case of no-possible-race-discrimination. That is to say, none of the folks who made the decision ever met me in person, and I never mentioned my skin colour to them. They know they’re employing [an expert in my field]: we discussed that at length. But they don’t know my ethnicity.

Of course they can google, they can make a guess. So can I, and my manager’s name strongly suggests that he’s from a very different racial group to my own. So neither of us can be accused of favouring our own kind (unless one of us has made a wrong guess about the other).

Now part of the documentation they expect[1] from me is a racial monitoring form, so they can “prove” they … erm … don’t discriminate. It lets me choose from:

White
Black-Caribbean
Black-African
Black-Other
Indian
Pakistani
Chinese
Bangladeshi
Other (please specify)

Right. One category for white – the vast majority, encompassing warring catholic/protestant communities, and presumably other groups having significant tensions like jew and arab. Not to mention what the ‘merkins call “hispanic”. By contrast, no less than three different categories for black based on their history rather than their ethnicity, and three for south-asian based on country of origin. Seems to me offensive both to the white majority and to the minorities – both white and non-white.

I want the option to describe my race as “human”. But that’s not Politically Correct. Bah, Humbug.

[1] Or rather, that the Political Correctness Police expect of them.

[Diziet]

It works both ways. In my business (software, if I may oversimplify just a little) people are desperate for more women. So when we recruit, we sometimes see a subconscious process like:

Male Candidate: He's good, but the other candidate was better for the job. So that's a no.
Female Candidate: She's good, but the other candidate was better for the job. Let's see what strings we can pull to fit her in somewhere that'll suit both her and us.

If we had similar numbers of candidates coming out of university in technical fields, then this would not be an issue. I work in a technical field and was also a lecturer in engineering for several years. The number of women graduates was small but they tended to be very strong (no wonder, as they had a higher barrier to get there in the first place). My current company has 40% women in technical management roles, which is very unusual as the graduate percentage in the area is around 13%. They have a recruitment model that values talent and tries to remove bias. They don't run quotas. My company is unusual, because representation of women goes down as seniority goes up.

It's only one example, and single examples are of course not statistically significant. But I think the assumption that employing a woman in a field where women are not in the majority is automatically simply a politically correct, quota driven and ultimately questionable decision is very insulting discriminatory in itself (for the record, i am not saying you said all these things in your post, I am getting the gist of several posts). This constant higher barrier gets very tiresome and of course most men don't see it, for the simple reason that in most cases they don't have that direct experience. And, not having the direct experience, any deviation from the current norm is seen as 'unfair'.

One very handy way is to switch the genders when describing a situation. if is sounds ridiculous, then chances are there is conscious or unconscious bias at work, and that affects people's everyday lives.

[coleyfish]

The number of women graduates was small but they tended to be very strong (no wonder, as they had a higher barrier to get there in the first place).

But I think the assumption that employing a woman in a field where women are not in the majority is automatically simply a politically correct, quota driven and ultimately questionable decision is very insulting discriminatory in itself (for the record, i am not saying you said all these things in your post, I am getting the gist of several posts). This constant higher barrier gets very tiresome and of course most men don't see it, for the simple reason that in most cases they don't have that direct experience. And, not having the direct experience, any deviation from the current norm is seen as 'unfair'.

One very handy way is to switch the genders when describing a situation. if is sounds ridiculous, then chances are there is conscious or unconscious bias at work, and that affects people's everyday lives.

Could you explain what this "higher barrier" is? One often hears this or similar claims, yet I'm not sure quite what it is in the context you describe, which sounds like higher qualifications necessary.

I would tend to see the observation you make about female candidates as something different, simply one of a perceived need to be better than the equivalent man and this then translates into trying harder - or just as likely it indicates that women are more focused on the actual reason for studying, than men who can be sidetracked into messing around more easily.

No-one is making an assumption o political correctness as far as I can see, quite the reverse.

It isn't very satisfactory to simply dismiss the struggle that me have in recognising something as being an innate inability to see gender bias. "It's there but you can't see it because you're a man" s a self-fulfilling argument that I don't buy I'm afraid.

Coleyfish

[Slarti]

Now part of the documentation they expect[1] from me is a racial monitoring form, so they can “prove” they … erm … don’t discriminate. It lets me choose from:

White
Black-Caribbean
Black-African
Black-Other
Indian
Pakistani
Chinese
Bangladeshi
Other (please specify)

Right. One category for white – the vast majority, encompassing warring catholic/protestant communities, and presumably other groups having significant tensions like jew and arab. Not to mention what the ‘merkins call “hispanic”. By contrast, no less than three different categories for black based on their history rather than their ethnicity, and three for south-asian based on country of origin. Seems to me offensive both to the white majority and to the minorities – both white and non-white.

I want the option to describe my race as “human”. But that’s not Politically Correct. Bah, Humbug.

[1] Or rather, that the Political Correctness Police expect of them.

Back in the early 80s I worked for a company that, among other things was a supplier to local councils for cemetery furniture.
At the time there were what was joyfully known as "loony left" Labour councils who wanted to know that their suppliers were not discriminating against the local ethnic population. In a company of about 120 our staff included one who's ancestors came from the Indian sub-continent and 2 who's ancestors came from central Africa.
When I completed some of the forms sent to us by these councils, I triggered a visit from a group of councillors ostensible to look at our working environment, but actually to question our staff about our discriminatory recruiting practices.
They were confused when they asked the Asian chap when more of his community didn't work for us and he replied that his Dad was happy running their shop. And were then even more confused when the talked to our African ancestry guys (cousins) who both spoke with relatively heavy Norfolk accents.

As for everything else, we had it covered in one worker. She was a deaf (registered disabled), motorbike riding, master carpenter who lived with her female partner.

These things never change.

Slarti

[bungeejumper]

I was once involved in writing one of the Dummies textbooks, and I ran into an editor who always (but always!) used "she" rather than "he" when talking about somebody whose gender wasn't specified. It was a bit tiresome having every single editorial mention of a truck driver, a soldier or a postperson translated by default from male to female**, but we put up with it right up until the moment when I was talking about an airline pilot, who had been predictably feminised by my editor.

I felt obliged to point out that there are incredibly few female airline pilots in the world. (Around 4,000 out of 130,000.) And there are two reasons for that.

One, to be perfectly frank, is that there are many countries, including most of Africa, where the benighted and male-chauvinistic clientele just wouldn't stand for it - they'd use another airline, which would disadvantage the enlightened employer but which wouldn't make a scrap of difference to the state of the passengers' mindsets. A lose-lose situation. What is an airline supposed to do about it?

The other reason was a bit more objective, and maybe a bit more controversial. It costs two million quid to train a pilot, and only a very small proportion of females ever stay in the job for long enough to make it worthwhile.

One of the principal reasons (wouldn't you just know it?) is that pregnancy is virtual death to an airline licence. If you ever go more than six/nine months or so without flying, your licence automatically lapses. (A slight oversimplification - you can always go back to school and retrain - but bear with me.) So what's an airline to do? After all, the lapsing rule is there to protect the travelling public from out-of-practice pilots. Whereas the demands of motherhood make it damn-near impossible to fit an intercontinental day-shift into the daily cut and thrust of getting the kids to the crèche and back again.

Oh, certainly, there are women who have no familial intentions at all, and who may very well make excellent pilots, but who never get the chance because the airlines aren't prepared to gamble a couple of million on their reproductive outcomes. I can see both points of view, can't you?

** So I made my case to my editor, and she refused to budge from her insistence that all airline pilots should be considered, by default, to be female. She did, however, desist from altering my description of an ordinary piece of street furniture as a manhole. For the life of me, I can't understand why.

BJ

[UncleEbenezer]

One very handy way is to switch the sexes when describing a situation. if is sounds ridiculous, then chances are there is conscious or unconscious bias at work, and that affects people's everyday lives.

Fixed that for you. Gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) is linguistic and applies to words; sex (male, female) is biological and applies to people (and most other life forms).

I regularly do that when I hear the BBC on the subject: their casual anti-male sexism would cause a storm many times a week (maybe day) if reversed. A couple of months ago (end of September) I happened to hear a concentrated dose in their "late night womens hour", and if you reverse the sexism in that, it makes Donald Trump sound right-on politically-correct.