The women on The Apprentice

generalise about, even

I don't think you can generalise to men and women from this.

The all male groups have been useless in previous series. It depends on the individuals, not their sex. One group is going to lose whatever happens.

Is it too much of a stretch to link this to the "Spiders and varying levels of patheticness" thread? I'm thinking that if you put people together with strangers, they're likely to follow the social roles they're familiar with, and that might especially apply to young people who know there are TV cameras rolling.

So the men do their macho blustering but eventually get some kind of work done. And the women nip at each other and work much less effectively. And the production crew, seeing a good story with familiar roles, the kind the audience loves, encourage them and maybe exaggerate things via editing.

Mind you Lord Sugar is very often sexist in his final choice of Apprentice, picking fairly mediocre men over talented women.

Hmmm, I thought that all the Apprentice demonstrated was that women can be just as big pillocks in business as men can.

When the men are useless as has happened in quite a few of the series, nobody feels the need to draw conclusions about their whole sex. That should apply to women too.

2 tasks is not a big enough sample size to see which team is better.

Even after 100 tasks, all you could say is that a particular team is better at doing "Apprentice-like tasks", not that they are better at "business" (whatever that means).

Both teams seem pretty bad, actually.

I don't think the men come off any better, and even if they did, I'm not sure what that signifies. That the men they selected are better than the women? So what?

What I don't like in the show is the failure to examine wins, comb through them for ways the result could have been better or ways in which individuals dropped the ball but the team won in spite of it, or to identify factors that contributed to the win that lay outside of anyone's control.

Who wins and loses those tasks is only a measure of who wins and loses those tasks. It doesn't mean whoever wins is somehow better at business.

All the people making decisions on orders last night were men. So they may well have seen themselves where I am seeing idiots, and respond accordingly.

The tasks don't take place in a vacuum either.

I do agree with a lot of what has been said here, but facts don't lie and they have lost BOTH TIMES so far!!!

What is wrong with products for babies or children? The woman who dreamed up Spanx is a millionaire many times over.

I agree that there is a lot of jargon and long (and sometimes wrong) words spouted by the men, purely to impress one another and establish their places in the pecking order (this has to be established before men in a group can do anything).

Whether that is impressive to the viewer depends purely on the viewer really, ditto the presentation of the women's group dynamic or individual abilities -- if you buy the line that appears to be peddled by the editing and conclude Men = confident, articulate, clearheaded about numbers, good at business/Women = catty, fussy, tetchy, muddled and not good at business maybe you have a predisposition to not let women win for losing. The heavy editing that gives the public the usually accepted narrative is hostile to women at worst and irresponsible at best. A shame, because this concept has the potential to challenge the accepted script.

Obv people here on this thread are a bit more conscious of what is being presented and why, but most people will just have their prejudices reinforced, which is a real pity because every negative portrayal of women has an impact.

YY the vegetation! We were a bit at that one too

Yes! You've reminded me. I muttered at that bit too. Women pick a project leader and get on with it, of course with the editing showing a 'woman scorned'. Men dick about with handshake showing what businessmen they are.

And (now I've started) the lying on the men's team. The 'oh yes we checked but that product already exists'. Liar! Although tbf one of the other 'boys' did seem pick him up on that.

I also muttered at the ridiculous use language to try and impress 'you put the vegetation in here'. Vegetation? You mean food waste. Vegetation does not make you sound like a clever executive if you have any life experience at all.

They also shook hands an awful lot, Alice, and in such a manly fashion. DH and I ended up turning it into a drinking game...

I have no doubt the apprentice perpetuates sexism as it isn't in a vacuum. But I find I spend a lot more time thinking what idiots the 'boys' are, they are so full of meaningless business lingo and bullshit. But then I have little time for business bollocks. So maybe that has a bearing on it.

Me and my partner were discussing more how the guy who kept saying 'good questions' in an utterly disingenuous way had no idea with how to deal with someone with a lot more life experience who would know his onions, and would not be impressed by a patronising twerp.

And they focused on the 'boys' sidelining the guy who came up with the idea.

So 'ladies' bad at figures, 'boys' bad with understanding people. Stereotypes. But does if make the 'ladies' look worse? It depends on what you think is more important. I'd say you have accountants to do your numbers for you, but if you're a jumped up twerp, you're a jumped up twerp. So do the 'ladies' look worse or is that only if you look through a particular lens of what 'business' looks like

Is one of the contestants called Kate Hoppen? or Katie Hoppen or something?

no doubt

Why didn't they come on here and use us as their focus group? They'd have been left in do doubt about how shit their product was.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people who recruit for this, consciously or subconsciously, recruit more capable men but don't recruit the most capable women (just reading in The Gender Delusion and reading about how people like confident, competent men in work scenario, but are put off by similarly confident, competent women). As pp said, sexism is popular. And I agree that the editing could completely skew things.

That said, haven't seen it. Watched a bit of the first and second series, but can't bear it any longer.

The girls team have doen products for babies/children two weeks running now. And are defendign their decisions with 'well i am a mother'. cringe.

Editing can't make people say things they didn't say in the first place though, and they did go into Amazon, offer them a million products for their first order and seem extremely unclear on their margins in that specific moment. Which is a bit shit as was the product

It's entertainment. I wouldn't be surprised if much of it is staged as well as carefully edited to match what they think will draw in the viewers. Sexism is very popular.

This made me cringe too. I had never watched the Apprentice right from the start before, so had never seen the "ladies" against the "boys" before.

Painful viewing.

I don't like the 'ladies' versus the 'boys' either.