Feminist Pub 14: The Bluestocking, a place for feminist chat and feminists to chat

Yes LordC. It's hard to know from the website, but it seems to be more mentoring and networking with other women, not "how to bust balls". I'm a great ball buster, but it doesn't help me in my career.

Fibonacci you are absolutely right. My employer is very very vaguely thinking about those kind of senior managment targets but I doubt they will actually follow through. It's just one of those things that the think "hm that would be a nice idea". But turkeys don't vote for Christmas, whenever they mention it , it's met with vocal opposition. Why would anyone want change if change will leave them personally worse off, even if it's for the greater good?

Here is my proposed solution for any corporation that might be reading this and really wants to sort out their diversity problem: tell your managers that in five years time there will be diversity quotas, measurable as part of their performance review, and that if they want to be in a good place by them, they'd better start identifying and nurturing the pipeline of junior women in their organization, or start working on attracting them from the outside. They have five years to do this, so no excuses.

Fibonacci I agree with the pay-it-forward approach. I find myself doing that these days.

Katee What sort of "women's thing" is it? I would absolutely refused to go on anything that wants to sort you out because there's something wrong with you due to being a woman, but I would go on things that simply give women space because there are too many male fuckwits around. Though sometimes it's a fine line between the two ... For example, a fellowship for women which recognises that women face more barriers would be a good thing, while a "leadership for women - how to grow a willy" type thing would be terrible..

Our person-in-charge of equality initiatives is a man who does not see any sexism. What sexism? My friend who is a woman got promoted and promoted! > I don't even have any energy left to be angry.

NB that's not to say there isn't a problem with institutionalised sexism - where a woman has all those business attributes and still isn't even looked at because she isn't a "jolly good chap." But the point is that's not the woman's fault for not being assertive or whatever enough, that's the institution's fault for judging her on not being "male" enough.

One of my colleagues posted this TED talk, basically saying "you know all that career advice you get given about coming across as assertive and confident without being ball-breaking? Well, guess what, it's bollocks. That's the minimum requirement for the job, the stuff that any candidate who's going to be taken seriously has to have. The stuff that actually gets you the job is the business stuff - knowing the financial details and the strategic plan. All this stuff about 'lean in' is just so much window dressing."

I now believe that the only way to help is to succeed and pay it forward: find younger women to mentor and make sure that your teams are diverse. The women's groups, as you say, I found to be whitewashing of women's problems; they all ended up being 'well you women are not succeeding but it's because you are not doing the right things, let us throw some training at you to see if that will fix YOU'.

Ooh Fibonacci, I am having an argument with myself about this at the moment, there is a women's thing that my work is offering sponsorship for, I am in two minds about applying as I feel like something needs to be done, but I don't know if it's actually going to make a difference. It is kind of like "let's give the women a few biscuits and a place to talk about how they have the potential to be leaders, and that will leave us men free to get on with doing the actual leading". A bit torn at the moment! The deadline is on Friday so I had better make a decision. I feel like I should throw myself in because if no one shows willing nothing will ever change. But I've shown willing before and all that happens is I get a reputation

I had a huge rant about our "Women's Network". Basically, they have taken a description of something exclusionary that helps men to get ahead (networking over golf, whatever) and thought that simply by applying the name to a group of women in a room, they would help us to genuinely network in a way that would advance our careers. I called bullshit!

Also, they got someone in to give a talk on neuro-linguistic programming (aka snake oil and quackery). Why do women always get dumped with the woo? In an organisation where a lot of us have science PhDs, it's fair to say a number of us were underwhelmed.

I jumped over briefly to the thread about a women's group at work and stopped myself from typing out my advice, which would be: don't join them, they are too often seen as 'that thing that needs to be done to keep women quiet' and I personally missed out on a big promotion thanks to one such group (I kid you not). So from now on, I stay away like the plague.

I only read the beginning of the thread. Does it go downhill?

Yes, and the "yeah but what can we do about these dinosaurs who make sexist comments?" Well, call them up on it - otherwise they and people around them think it's acceptable. And you know, they arrest dinosaurs too eg. Harris et al.

Exactly, Katee. This would be such a good learning opportunity for that boy, and I feel like his parents are trying to ruin him by fighting the school so much.

The thing is, the poor boy sounds like he has the right kind of thought process to learn from this and be a very good citizen and not make racist comments off the cuff. He doesn't stand a chance of that if his parents are up in arms trying to minimize things when he does actually say something racist.

It's why it is so important to pull people up as and when comments are made, otherwise they think it's ok. It's why people I know think it's ok to make quips or comments that are incredibly misogynistic, and that I should get over it as it's not as bad as, I don't know, Boko Harem. It all starts somewhere.Bigots are made, not born.

I just read that racist boy thread.

I am actually speechless.

The "racist boy" thread is making my blood boil

It's bloody awful. I really thought this kind of thing didn't go on anymore but it seems I was too optimistic. It's so depressing how casual and minimised it is.

I have friends who make derogatory sexist comments all the time. I am not white, they don't say anything racist to me very often but I think that's only because they fear getting their heads kicked in by a black man if overheard being racist. They don't fear women.

Katee - I'm so glad you've pointed that out. I was just about to say the same thing. Mind you, it explains why the technique of "substitute black/white for woman/man and see how it reads then" never seems to get the point across to these people - it's because they're racists as well as sexists.

It's such a depressing thread, isn't it.

So it seems that there is some overlap in the gross victim blaming thread and a thread where people are trying to justify racist behaviour and comments. Quelle surprise.

I really don't know why MN has a reputation for being full of raving liberals...

How's your head DrAnnie ?

Well, it's awful I'll grant you, but only one pic seemed to violate FB's standards to me so I reported it. But while the whole page is full of misogynistic shit, I'm not sure it's actually something that can be reported.

Ugh!

Anyone of FB fancy reporting a page? Most of you know about my military connection, but this shit is just appalling. I've already reported and been told it doesn't breach FB's code for nudity.... which is odd, given the pictures of naked women on it... anyway here it is

Just need to find a tame RMP to report it to, because some of the pics look like the woman is passed out to me...

Congratulations, Annie!

Congratulations DrAnnie

Congratulations DrAnnie - well done. Really pleased that all your hard work paid off!

Woo woo Annie! Great news! So pleased for you!