Feminist Pub 16: where the Bluestockings develop armoured stockings to deal with the thousand paper cuts

Working for a charity, in health and social care, we're about 99% women. Men are a bit of a novelty, and quite a lot of women in my office have an annoying habit of treating them as senior, and deferring to them as such, when they actually aren't.

Didn't think much of it at the time, as it was my first job after uni (started as a graduate trainee.) What I have noticed in the 15 or so years since is that the numbers appear to be getting worse - the techy departments in my current company have fewer women , like the when the one female network engineer left, she wasn't replaced (headcount freeze). Nor was the one female DBA - so the place becomes more male.

I think one of the problems with the leaky pipeline is that these roles do require specific technical skills - and if you take time out (maternity or period of unemployment or whatever), it can be difficult to break back in, because you don't have the skills now being asked for, because you weren't there when everyone else was getting training.

Yes Ebear, I used to work in a large bank and the male:female ratio was totally screwed by what we used to call the girl ghettos - HR, Communications and Retail. Their numbers would be around 70% female at a guess.

Mind you, during my ten years there, every single one of those divisions was headed by a man...

EBearHug, but those are total figures, right?

No - they were departmental figures for unix sys admin. Don't know the overall figures for previous employers (one investment bank, one public sector), then or now.

My current place is about 23% women overall, which is about average for tech companies - but our division (very techy) is around 8%, and it is indeed balanced out by HR being 49% (or possibly 51%.) We do have an above-average number of women execs (not that you need many to be above-average), but there's about 5 layers of men between me and the next woman in my direct line of report - plus once you're at that level, it's all US-based, so it just feels impossible most of the time.

Sudden intake of breath. Of course! Doh.

Annie I suspect LRD is onto something there if that's the case with your PhD. Utterly infuriating. It may also be a different hiring manager within same dept so might have no idea how well you interviewed before

Sudden intake of breath

Sucking In Of Breath is my guess, from context.

annie, did you have the PhD when you applied for this one? My memory is you didn't first time around, but maybe you (just) did for this one? Because, if it's a lower ranked job and you're one qualification-level up, it might be they don't want you for that reason. Which is a real thing, intensely infuriating as it sounds.

What's an SIOB. I am behind the times, clearly

Does anybody listen to Bridget Christie Minds The Gap on a Thursday evening? She made a joke the other week that if told by a man would be considered offensive, but told by her it was met with a SIOB then raucous laughter.

At the end of a rant against vaginoplasty, porn and why porn is to blame she said "vaginas are like snowflakes made of gammon."

I like her. Her style is wordy but not overly worthy and she makes good points and is bloody funny.

Well exactly lordc, and anyway, is that a good reason not to promote equality? It's like some people forget what society and te human race is when faced with a P&L. (I feel the same way about people talking about children being a lifestyle choice)

Somebody or other at Davos said there is no evidence that equality brings prosperity (something in the Guardian last weekend). Seeing that we've never had equality it seems a bit difficult to prove anything ...

When I worked for an investment bank - well, it's a while since I've worked with that many women. It was probably around 30%. (Don't know the current figures, and they've had massive organisational changes since I left.) My current department is about 10%, though that includes one woman doing an admin role rather than techy stuff.

My current employer was talking about having some sort of agreement with customers, to encourage them to promote diversity, but I don't remember the details, nor what its progress is...

Sorry, my post wasn't clear - I meant phone feedback but I see now it was all in the letter!

Like I said, they said I had a valuable skill set that would be very useful to them. But the letter was from another HR person.

I have considered writing "Oi! Last time you said 'XYZ Annie is Awesome' but this time you aren't even offering an interview. Whazzup with dat shizzle?" But I fear it would make me look unhinged, and I would just get more "higher calibre of candidate this time around" brush-off and ruin any chances of ever being considered for other jobs.

Ah, when you were turned down last time did you get any feedback from anyone? Whose name was on the letter?

I don't know who the manager making the decision is, Yonic. I don't remember names from when I had the interview.

Though I agree it's worth pushing further up the food chain. Various recruiters refused to put my CV forward for another job, so I applied directly to the company and got an interview.

Your job sounds rubbish Puffins. Have you got something new lined up.

Annie, did you go via HR or to the person durect?

I was once turned down without interview by HR, got the job fr the manager making the decision!

Crikey, puffins. That's horrible.

annie - sorry, that's rotten.

I won't be working here for too much longer, thankfully, and once I leave I will be doing a mahoosive and somewhat public grievance.

I have been really shocked by some of the casual sexism/racism/ablism today and in the past. It's a horrible, horrible place to work if you have any morals at all.

anyway - inclusion can not only open up the field to include ALL the most talented people, not just the most white male ones - but it can REALLY keep wages down and profits up. That should mean we all have a better chance of getting to the higher paid jobs but all start from a lower point, so some white men might miss out, but other people gain from it.

there's load of economists who write about how truly meritocratic companies would have no bias in them at all as that is the cheapest way to ensure that wage costs are kept as low as possible. However, the history of organized labour and pay disputes demonstrates that even the workers want to collude with management to keep certain groups (women, people of color) away from equal pay, so many disputes are settled by convoluted agreements which effectively discriminate and maintain the status quo.

I've lost the details of the books I read this in (and they were BIG books from the university library, so they. were. right.) as I didn't use that info in the paper I was researching at the time.

IT always drives me mad when threads come up about equal pay and people pile in saying 'that's ridiculous, no company would be so stupid to pay a man more if they can get a woman for less'. Not only are there huge numbers of statistics proving that women get paid less, but it's just a really wantonly blind attitude to discrimination and how it works.