To ask your opinion on gender quotas

[eatabagofdicks]

After speaking with men who believe that many men are being pushed out of positions they deserve because of gender quotas. What are your opinions? Interested in women's point of view after being in a room full of men all night.

No doubt the Soviet women engineers were as good as the men. However they generally had to come home and do all the housework, and what is more with domestic appliances that were not up to Western standards.

Lets say we want a quota of 30% women. Are we REALLY saying that there aren't enough qualified women out there to meet that quota?

In my role, that's exactly the case.

Women don't have to do this though. They can choose not to have children.

And men can choose to not have sex.

And men can choose to not have sex

Exactly! Because of free will. And the understanding that choices and decisions have consequences. It should not be the role of the state to mop up the consequences of anyone's choices at the expense of other people who had no control over said choices! If you choose to take several extended breaks from work to raise children your career prospects take a hit. If you choose to take a gap year to go travelling your career prospects take a hit. If you choose to go part time because you want to spend more time doing pursuing hobbies your career prospects take a hit. If somebody else becomes more valuable (through accruing an additional year of experience, developing client relationships while you lost yours etc) in your absence, it doesn't matter why you were absent and nobody else is responsible for your decision to be absent. There is no moral or ethical problem with this concept. Just cause and effect.

The state isn't there to negotiate a promotion or a pay rise for somebody who hasn't been at work and try as it might, it cannot micro-manage every facet of our lives individually. Those of us who yearn for an authoritarian government to come along and watch over us to ensure equality of outcome (at the expense of equality of opportunity) will change their minds very quickly when that day comes.

Women aren't penalised only for having children, they are penalised because they might have children. Men, OTOH, tend to be seen as more serious and responsible and therefore managerial if they become fathers.

You can't focus only at the top - you need them all the way through, because you need people who are gaining the experience that means they will be capable of the C-suite jobs. They need to be leading teams, handling high-profile projects and dealing with budgets -especially this last, if you follow what Susan Colantuono says. Women are much more likely than men to miss out on financial mentoring and experience, and without that, it doesn't matter how good your people skills are.

GainIng experience is key in a cumulative way. Give Dave the big project this time, Jane can have the next one. But the next one is really high-profile, and we can't afford to screw it up - well, we know Dave is capable, because he did a good job on the last one, and Jane just hasn't got that experience, so to reduce the risk of things going wrong, we'd better give it to Dave, and Jane can have the next one. And then Dave has gained the experience and profile to get promoted, and Jane is still expected to take the minutes in meetings, because she's good at that... once or twice, it's not such a big deal - you only need so many people to run a project - but over a whole career, the cumulative effects can have a massive difference.

I agree there should be equal rights to paid parental leave - however, on average, men are more likely to be a bit older and in a better-paying jobs than their wives, so in a lot of cases, it will still often be financially better for the household income for the woman to take the bulk of the leave. When a Swedish colleague took a year's parental leave, there were comments from one manager about his lack of dedication to the job, which is not the sort of equality we should be aiming for.

I agree there should be blind CVs (eg names etc) removed.

There should be a lot more awareness of unconscious bias, thing like women being seen as too pushy for asking for a payrise which a man would be expected to ask for. Women being seen differently, and usually more negatively, than men are for the same behaviours - bossy vs natural leader, aggressive vs assertive, that sort of thing. I'm tolerably certain that none of my male colleagues had anything in their reviews about being emotional like I did.

But all that stuff still goes on way too much, so there should be quotas. It doesn't have to be, "you must only interview women," but I know of one place where they won't allow any interviews until there are at least 3 possible women among the list of interviewees - you can still interview men, and obviously they need the skills required for the role. There would be other ways of doing it, too.

It's not easy - I am in a techy department and we currently have a senior tech vacancy, and there just aren't many women applying (which also isn't helped by HR sending through CVs for magazine designers rather Unix sys admins - made me wonder how many people are thwarted by poor recruitment processes.)

There are loads and loads of incompetent male managers out there. Women often have to be far better to be seen as their equivalents. We all deserve better than that, as people who are being managed, a's well as those doing the managing. If it takes quotas to get there, so what? If men want promotions, they're going to have to work for it, like women do, and get there on merit, not just because they're pale and male and play golf with the right people.

Computer scientists in the USSR, and I'm guessing engineers would be similar, - yes there were better figures in terms of numbers of men and women doing it, but it wasn't all equal. Men were more likely to be doing actual computing, and women were more likely to end up teaching it.

In technology at least, the low numbers of women in the workforce is definitely cultural, because it's only experienced in western cultures like the USA, UK, north-western Europe, Australia, NZ, Canada. Areas like India and Asia and parts of the Middle East don't have a gender split like we do. It wasn't really an issue before men realised computing wasn't just glorified secretarial work, but something that money could be made from. All the first programmers were women, and we should have more women doing it now.

Why is the debate on quotas always focused on high end, executive type roles? Why is there no clamour for gender quotas for drain clearers, plasterers, window cleaners, truck drivers (all massively male dominated professions)?

Because women do plenty of low paid work already!

Well if you're in favour of having strict quota for Non Executive Directors on Plc Boards, you should also be in favour of quotas for
Gas engineers
Car sales
Roofers
Tilers
Steeplejacks
Carpet fitters
Mechanics
Plumbers
Electricians
Sewage flushers.

All male dominated jobs ...but there is no reason for them to be...

Your local plumbers could (should?) be forced by the state to take on X percent of female plumbers.

You clearly think this is a comical scenario. Why is that?

Is that directed at me?

I don't think it is comical at all. I am wondering how those in favour of quotas would enforce them. E.g

1. Would they apply to all classes of employers (Plc, SME, public sector, private sector, small businesses, limited liability partnerships etc)?
2. Would they apply to all levels of a job (e.g. entry-level all the way up to top management)?
3. Would they apply to all types of work (e.g. Your local beautician would be forced to employ x% male eyebrow pluckers and your local abattoir would be forced to employ x% female slaughterers)?
4. Would they apply to every function within an organisation e.g. would a courier company be forced by law to have x% female van drivers as well as say the exact same x% female marketing executives?
5. How would you sanction non-compliance? Would your local builder face a a fine if they did not have x% female bricklayers.

Positive discrimination is wrong. That's it.

I wonder why more men don't work as carers in a nursing home on NMW. It's so unfair on men.

I wonder more women don't work as van drivers in courier companies with Zero hours contracts. It's so unfair on women.

Why don't you think about that a bit more, catch. Think about the logistics of paying for childcare for one or more DC on fixed days in a nursery, for a zero hours contract job.

How would you tackle my five questions above sonic?

It's tricky. My dh missed out on a promotion due to gender quotas. It's in banking and she was the only woman at a similar level and as they needed at least one woman in the next bracket she got it. The poor woman didn't even want the bloody promotion and quit a month later. Now they have no women at the higher level or the lower level.

This is in analytical banking and a lot of the problem is there simply aren't enough women who qualify with mathematics from uni. Because not enough women study maths for GCSEs or a levels. It needs to be tackled at that level first.

EBearHug's post sums it all up.

Sexism doesn't start at the interview for the director's or vicechancellor's job. It starts at a much lower level: when the male junior assistant gets assigned the kind of task that tends to lead to promotion while the female junior assistant gets assigned the pastoral and minute-taking jobs. When the male candidate is encouraged to go for promotion and mentored through the process while the female candidate is asked why she wants promotion and is she sure she can handle it?

What we need it a longterm culture where the head of the organisation/faculty understands that it is in his interests to give young Jane the same opportunities as Dave, because sooner or later he will be expected to find room for a certain number of Janes.

I've just read Solaris's link which is supposed to prove that gender neutral job applications don't work. However, it shows that it worked fine for lower level jobs (the bureau of national statistics improved their diversity using this method) but not for senior roles - which suggests to me that by the time you get to senior levels, other forces have come into play which made the female CVs less impressive: a career of institutionalised patriarchy, perhaps?

I'd love to be a plumber or a roofer. Have you ever done any plumbing or roofing, though? I have done both (DIY, not trained) and I was at a massive disadvantage - when we had to use copper connectors rather than plastic (and sometimes we did need to) I didn't have the strength in my hands to tighten them enough to stop them leaking, my husband had to tighten them. I loved roofing, but I can imagine I wouldn't have the strength to carry as many supplies up the roof at once so a job would take me longer and therefore need to be more expensive. So many manual labour tools are designed for male hands, too - I find things like wire cutters hard to manage because my hands are so much smaller than the handles, or require a lot of physical strength to manage well, like floor sanders or heavy duty drills. You can't say it's sexist of women just to be unable to do as many physical jobs as men, that would be like calling them sexist for being unable to beat the top men in sports.

On the other hand, it isn't prejudice in the school system that holds back white working class men, it's social conditioning that it's not macho to study and read and listen to a (usually female) teacher.

Corythatwas
Do you think that is also the case in entry level jobs in say an abattoir or carpet fitters? The reason why almost 100% of carpet fitters are male is because the hundreds of thousands of junior female carpet fitters are unconsciously held back or discriminated against at early stages of the carpet fitting career ladder?

I don't see many carpet fitters running for parliament, or heading up corporations with influence on the jobs of hundreds of other carpet fitters, so the diversity of carpet fitting isn't a big deal. Just like the way there'd be no problem with the lack of men in caring roles if women's work was valued highly enough to be paid a decent rate. I bet a carpet fitter earns a better hourly rate than a carer.

My experience as a man is that I appear to have worked in industries which seem to go against the grain.

Aged 15, my first Saturday job, business owned by a woman.

Aged 18, my first post-school job, my line manager was a woman, her manager was male, department director was female and on the board.

Aged 21, my second job, my line manager was a man, his manager was female, department director was female and on the board.

Aged 24, my third job, my line manager was a woman, her manager was a woman, department director was male and on the board.

Aged 28, my fourth job, my line manager was male, his manager was a woman, department director was female and on the board.

Aged 31, my fifth and still current job after 12 years. My first line manager (six years) was female and of the charity's trustees 75% of them were women. Over the last six years my managers have been male but the ratio on the board of trustees has remained female majority.

What's your point, Shatner?

I have a friend who is a transman who transitioned in his 30s. He says that the better he presented as male, the more his most banal comments at meetings were taken seriously. He tested this by deliberately making inane comments and was shocked to see how well received they were.