The women on The Apprentice

[WidowWadman]

Second week of men vs women, with me watching from behind the sofa and cringing badly.

Both weeks the women's team explicitly shows lack of any acumen when it comes to the finance side of the project, and concentrates on coming up with a pretty crap product and bickering and stitching each other up.

Is it the editing? Or have they purposely recruited female canditates who showed no interest in margins?

It will get better once the teams are mixed up, but the current set up just screams "women can't do business".

I just wonder whether that's by design or accident.

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!!!

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.

The first week they had no obvious strategy - 3 sales people hanging out together at the same spot taking turns? Really? It was a nice design, but they were more busy faffing than focusing.

This week they've not only shown (again) that they didn't think costings were relevant in the design process, but completely failed to understand the brief. A bath toy is not a household product. It's pretty obvious that Lakeland wouldn't be interested. (And they wouldn't have bought the tap cosy either) Nor do they display particular good teamwork

The blokes do use a lot of jargon, but they also seem to look much more at what the aim of the tasks is..That's all part of being good at business.

I think the teamsplit by sex exaggerates the impression that this is a "women are crap at business" thing, but so far there seems to be the bigger amount of numpties in the women's team. I believe that it's because they're numpties, not because they're women, but it grates me that the editorial choices feed prejudice.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

generalise about, even