wtf are work thinking?

[LadyRainicorn]

I work for a financial services firm. It's usually run by a group of old white men but the current CEO elect (or whatever the title for the incoming leader the UK leadership board is) is a woman.

They produce a lot of reports. Coinciding with international woman's day, they did a report on women in business globally.

At the end of the report they made 12 recommendations on how to get more women into business. All well and good. Except 3 were for women. They were basically, act like men. Why? After a report saying that changing the old structures would be beneficial you just want people to mold themselves to perputuate it?!

And the final recommendation was to 'challenge discrimination in your workplace'.

Yes of course. Silly me. All these men discriminating against me because I forgot to ask them not to!

No fucking recognition of the work women put in to get any where in businessin the first place then. Or in some parts of the world, educated.

Yy Moving.

If those recommendations for women had been left off I don't think I would be as bothered by the report.

Why not recommended 'have faith in your own worth'? Instead of piling on more work women have to do to be better?

The first statement can apply to any one. Your second statement doesn't make much sense , particularly as you haven't said what all the recommendations were.

I'm not sure why you are so angry at the suggestion of pointing out discrimination. Isn't that the whole point of the concepts of everyday sexism/ institutionalised racism? It's the people affected who notice things which impact on them where there's no deliberate attempt to be sexist or racist but it's not been thought through.

Because challenging discrimination in the workplace can and does get you sacked? (As I mentioned earlier I brought this up at work, with named examples, I can't be fucked to do this on a chat thread now)

Because of an odd feeling that saying to the oppressed group that the solution is to ask to stop being oppressed is just not quite right.

My comment on knowing your worth was coming from the whole imposter syndrome, only appying for things when you know you can prove you're better than anyone etc. We should stop this shit. We are already good enough, we don't need to flog ourselves into the ground to prove things to people who aren't listening anyway. So be secure that we are worthwhile, our contributions have meaning and get on making the world spin. Maybe add another about networking/collaboration with other women working same way you are to achieve things outside traditional office hierarchy presenteeism power structure.

There is a massive blind spot about how badly women can be punished for being ambitious, demanding or confident. Men who behave confidently and are rewarded for it can dish this advice out to women, complacently, without realising how high risk it can be for women.

traditional office hierarchy presenteeism power structure

It's remarkable how many of our recent redundancies were home workers; the ones I know of, at least. I don't know if statistical evidence would back it up, but it's the impression I get.

Now I have spit some feathers here and at work on this I feel slightly ashamed.

The report is shallow.

The recommendations for women are ill thought out and patronising.

But my firm isn't as bad as the industry standard. The us branch was in the top 50 for women friendly companies. They have revamped flexible working policies, overhauling parental to make it parents instead of mothers, there's a big emphasis on looking at why you are in the office if you are not actually meeting anyone - and indeed, looking at different ways of meetings and collaborating on projects across offices.

I mentioned I'd critiqued the report - this was on a platform where the slt had presented it and asked what we thought. I think the intention was to get better conditions for women and flexible workers in our department so after that I did go back and give suggestions for improvements in how we work. Which people read and commented on (fuck knows what'll actually happen...)

I've been offered flexible working to cope with shit life events at the mo as well, which I can see not happening at other firms.

They are in no way perfect but they are making an half assed effort.

The shit companies who want to be better keep folks like me in business so keep plugging away

Maybe they've already engaged you? The average profile of partners is scary though. Middle aged to old. White. Male. Most of the guys running our regional department have the same first name even (it's a little creepy).

I wish I could find something on proportion of directors in the public sector, by sector. It should be fairly easy to compile as all members of the board and senior management need to disclosed, governance structures are disclosed etc. etc. Anecdotally I know a fair few directors of finance (given the nayure of my work that's my entry into these organisations) and also senior accountants that are female.

My company has won awards in the USA for being women-friendly. In many ways, they deserve it. But it does depend massively on the department, and there are departments which appear to have missed out on the culture they're trying to inculcate - which (unsurprisingly) are the departments with the worst diversity etc. The techier departments appear to be some of the worst, which I suspect is partly because they need people with particular technical skills, which are valued far more than any soft skills to do with communication and so on.

My department is one of the rubbish ones.

Two people I know were both arranging compromise agreements for maternity related discrimination while their employer was launching an actual award and being feted in the media for supporting women in the workplace. It was worse because the discrimination was systemic and institutional but it just happened that these two knew enough about employment law to take advantage of the situation to their benefit, instead of just quitting like most of the others.

That was fun.