I am not Feminist

[Muslim786]

I would like to mention several facts about feminists. Agree or not, at least try to ponder about it:

1. Feminists are rude

1. They tend to be rich or upper middle class

1. They over-analyze everything which men do. So now a man cannot even open his mouth to pass a little comment or say something ordinary without thinking twice or thrice how his feminist-influenced wife will scream "misogynist" and create an argument out of nothing.

1. Feminists want political power

Now before you swarm me with negative comments (I hope I'm wrong in anticipating that) I would like to say that the feminists of old days were much better. They were concerned with human dignity and good treatment of women. They deserve to be saluted. Why modern feminists are not willing to negotiate or compromise?

Please I am asking this question very sincerely and do not want to create any kind of social disturbance.

LassUnparalleled dh is corporate lawyer by trade, and many is the time I have found myself saying, 'and why does this have to complete by Friday exactly?'

I can accept the rush at the end of the financial year, but 90% of the rest of deadlines are just dick-waving, and the real answer is because the buyer has decided they want to complete by then, but also want to take every tiny point and have it massively probed, negotiated and explained.

There's a reason that my 'go to' quotes are from the likes of Lady Hale or Lord Neuberger.

Law is frequently quoted as a profession that cannot accommodate anything other than a culture of presenteeism and yet there are plenty of progressive, forward thinking legal firms who manage to thrive on early finishes on Friday and homeworking. And those are the ones seeing a rise in the number of female partners.

We can all moan about how it's not possible or we can look for solutions instead of reinforcing the barriers. IMO.

I'll join you OP in admitting I'm not a feminist either, but in my case it's because I don't want men to define what feminism is, I'd prefer to leave that up to women. What I am is a feminist ally and this section of MN has taught me so bloody much it's unbelievable, it's been a real eye opener. I know it's not their job to help me but they have in so many ways, and lazy old me hasn't had to do any proper research, I've just found it here. Awesome. FWR is honestly my favourite section of this massive site, and yes I've made mistakes and have rightly been pulled up for it, but I've learned from them and hopefully all I've learned helps my daughters become better feminists.

You deserved to get banned, you were after all a goady fucker.

On the subject of 'best person gets the job', I'm a bit torn. The reason can be summed up by the question 'who is the best'. It is rarely the person who can perform the technical aspects of the job well who will get it. It is the person who the interviewer(s) most 'click' with. On the one hand, my dh and I have been rejected from jobs for which we are the best candidate on these grounds and it is bloody soul-destroying knowing that you won't get on because you can't gossip for an hour about football or because you're the wrong social class. On the other hand teamwork is important and being able to get on with your colleagues is too.

This is one of the reasons why we have interviews at all rather than just recruiting by paper. Really all recruiters should be aware of their own biases and try to consider other matters such as increasing the 'life experience' of a team, but hardly anyone does.

Selection by gender is one extreme edge of this. I'd guess race is too, and certainly social class is a factor. Of course an unaware middle class male is always going to select another middle class male whom he can relate to easily. And thereby, unless there is a self-aware balancing act, the life experience of a team and then an industry is compromised. And whole social structures are reinforced, such that social mobility ceases to exist and women and ethnic groups are forced into menial positions.

Actually now I've written this down I'm not torn at all, quotas are a good idea, as is training everyone who is a recruiter to be aware of and correct for their own bias and consider the full needs of their teams. Not going to happen in small companies of course!

Im very much torn on this argument.

I believe quotas are wrong and that the best person should get the job. I certainly agree with blind selection for interview (which is very common nowadays) and I agree wholeheartedly that women are just as capable as men. But to give a woman a job just because she is a woman is wrong and does us a great disservice. If there are two completely equal candidates, one male and one female then perhaps but it is unlikely to be the case that they are completely equal in every way.

The comment about law firms accommodating females by allowing flexibility and home working also misses the point. Why should a woman be allowed to leave early on a Friday just because she is a woman? If we are all leaving early on a Friday (men and women) then great, but why are we as females special?

I say all this as the owner of a boutique law firm who was a partner in two very large law firms previously. I now work from home and am currently "working" in my PJs. That's fine because if I don't work I don't earn anything so its my choice. However I have worked with many female lawyers over the years who thought it was fine to walk out at 5pm to collect the DCs and then switch the phone off, leaving everyone else there until late finishing a project or a deal. That isn't on.

I have no idea whether I'm a feminist or not and am confusing myself the more I post!

I think the best person to get should get the job too, but I don't think we can view it in such an insular fashion. The automatic default of society in the Western world at least, is to 'prefer' white, male heterosexuals this applies across the board. If quotas are a way of evening up the playing field and rebalancing the standard default bias then I support them fully.

I also think this applies to all groups who are discrimnated against when that discrimination is unwarranted.

Massively paraphrasing from Cordelia Fine here, but her book includes some studies in which precisely the same CV was given to assessment panels, just with the name changed from male to female.

The very qualities that the assessors thought would be go-getting, ambitious and useful to the job for 'Kevin' were seen as offputting in 'Karen'.

Yep, that sounds fair...

The last time we had quotas in employment law was for disabled employees. That disappeared a very long time ago since it didn't work.

I entirely agree that there are still barriers to be broken down, and yes absolutely I can see that what can be seen as a desirable quality in a male might be seen as off-putting in a female. Blind interview selection minimises that problem to an extent but of course the subconscious bias can then come in at interview stage.

I am not for one moment saying there is no discrimination (I'm a discrimination lawyer!). I'm simply saying that giving a job to someone who is not the best candidate simply because they are female is not the way to resolve the problem and like it or not, females on the whole tend to want to be "accommodated". Myself included. But until this changes we are going to find it more difficult to be treated in exactly the same way as men.

" I'm simply saying that giving a job to someone who is not the best candidate simply because they are female is not the way to resolve the problem"

Does this ever happen though? Sure I've read stories in the Daily Mail and other similar publications, but I'm sure any half decent selection process wouldn't use quotas as a standalone tool. It would be part of a whole array of other assessment criteria surely?

Are you saying that women need to stop asking to be accommodated, Prepper? Do you mean around family life? Maybe men need to start demanding that they need their family commitments to be accommodated instead.

blistory

No, I'm saying we, as women (myself included), do ask to be accommodated around family life and men typically don't.

If we all had early finishes to accommodate school pick ups etc then fine but that doesn't happen. Men don't typically ask to be accommodated in this way.

My DH is a partner in a law firm and would love to work part time. We could afford for him to work part time since I'm by far the higher earner and it would bring massive benefits to our family. But he doesn't ask to work part time because it would have a very negative impact on his career. Women typically expect to ask to be treated more favourably and for it not to have an impact on their career.

This isn't "right" but it is simply a fact that men don't ask to be accommodated as frequently as women do. That then impacts on an employer's perception of who will be the best candidate for a job when neither the male or the female candidate is known to them.

I really am not saying this is right but I am saying there are reasons for it and some of those reasons are understandable. We need to resolve the situation but IMO its not as simple as saying we need quotas and women should be given preferential treatment.

Squeezy good cartoon but I am a grown woman and as tall and as capable as the adult in that scenario.

Blistory was looking for the image to illustrate a point earlier, it wasn't a comment on your capability, prepper.

don't worry I didn't think it was directed at me personally.

I meant women are grown up and capable. To illustrate the quota point with your picture, it would have a woman at the end on a crate lifted higher than the man.

I'm sure any half decent selection process wouldn't use quotas as a standalone tool.

Unfortunatelly i have seen this in a competitive field in a competitive organization. Candidates of a certain demografic were basically given priority over everyone else. And it was a very black and white thing, so you are either in or out. So the offers went to one person from this demografiic and some other ppl. To say that the one person selected from that group was significantly unqualified would be a huge understatement. I think it was a diservice to the qualified ppl from that group as a whole.

And i think the same thing can happen if quotas like x percentage of the new hires have to be from this group are imposed.

wouldn't the OP be delighted to know he'd prompted such an interesting discussion

Thanks Nolim, I stand corrected then.

I still think quotas should be used as a tool in the selection process, though how that is implemented obviously needs a lot of work in some cases. The problem they're trying to address needs to be tackled either way and I can't see the status quo changing without using quotas.

I'm hopeful they will only be transitionary to a more equal society. I'm an optimist when it comes to people!

I read an interesting research study (I will try to find it) which said that interviews are a very poor way of selecting. The best way is to get people to do the job for a period of time and assess capability, followed by practical testing, followed by paper selection. Interviews came last, and this was attributed to unconscious bias by selectors.

I'm sure that is a better way but in reality organisations would be unable to afford to do that and there would be issues around exposure to client information etc, disruption, training. Plus those people would become employees and would have to be paid etc and would gain employment protection rights.

Nice idea but pie in the sky.

But demonstrates why women are more likely to succeed through working their way up and proving themselves and their commitment.

But we can't work our way up either can we prepper? Doesn't work. The stats show it. And 'demonstrating commitment' do you mean by not having kids? There is a thread about commitment after kids somewhere... Linked with your comment about needing to be accommodated it sounds like you think children and childcare are still the woman's problem, not both adults' (sorry if not the case, just sounded like it). That is the prevailing attitude, and it is just plain wrong.

As others have said, the trouble is that it's not necessarily the best person who gets the job at the moment. Remember the orchestra experiment? If candidates auditioned behind a screen, women were several times more likely to be the winners in the final round. So either screens make women magically play a lot better, or they would be seriously disadvantaged otherwise.

Not at all. In fact in our family DH does more than his fair share of the running around dealing with stuff for the DCs. He does the morning school run every day, goes to every school event, is a taxi service in the evenings and when the DCs were little we took it in strict turns to get up in the middle of the night even to the extent that he would go and fetch the crying baby to bring them to me to be breastfed and then take them back once they'd fed and settle them again. In fact he's pretty much all around fabulous and that's the way it should be IMO. I choose to collect the DCs from school and down tools in the afternoon for a while but that's because I personally feel its important for our family, DH would probably rather I carried on working and earned more money!

By "demonstrating their commitment whilst working" I mean that it is far easier to be promoted from within since you have already proven to your employer that you work hard and get the job done, which at the end of the day is all most employers want.

In reality it should be that we all get to work in a more family friendly way, whether male or female - but there's a limit to the extent to which that can happen.