Men at Work!
September 5, 2003
by Bernard Chapin
Over
the weekend, when I finished “The Myth
of Female Supremacy,” I thought that I had said all I needed
to say concerning the topic. Then a reader, and a fine fellow at
that, sent me this slanted,
foolish article concerning women making better managers in
the workplace, and I quickly realized the siege guns needed to be
rolled up to the front again.
This particularly deceitful column is called “Marketing Intelligence”, and is subtitled: “Why Women Make Better Managers.” They should have called the piece “Why Bill Gates Gets Scammed Every Time He Makes a Hire.” I have no idea why Slate and msn.com have the majority of their positions filled by trendy, politically correct cyborgs but it seems highly unlikely that the situation will ever change.
She begins by informing us that more and more women are becoming top managers in the present age, and that equality with men does not preclude women bringing unique gifts into the world of leadership. The problem I have with all of this is that I have worked in a female dominated occupation for nine years now and believe that most of these “advantages” are mere illusions. This article in no way correlates with anything I have personally experienced in the workplace.
Due to the fact that many of our readers may not be in the same situation I am, and have the same experiences from which to draw, I will offer you my opinions for the sake of your future arguments against this combustible effluvia. In the paragraphs that follow I will try to take the ground out from her conclusions yard by yard.
Her first conclusion is “that women are better than men at empowering teams and staff.” What exactly does this mean? Not much I assure you. “Empower” is a word that has very little meaning, and its usage often negatively correlates with the intellectual functioning of the person saying it. This is just another in a long daisy chain of empty rhetoric that’s slathered across the foreheads of today’s university graduates.
I have often heard empower refer to employees feeling like their equal partners in the decision making process, but such feelings are always due to ignorance and not reality. As much as they want to pretend there’s no hierarchy– there always is. Someone is paid more than the others. The person who is paid the highest (at least in my line of work) has the most responsibilities, and is blamed or congratulated for whatever goes wrong or right in the building. Ultimately, they must have decisions they agree with or they won’t be around for long. A supervisor can disguise how they arrived at a decision, but, in the end, it is they who arrive at the decision (one way or another). Only neophytes to the world of work are fooled by all of this “empowered” nonsense.
At my job, I have often been empowered to make decisions, and, should one of my decisions later be deemed unwise, my boss then empowers herself to place the blame exclusively upon my shoulders. Therefore, due to empowerment, blame becomes farther from her person than dignity from Madonna.
Let me clue you in on a little secret: empowerment means they don’t have to be proactive in their decision making. That’s why they empowered you; so you’ll be free to absorb all of the blame. If that hadn’t empowered you then the fault would also be shared by them. Now it’s all yours. You’ve come a long way baby!
Here’s another stroke of masturbational genius: “Women encourage openness and are more accessible.” I have never found this to be the case. My female bosses have been more conversational and talky, but this ended when the vocational nuts and bolts issues had to be discussed.
Supervisors should not be universally “open” and available anyway. They should be available to employees in the order of their importance. Now that’s an effective and productive leadership technique. The second string guy on the bench is not as important as David Beckham and anybody who wanted to succeed at work would realize this fact. Treating all employees as VIPs is ludicrous because, in practice, then no one is a VIP. In such a situation the boss has to spend as much time digesting garbage as they do meaningful information. How hard is this to understand? It’s not playtime. They call it work for a reason. It’s not the Santa Monica Mutual Acceptance Club. I say, “close your f---ing door and do some work. To heck with being open; you’ve got a job to do.”
Then she states: “Women leaders respond more quickly to calls for assistance.” Well, I’ll grant that out. At my school, my boss has regulated everything to such an extent that no one remembers any of her regulations. She’s tried to solve problems that were never problems to begin with. She thinks this makes her caring and effective, but all it’s really done is alienate the staff from her rules. It’s like in Chicago where most of our intersections (on side streets) have stop signs affixed to them. Guess what? No one stops. The stop sign is as banal as drinking a sip of water. Nobody sees them anymore because they’re a ubiquitous part of the landscape. It’s the same thing for my bosses’ responses to assistance. Many of these women have never heard of robbing Peter to pay Paul. They don’t know that if you strengthen one area you may thereby weaken another.
Here’s the columnist’s dumbest conclusion of them all: “Women are more tolerant of differences, so they're more skilled at managing diversity.” What? Women are far more cliquish than men. Men notice the position; women notice the person. We want to know their output, women are more likely to want to know them personally and that’s disastrous for diversity. I don’t even consider a thing like “diversity.” People who do are more likely to outcast employees than support them.
I have noticed that many more women have absorbed political correctness than men. Oh sure, they’ll notice PC diversity, but if you don’t meet their stereotyped notion of the sterility then they’ll target you. Some diversity that behavior is. If you’ve never been around progressive educators then it may be hard for you to understand what I’m talking about but these people are so brainwashed that if you question one of their philosophical (sic) tenets they’ll start asking why you work in a school at all.
Here’s an example: I once told my boss that I thought cooperative learning (as religion) was foolish and that people learn best when they are held individually responsible. Now I knew in advance that cooperative learning is a major commandment to many teachers yet I was surprised by her response. She looked at me as if I had stumbled out of a medieval monastery or something. She was like, “I can’t believe you think that. What’s wrong with you?” She manifested no tolerance for diversity whatsoever. Many of them can’t stomach intellectual diversity even if they actively seek out multicolor friends to sit next to during meetings and workshops.
The funniest diversity story I have concerns the university where I work part-time. They had a big meeting last year and only one of the employees happened to be a black male (only four men altogether). I noticed that the three white female organizers of this event had their pictures taken with him and he appeared in two of the three photos describing the symposium in the faculty flyer newsletter. I had a good laugh when it came in the mail. Who did they think they’re fooling? Answer: just about every one.
This next one will give you some heartburn, she announces, “[w]omen identify problems more quickly and more accurately.” In a word: “no.” No, they don’t. I’ve never seen this to be true. They talk…and talk…and talk…and talk…all the while identifying very little. Discussing why fire burns is not an appropriate use of time. Fire burns, there’s no reason to be inclusive and discuss it for 45 minutes. I always want to stand up and yell, “More study; less chatter!” If they spent less time speaking then they’d have more time to actually see and comprehend a problem because then they wouldn’t be obsessed about what they’re going to say next.
I witness this all the time. I attend three staff meetings every week and, frankly, there’s more fun to be had at the oral surgeon’s. I raised my hand yesterday during one and said, “Hey, since we’re starting a new year, how about we restrict these meetings to one hour in duration. That way we can stay on topic and get done in a timely manner.” No one seconded it and I’m sure that’s the last we’ll hear of my suggestion. The taxpayers pay us to service students and yet we sit there and gab away their time. I have known many a woman supervisor to talk around problems, but they’re painfully slow at identifying them. She has no real evidence for this because none could possibly exist.
This last one comes to me via Pluto: “Women are better at defining job expectations and providing valuable feedback.” I have never witnessed this before. I have met quite a few who have micromanaged but that’s because they have no defined job responsibilities. I’ve known female supervisors who spent hours each week trying to get people to do things they could have accomplished in a few minutes. Why? So they can feel powerful and important which is what really motivates most of these people to come to work in the first place.
I have a message of recommendation to this writer and her uber-female managers: “Get a hobby, collect stamps, kiss some frogs, play with sex toys, I don’t care what it is you do, but, please, let’s cut out the pretense that women and their ‘careers’ are superior to men.”
Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
