Women & Discrimination

WOMEN'S BUREAU

US Department of Labor - Bureau of Labor Statistics

Will post more later Phoenix but more coffee before I try to type. Great topic.

Joanne- Great Link concerning the area of government awareness and action.

I see again and again that women are not accorded the respect and consideration which is their due without regard to gender. I also see that many are accorded, and take advantage of, the respect that has been traditionally accorded them as a result of their gender. This is the sort of topic upon which one could hold forth for pages and pages. For example, in a diner where i frequently have lunch, the waitresses are almost exclusively married women with children who have few other skills to offer in the workplace, or who cannot find schedules convenient to their child care responsibilities elsewhere. They are paid about $2.50/hour (which is the special minimum wage for table servers), and, as they work in diners, they don't make the kind of tips which both men and women working in "white tablecloth" restaurants earn. The dishwashers make $8-$10/hour, as do the cooks, who are almost exclusively male. An irony of the situation is that other women are those least likely to give them a decent tip--including, in my experience, those who claim to have "liberated" themselves. I have been told that the glass ceiling still exists, but have no personal knowledge of that. I even know of one notorious local conservative type who loudly proclaims that women should not be allowed to vote. His contention is based upon a contempt for the intellect of women, and his assertion that they vote on an emotional basis (which is laughably absurd--this man waxes positively apoplectic at the mere mention of Hillary Clinton--of course, he is completely unemotional in such a matter ).

Lots of meat to chew here . . .

Happens every day, Phoenix. I have one or two callers every week referring to conversations they've had with our secretary. Sorry, we have an engineering tech who bids jobs and writes plugging and abandonment procedures for oil and gas wells.

The same kind of assumptions were made a decade ago when I was working front desk and night audit in a motel. Without thinking, guests would make the assumption that I was the manager, or a manager. Carolyn, our general manager, used to get a little annoyed at this when it happened too often.

Some women have been able to overcome discrimination by setting up their own business (law) or practice ( medicine).

There's a long way to go, but woman like Condo L. Rice demonstrate to all, that it is possible to overcome racial and gender-based discrimination.

roger- Interesting. I had a conversation with a lawyer friend of mine, maybe twenty years ago. She said that when she first became an attorney, most people mistook her for the secretary. There seemed to have been, and probably still is, a general assumption that when there is a woman in an office, she is in a support role.

Anyhow, what she did (and I think that other professional women have caught on to this), was to dress differently. The whole "power outfit" deal, including an elegant hat.

When I practiced law (and I used to carry around an enormous, honkin' briefcase), people used to think I was the court reporter. Very annoying, and it didn't seem to matter that I was in a suit and sensible pumps and was carrying that huge briefcase (court reporters often dressed more casually - not always - and carried around a much smaller dictaphone machine).

One time, I recall going to a deposition with a guy I was training. He was fresh out of law school (not that I was so long out, but I was older and more experienced than him). The doofus on the other side asked him if he was evaluating my performance. To which Dimitri, God bless him, said, "Uh, she's my boss."

Total silence.

At work, I've been in both sides of the spectrum.

In a former job, we had a Toby's Club , macho jokes abounded. It was like a trip to the sixties. Once we told the two women in executive level that our boss had named them "honorary males".

In my present job, my direct boss is a woman, and in some aspects, she openly discriminates against males. There are closed reunions for "girl talk", pressure to make the best bathroom -actually, the only clean one- "for women only" (we do put the seat down, but she says we leave a different kind of smell), I was vetoed by her for the pre-work yoga session, and there is actually preference for women when a spot has to be filled.
I told her -with support of some female colleagues- that if she was a man, she would have been suited for discrimination.
But of course, no one has ever felt that his opinion was not taken into account because he is a man.
Oddly enough, our field of work is dominated by males.

fbaezer- What you have experiences is a backlash, albeit an unfair one. I think that with some women, gaining a bit of power is "payback time", for the indignities that women have endured over the years.

That situation is unfortunate. I would like to think that women, understanding discrimination, would have more empathy, when "the shoe is on the other foot", but obviously some of them don't!

Also, I would expect that many powerful ARE powerful because they have learned to play by following the poor but effective example of men.

I still get some disrespect compared to men in my workplace. When it happens I'll call the person on it. I won't let it go and suffer in silence coz you know that just builds up inside until I blow my top!

I had a support job once and a new person joined the company. His first day he asked me to go get him a cup of coffee. All the other guys scampered away with aghast expressions on their faces because they knew he was going to get the thrashing of his life! I invited the new guy into a meeting room, sat him down and explained my role and what he could and could not expect from me. I told him if I wanted to serve coffee I would be working for Dunkin' Donuts.
We all still laugh about it years later, but demeaning things do still happen time and time again where work is concerned.

I have been on the receiving end of sexual harassment but I was extremely young then and it would never happen now because I'd nip that in the bud pretty sharpish.

I have worked with a male co-worker who earned more than me and when I found out I marched into my bosses office and told him I wanted a raise. He whined for all of five minutes before giving it to me. This co-worker and I did exactly the same type of work.

In my current job, I do quite a lot of high-level reporting and while I find that the executives at the very top recognise my position, it is those lower on the totem-pole who will ignore requests, emails, voicemails and such from me because their impression is I am a PA or something! That not only irritates me but it impedes my ability to do my job. It wasn't until I won an award at an educational facility for the line of work that we practise and my boss announced it, that people began to tell me "I didn't realize you did that" or "I never knew you were responsible for this". As I told them then, I'm not just a pretty face guys!

Way to go, Heeven, especially if you're as toothless as the pic you provide.

Hey rog, I'll have you know I look this good EVERY morning.
I look in the mirror and I'm so hot I burn my own eyeballs!

Toothless has its advantanges ... oof I gotta stop, I'm outta control!

Drop dead gorgeous or not, you sure do look friendly.

Some world statistics...http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2002/english/ch4/index.htm

Dammit! Why didn't that work! Nemmind, copy to your browser - and :http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/ww2000/tables.htm

I got some respect today, when I called the plumber back and told him, he didn't have to come to my house. I had fixed the toliet.

"You fixed the toliet"! He asked.

I did fix the toliet and I saved about $150 by doing so. I suppose if I hadn't been so mad, I would not have be able to fix the toliet!

By "fix" do you mean smashed to smithereens?

No!

I fooled around with anything inside the tank until the darn water finally stopped running. Seems that two screws were loose. The water had been turned off for 2 hours in the morning. When the plumbers turned the water back on, I flushed the toliet to check it out. That's when there was a blast of air in the water line and then the toliet water refused to stop running.

I called the plumber and he tried to talk me through a fix of the toliet. Nothing he said worked. So... I worked on the tank and finally got it fixed. Called the plumber back...He was surprised, but reminded me to "Call me if you have any more trouble".