Women in the Workplace

[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by Superman

Yes they are. They run our homes. And our schools and hospitals. Increasingly, our House of Representatives.

Let's see if we can avoid forcing the moderators to move this thread, shall we

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by Sooner or later

Let's see if we can avoid forcing the moderators to move this thread, shall we

It's Bush's fault !

[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by KC911

^^^ yep, didn't read this before my last post.....spot on!

Agreed! I don’t give a damn what you look like, I judge people based on what they can bring to the team.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

......Not a one of them grew up playing with Erector Sets, wrenching on their own bikes or other mechanical objects, not a one had any mechanical hobbies. You know, the grease under their fingernails and the skinned or bruised knuckles. In other words, not a one of them had developed the least little bit of mechanical intuition whatsoever...

Which is why when they are little and choose to play with "boys toys" we should not be taking them away and giving them Barbies because "that's what girls play with".

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

No offense intended but I’ll vote this “least insightful thread of the year”. So far at least. Seems like it would be a better fit in 1959.

Count me in with that sentiment.

All the women in my personal life are or were professionals in various disciplines.

Likewise, I have with for with and have supervised a large number of "women".

Trying to assign a blanket set of traits to them all is a complete fools errand, and, frankly, the height of misogyny.

The Bell Curve includes women.

[GH85Carrera]

I never have worked in the "corporate world" so all I can add is my experience as customers or vendors to large organizations. More than a few time I was dealing with some lower eschillon employees and it was obvious why they had hit their maximum potential. Bring the manager or boos in, that can be female or male, and suddenly you are talking to an individual that truly understands the issue, and asked really good questions. I have seen some situations where the woman outshone them all and others where they were promoted to above their abilities.

Like most discussions like this, it is impossible to make accurate general statements about any group of employees.

I can say they in my line of work, dealing with land surveyors, and engineers, there are very few women. Not many women will walk through a overgrown tick infested field on a 100+ degree day next to a swampy area swarming with mosquitoes to shoot in survey points.

[jhynesrockmtn]

I found this article interesting. My son went through the army special forces assessment the first woman made it through. He described her as a legitimate bad ass and said she deserved to get put through. He starts Q school in April.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/magazine/woman-combat-afghanistan-military.html

Jeff, I wonder if some of your observations had to do with women growing up playing with more girly things, not wrenching on cars with their dads, etc? I know my daughter and son had different experiences in this regard. I do agree with you that women and men have inherent differences, thankful for that!

[brshap]

Originally Posted by Tobra

Anyone who ever worked in a hospital could have told you this stuff a long time ago.

The ability to effectively use the contributions of women is the greatest advantage western civilization has in the existential struggle with the east. If they ever stop treating their women like chattel, we will be in real trouble. Smartest people I have known have all been women.

I know this conflicts with your world view but China has a higher female labor participation rate than the US.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Superman

I have four sisters, no brothers. I'm probably more respectful of women than most guys. My sisters are all professional people, good at what they do. Over the years I have noticed women getting into management positions, more and more.

I have known some women in clerical positions who practically ran the programs their bosses were supposed to run, while also doing IT and other projects on the side. As they say, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did....backwards in high heels.

Today, I notice some female senior leadership who seem to be doing the same thing there. Getting the job done. Attending to the details while keeping the destination in sight. Hand on the rudder, directing crew, getting us where we want to go.

I think women are taking over, and that seems to be working. When it happens. We all know that women are more aggressive than men.* We know their brains can focus on more than one thing at a time. This is my point. There are also great men out there, but I think we've got some stiff competition.

Discuss.


* Those of you who do not yet know this, pay closer attention.

Ya mean on those days when they are not out sick or on leave? Women miss nearly twice as much work as men.

In 1998, about 4 percent of full-time workers were absent from their job during an average workweek—meaning they worked less than 35 hours during the week because of injury, illness, or a variety of other reasons. About 5.1 percent of women (including 5.6 percent of women aged 20 to 24) were absent in the average week, compared with 2.7 percent of men.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Mar/wk4/art04.htm

[stomachmonkey]

You do realize if women were like men that'd make us all gay.

[Zeke]

I've worked in construction all my life except the first 10 years fooling around with mechanics and being on a pit crew occasionally. I learned the money was in construction, but that's OT for the moment. But, even in the world of mechanics, and certainly in construction (in the construction world I tended to gravitate to home improvement), any females I have worked with seemed to be egotistic. Not very good team players, but neither are many of the men, for that matter. Having the choice I'd rather work w/o them.

A good assembly of decent construction workers flow like hot lava each having their turn at the front of the flow and blending in behind. Too much differential for women.

There is a fair share of longshore women at the docks. As you would expect, non are nice little soccer moms with nail polish and cute little mid calf capri pants. In that world they have to be tough for 2 reasons....

Even the construction counterparts would cry at the prospect.

[Mike Andrew]

Worked in aero for almost 40 years. In that time I saw male engineers who were only numbers guys but smart design engineers. Worked with only a few female engineers, mainly electricals.
Interestingly, our assemblers, mostly female, would offer many suggestions to the design guys regarding tolerances/stack ups, assembly difficulties and end function. Realized that the company was not suggesting engineering education for some of these women(with reimbursement) and moving them into our engineering area. Truly a misuse of talent which could have greatly helped our organization.

[Iciclehead]

I honestly, truly do not care what colour you are, what gender you are, what your religious beliefs are...don't care, but I will make an honest determination of what value you bring to the workforce and deal with you on that basis.

I have had guys who spend half their time trying to seduce the secretaries who I fired without a moment's hesitation.

I have had women who spend half of their time complaining about what other women are wearing who I fired without a moment's hesitation.

I have had a flamboyantly gay guy who was extremely competent at his job who I promoted the heck out of and was delighted to have on the team.

My ask to people is that they not bring their religion, sexuality, social life and personal biases onto the job site...just do your ****ing job and go home at night to whatever it is that makes you happy.

[Rodsrsr]

They're also miserable...and please don't be #18 guys.

20 Reasons Why Modern Women Are So Unstable And Miserable – Return Of Kings

[ficke]

Women are not "taking over" and never will.
Women and men are different on average and will strive/succeeded in different fields.
There will be cross over and some underrepresented fields will get filled by more women. There are also exceptional women and men who will succeed in areas uncommon to their sex.
BUT, I highly doubt we will see 50/50 women to men in a lot of areas, underground mining, welders, heavy equipment mechs. military grunts, timber, farming etc. will be predominantly men. All top sports, Tennis, football, basketball, F1 etc. are men now and will be men in the future. and on these team sports if women could play better than men there would be an effort to have them on the top teams, because it is all about the money. Or any job for that matter, it is all about the money.
There are now more women going to collage than men but they sure are not picking the STEM classes like men so their interest does not seem to lie there or in that industry that needs those degrees.
No there is no "take over" of women. Just a few areas where women who have been underrepresented are making some inroads. Good for them and all of us for that.

But I highly doubt wars will be fought by men and women equally or mines will be worked by men and women equally, or a host of other occupations dominated by men now will be taking over by women.

[Won]

I consider myself to be fortunate to always have had smart, strong women around me in family and friends. Professionally, especially in my field, I think I'm right in the middle of a real, meaningful change. Some of the best people I work with are women - this should not be a surprise or even noteworthy (as some of you already pointed out), but motorsport tends to be pretty old school even among various engineering disciplines. We have just as many women in technical and hands-on roles as we do in the design office, and clearly they are some of the best in the world

Linked below is Mercedes F1 team's report on gender pay gap in 2017. As pointed out, the real reason behind this seemingly shocking gap is that, simply not enough women have made it into the top level roles, yet. I work with someone who is the same age as my "baby" sister (who herself is doing quite well in finance in NY), who is very smart, talented and capable. I've no doubt, other than the few years' extra experience I have, she is a better engineer than I am, and I see no objective reason why she couldn't make it all the way to the top.

https://www.mercedesamgf1.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/03/Gender-Pay-Report-2017.pdf

In my previous team, we had a female mechanic, again quite young and just starting out in her career. Not exactly a shiny fingernails-type person - at various times her legs were completely covered with bruises and burns from doing brake/damper change practices on WRC cars (it's damn impressive if you ever get to watch in person). Towards the end of my time there we had a long chat, and I found out that she was considering leaving this "dream" job of being a rally mechanic. Apparently, the #1 mechanics straight up told the team manager that they wouldn't have her in their crews because, well, she's a girl. It's actually quite a toxic, macho environment, far worse than I've seen elsewhere really. To put things in perspective, they kept certain mechanics in their crew who made repeat mistakes which resulted in multiple DNF's, but apparently she was not good enough. This really made me angry and disappointed in my colleagues who I thought were quite decent people up to that point. She has since moved on to different world championship teams, and I hope I can work with her again in the future.

Regarding #18 in the post above; I have no problem being the "feminist knight" because the world at large (and as exemplified here by a few, evidently) still discriminates against them for simply being women. Sure, it's not right that they should get any preferential treatment if they are in fact rubbish at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing. But all things being equal, it's never equal for them, is it? I'll happily to do my part to try and fix that.

PS poking around this "Return of Kings" website a bit, I was really hoping that it was The Onion sort of satire website, because otherwise the level of misogyny on display there is, well, just sad. Unfortunately I don't think it is meant to be tongue in cheek. God bless you.

[Rodsrsr]

The small gender pay gap that exists is largely due to the career choices women make. Most fortune 500 company CEOs are male simply because it takes a tremendous amount of drive and determination to reach that level and most women simply choose differently.

If women were being paid less for the same job than companies would simply exploit this and hire only women to increase their bottom line.

Women are far from oppressed in society and any male that believes this is simply brainwashed.

A women could cheat on her husband and take 50% of his worth. In other words your wife could screw some random guy than file for divorce, claiming emotional mistreatment and the courts will give her half plus you will pay child support and alimony. In some cases alimony for life.
A women can (unknown by the man) impregnate herself with sperm from a condom and the man will pay child support for 18 years.
A woman can have the courts legally garnish your wages for child support and the man only has 30 days to PROVE the child is not his. If he misses the deadline he pays for 18 years.
If a man marries a single mom he will now be liable for another mans child support for 18 years.
In a domestic violence call the woman will be believed and the man arrested 99% of the time.
In a hostage situation, women would be rescued first.
In a war, the men will be called first.In a fire the women will be saved first.
A woman can falsely accuse a man of rape and he will immediately be arrested.
Our young boys in elementary school are being forced to act more feminine and put on drugs like Ritalin due to "toxic masculinity"
Women outnumber men in terms of college degrees by 25%.
Women outnumber men in nursing, teachers, physiologists, HR managers, veterinarians, advertising and marketing just to name a few. I don't see women complaining that the nursing field is unbalanced for example.

Don't buy into the hype. Women are far from being oppressed. A woman complaining she is oppressed is about as silly as a Black person claiming oppression in 2019.

I wonder how many of the graves below are for women....That is Normandy BTW.

[Captain Ahab Jr]

Also pleased to say I work with and have worked with some talented women engineers/designers in motorsport and treated them as an equal because they were very good at their jobs.

Motorsport is good at filtering out slackers and people not good at their job whether that are male or female makes no difference to me

The last lady I directly worked with was great, had all the qualities you'd want from an experienced design/engineer

Together we pushed the composite design/manufacturing boundaries beyond what a very established F1 team had done before us. Without her help/support the project would have been half of what it turned out to be

She would also help design world championship rally cars or Indy cars in the evening too after she'd put her kids in bed

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Rodsrsr

They're also miserable...and please don't be #18 guys.

20 Reasons Why Modern Women Are So Unstable And Miserable – Return Of Kings

Never read such a crock of siht in my life.

[Evans, Marv]

In my work in education I experienced discrimination from the fairer sex. I had clerical staff slow work and impede things after I took over management after years of a female running the show. I had to work around it and eventually overcome it. They didn't want a "man" there. I also actually heard some I considered good women who were talented and competent (and who had been friends on a professional level for years) say they didn't want any "men" working in their operation. These were not teaching on the side but special programs, curriculum development, and other kinds of stand alone sections of the District. I often suspected it was actually a reaction from being kicked around by the male dominated management structure there.