Doug Ross has put together an invaluable series of charts explaining the feminization of our society.
He’s probably one of the most incisive bloggers on Teh Intarwebz.
My favorite (in an ironic sense):
From a personal perspective, I know for a fact that I couldn’t work in any of today’s corporations: I’d be fired before midday on Day One. What makes it all the more galling is that I also know for a fact that I would be a more competent manager — even at my advanced age — than pretty much any corporate VP of today… provided that I’d be allowed to actually, you know, manage.
I went from the male dominated industry of construction management to the female dominated industry of nursing. Men in construction have the stereotype of objectifying women with hooting and hollering at women when they walk by a construction site, pinups in tool boxes and such. The female nurses were far more nasty towards men in nursing. their “locker room” talk was far more crude, boorish and appalling than anything I heard on construction sites or while playing on sports teams.
Women and men are physically different and certainly mentally different. There is certainly some overlap but that venn diagram does not suggest that men and women are interchangeable in every capacity.
That timeline should have started back in the 80’s. Maybe sooner. I know by the early 90’s women were getting quicker promotions into management in order to promote better numbers for diversity, we just didn’t call it that back then.
Also, no pussification essay is complete without the swearing. Just doesn’t feel right.
Also, to JQ’s point. The men back then may have engaged in locker room talk when there were no women around, but the minute some asshat actually said something rude to a woman in the workplace, half those men were ready to take the shitbird outside and beat the daylights out of him. They knew there was a line there, and they didn’t cross it. It was enforced. Now it’s a trip to HR and your career is ruined. I’d rather take a beating than a fucking trip to HR, but that’s no longer an option.
I worked at Hewlett Packard when they made Carly Fiorina the CEO. This was strictly a hire done to prove HP’s “diversity” bona-fides. Chitchat amongst the employed masses was that it was important to “Send a message” and that HP was too big to fail.
Well messages got sent, and HP wasn’t too big to fail, and Carly flew the HP plane right into the side of the mountain. AFAIK HP hasn’t really ever recovered.
When she was announced as John McCain’s campaign manager, I knew it wasn’t going to be a well run campaign, and I was right.
Ah, Carly, we remember you…..but not fondly.
I’ll defy you to find one HR director in any company big enough to have an HR director, to find an identifiably male one that likes chicks.
In my ideal company, HR would be a single clerk, with absolutely no executive authority. His sole function would be to manage hiring interviews (i.e. post ads, schedule meetings with the candidates’ prospective manager, etc.) and maintain staff files. His title would be “Personnel Administrator”.
In time, that function could be replaced by A.I.
I find a high degree of merit in your suggestion. But Merit and HR are two unrelated words. Plus there are hundreds of gender studies majors that would get excluded from Corporate America.
“Plus there are hundreds of gender studies majors that would get excluded from Corporate America.”
And this would be bad?
It is indeed a feature not a bug.
I wrote this in response to something on Instapundit a few days ago:
There are some vital “HR” reporting functions that need to happen. The government MUST get it’s paperwork, numbers etc. So you have to have some people in there who know what forms need to be filled out etc.
And regardless of whether you live in an “at will” state or not you can be sued for “wrongful termination” if you don’t have all your ducks lined up. HR is the one that lines those ducks up.
And finally if you have a company of any size you need a C level person responsible for managing discrimination & sexual harassment/assault claims. Because yes, many of them are misunderstandings or outright lies, but also many of them ARE true and you need to protect your good people and your company from them.
So here’s what you do:
Break up HR. Instead of one organization that does recruiting, hiring, deals with complaints and handles the government paperwork all reporting into a single “C level” slot you create one organization that is responsible for all the government reporting in the company. Not just for HR related reporting, ALL government reporting. They may have to talk to other business units for the numbers etc., but it all flows through them, and it’s got a “Vice President of Reporting” at the top. It’s that person’s job to make sure all the numbers are accurate. They aren’t responsible for what the numbers mean, just that they match reality.
Move responsibility for recruiting down into the business units–each business unit gets a recruiter reporting into the leader of that BU. Or that BU can outsource it at that level to a recruiting company. But no one company gets the lions share of the business.
Do similar things across everything HR does, and outsource any of it that makes sense to do so.