I have recently found a new slew of articles supporting the popular idea that women are to blame –for everything.
Politico ran an article earlier this week citing research from American University’s Women & Politics Institute that shows only 13.5 percent of the lawmaker guests on the Sunday morning talk shows are women. (We referenced a similar statistic several months ago.) According to Politico, the show producers say part of the reason they feature so few women is “the shows must be topical.” Women represent slightly more than half of the country’s population. I would have thought women lawmakers could discuss topical issues.
But according to the article the producers also say, “Some congressional women — Nancy Pelosi chief among them — do not help the cause by making themselves so difficult to book. Most producers say they try to recruit female lawmakers nearly every weekend but receive a steady stream of rejection slips.”
Pelosi’s spokeswomen, in her defense, is quoted in the piece as saying the speaker’s travel schedule makes it difficult for her to appear but there are plenty of other women who would make good guests. Those other women, however, at least according to one producer quoted in the story, “have other things to do.”
You see, its women’s fault, and especially Nancy Pelosi’s fault, that they aren’t appearing as guests. Women, have other things to do.
Women are also blamed for the fact 90 percent of venture funding flows to men, even though data from the Center for Women’s Business Research cites 41 percent of private companies in the U.S. are women-owned.
I read a number of articles and blog posts this week on the topic and even though they all pointed out the challenges women face in the venture capital world:
- women are stereotyped as less likely to do what it takes to make a business succeed and more likely to seek work/life balance
- funders tend to fund in their image (white males from top schools)
- it’s tough for women to break into male-dominated networks and build relationships with the men who have access to the money,
the commenters dismissed these points and blamed women. “Women don’t get funded because they don’t ask,” was a common retort.
You can see that same idea play out in discussions about women in the workplace. The “blame women” theme is not new. It has been a popular one in discussions about why women are still missing from boardrooms in any significant way. Headlines like this one from MSNBC, “Study: Women create ‘their own glass ceilings’” go right at it. The articles cites a study from the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management, that shows women managers are three times more likely to underrate their bosses’ opinions of them while men overrate how their bosses view them.
Interpreting this data as women constructing the glass ceiling is quite a leap, but it’s a leap that many make when discussing the wage gap too. That women still earn, on average, just .77 cents for every dollar a man doing comparable work earns, is frequently attributed to women’s poor negotiation skills, women’s choice of shifts they work, women’s desire to have families.
While it may be popular and convenient to blame women for the gender gaps in the media, at work, and everywhere else they exist, it’s also lazy and irresponsible. Lazy because anecdotes and excuses avoid the systemic issues that need to be addressed in the American workplace such as attracting and retaining a diverse workforce, removing gender bias from performance reviews, establishing networks and mentoring programs for women, and work/life programs to support working parents. Irresponsible because there is plenty of data – from Catalyst, Ernst & Young, McKinsey & Company, Pepperdine and Columbia Universities for example - all showing a correlation between women in management and strong corporate performance. And in today’s shaky economic times, we should all be pulling for healthy corporations.
On a more personal level, women need to be aware of how the excuse mentality affects their individual careers. For me, it shows up in a number of different ways. Last year during the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, I wrote an op-ed on why women should support a smart, women candidate. While I didn’t name names, Martha Coakley was the only women in the race. The editor at my local paper told me he liked the piece but he couldn’t run something that clearly endorsed one candidate over the others. I responded I would be happy to rewrite the piece to endorse all of the women in the race. When I pitched the business editor of a major metro daily newspaper on a story about the challenges caregivers face at work, he told me he had already covered women that month.
Several years ago, I worked at a company where the CEO had a policy that the vice president title was only given to those of us who managed teams. I was the only female VP on the management team. The other three women held the title director. Two of them didn’t manage staff and one of them managed one employee. There were three male VPs, not on the management team but in the organization, who had no direct reports. The CEO’s excuse: a better title gave them credibility and helped them do their jobs.
One of my female employees was doing an outstanding job, taking on increasing responsibility, training other employees and aggressively cutting business expenses. I scheduled a meeting with the CEO to discuss her career path and growth plan. He cut the meeting short telling me there was no growth plan for employees without bachelor degrees. She had dropped out of college. A few months later, I learned that the VP of Sales, a man promoted into the position by the CEO and reporting directly to him, never went to college.
In this situation I was smart enough not to storm the CEO’s office or the HR department demanding explanations for these inequities, but I found it helpful to be clued in to the realities of the situation and the stories the CEO spun to maintain the status quo. That way before I met with him to discuss raises, promotions and new assignments I could anticipate any roadblocks and try to work around them. And, I could eventually decide to leave the company.
Pay attention to the number of men vs. women among the talking heads on television and the bylines on the opinion pages of the newspaper. Listen for the handy excuses you hear at work. It’s not easy to change the status quo but it’s not impossible either. Add your comments online, write letters to the editor and prepare like hell before your next performance review. Ladies, despite what you may read or hear, everything is not your fault.
Females do not make 77 cents for each dollar a man earns. Females are paid equal money for equal work. That is law. If females will not risk their lives doing underground mining why should they get paid the same? If females refuse to workk as garbage collectors why should they get paid the same? If females refuse to work in the stinking heat or the freezing cold working on the roads why should they get paid the same? Etc. To suggest that females don’t get paid the same as men is just a deliberate deception and evidence of psychosis.
There is NO discrimination in dollars. If a rich white man sees an opportunity to make a return on his investment he could not care less whether the business was started by a man or a female. To suggest it is otherwise shows a deliberate and complete lack of understanding of how the economy in your own country works. Since females demonstrate such lack of understanding is it any wonder that female businesses are not funded by men. Why, on the other hand, do rich females refuse to fund female businesses. Oprah has got a couple of billion. Why won’t she fund female businesses? Why don’t female run businesses float and list on the public exchange to raise capital like men do? Maybe they are too stupid or maybe it is the fact that the 41% statistic is composed mostly of hobby businesses which most often don’t make enough money to pay tax and the female would starve if they did not have a man’s pay packet to live off.
You’re going to have to go through her posts.
Thank you for the link but I did not see any statistics on the gender breakdown in the publishing industry.
Just as positions may benefit from impressive titles, people can be derailed by un-flattering epitaphs. Such as drop-out. And I speak from experience. I’ve been passed over on jobs because I’m too short, too white (actually a reason given to me), for some time I was a college drop-out and a lot of things didn’t come my way. It was referenced more than most on reasons I wasn’t getting the job.
http://agencygatekeeper.blogspot.com/
You’ll have to read through her blog. It’s funny, it’s got interesting information, it’s got depressing information, her advice to men trying to get published is to become a mechanic or something. So much for whatever one wants to be.
Promoting women? Absolutely. Like many journals will devote issues to exclusively African or Mediterranean or Irish or Russian or Latin American or Women’s or LGBT fiction. Journals that want stories on specific themes are okay. However, choosing a writer based on their sex or skin color or nationality is a barbarism I thought we were able to mostly transcend in the 60s-70s. It promotes a minority about the same as the KKK promoted Democratic Party Ideas (since the first Klan was actually more dedicated to killing Jews and Republicans than blacks.) or white culture.
Again, read the blog. Women control publishing. The reviews are of women writers by women reviewers. Universities have entire women’s study majors and grad programs, with more sections on women’s literature than on shakespeare, and priority enrollment (at least in my univesity) is given to females.
You have your wish. And you never answered. Are men to blame for everything?
Peace.
The woman I was talking about was not in sales. But many positions can benefit from an impressive title.
I would like to see the data on the publishing industry. What is the source? As far as all-women journals, until women writers are reviewed as regularly as men and referenced more frequently in literature classes, I support the promotion of women writers.
Was the female you were talking about also going for the VP of Sales? Of course, women now account for more than 75% of the publishing industry, and the vast majority of the writers now are women. Even though male authors of literary fiction are turned down because “literary fiction doesn’t sell”, every new book unveiling the same publishers have brought out female writers writing literary fiction. Masculine POV stories no longer sell because women don’t want to read about a man. Journals exist to publish only female writers.
I would appreciate vocal condemnation of these practices. After all, we are all after gender parity and want for work to be judged solely on merit rather than gender. So the question gets turned around. According to you, are men to blame for everything?