It's an advice column, and the chosen problem — from a woman who works "on a relatively diverse, gender-balanced team" at a job she says she loves — is that "the work itself does not feel fair" because "Within the project teams I’m a part of, it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings."
The NYT's advice columnist is Roxane Gay, and she says: "If a natural, equitable system isn’t manifesting, assign people specific responsibilities. Stop assuming everything will fall apart if you don’t hold it together. Stop coddling grown men. Prioritize your own work and ambition more than you prioritize the man-babies you work with."
I don't really understand the answer, because it seems to me that to " ssign people specific responsibilities" is to assume you're the one that must "hold it together" and impose the proper order, the "equitable system" that didn't emerge "naturally." The problem seems to be the familiar "group project" problem, where some people hold back and let the more anxious over-achievers get most of the work done. That's the natural order — isn't it? — among the human beings.
And why does it just happen that it "falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings"? Is that "natural"? An underlying question is whether all the note-taking and meetings and regular check-ins really need to be done.
You can look at this problem from different angles: 1. Women could be oppressing men by expecting work to be done with excessive meetings and documentation and bureaucracy. People who resist inefficiency are not necessarily babyish. 2. Men could end up coddling grown women if they get the message men violate gender equity norms when they don't go along with the expectation that work be done with lots of stultifying meetings and note-taking.
पोस्ट्स
१०८ टिप्पण्या:
The concerns of female professors are of no interest to sensible people.
More pointless drivel from the NYT.
Greg, the letter writer discussed in the post is at some other sort of job, I think. No indication that's a professor.
Fuck it. If you are really and truly a white male, what do you care what other clowns think. This is the price of white male privilege.
"If" by Kipling
I've worked in IT in large corporations for decades and my experience is that for a lot of people meetings are a way to avoid work. And these days, with the wide spread adoption of workplace collaboration software, they are very rarely needed. Oh, and project managers and supervisors are supposed to be the ones assigning specific tasks. There's software for that too. Its called project management software.
Typical Meeting:
Woman: Someone should take and publish notes.
Manager: Feel free.
Woman (later): They assigned me to take and publish the notes!
Meanwhile, everyone else wrote down the parts relevant to them and sent detailed emails to their colleagues about the critical items, including information not discussed in the meeting.
Then they deleted the email containing woman’s notes when it arrived.
I guess nothing ever got done before there were enough women in management.
Maybe the work isn't important.
What’s going on here? This is an office environment. It is somebody’s job to take notes, it is somebody’s job to make sure the tasks decided upon get done. In what office are these things handled willy-nilly, left to...whomever....to get done?
This makes no sense and I can’t even imagine the office in which it happens.
I'm sensing a theme this morning. Ann is trying to get her clients to move forward into exceptance by exercising American acceptualism.
Let the healing begin.
it broke my heart, because even white men are people too.
In the leftist utopia, Soylent Green is white men.
Not at all surprising. The "white" men are doing the analytical stuff, and if the workplace has an outdoors, machinery, or physical labor component, they are doing that too.
"...because even white men are people too."
even white men
Even! Can you imagine?
I am having 600 sq ft of carpet installed next week in three rooms.
Gosh, I sure hope that the install crew is gender-inclusive! Most people would think that the job of the install crew was to get the f'n job done, but I am going to make certain that the install company is assigning job roles in a fair manner, so every crew member can advance in their chosen career w/o regard to gender stereotypes!
Physical farm and factory work is dominated by POC. This was the reason for Trump, to put displaced white men back into sweatshops and factories.
The Enlightenment is over. You are now part of a group. Learn the role of your group. Take notes.
Group project dynamics are dysfunctional if organized such that there is no leader. A group of humans given a task to complete requires a leader. If one is not named, and accepted, then someone will take control - usually one of your "anxious over achievers". If more than one asserts themselves as the leader there will be squabbling and infighting. If the leader is not accepted by the other members then work will not get done. In any case, a group project without a designated leader will always fail to produce a quality result.
I thought we already had an effective test for finding out if something is sexist---Would the situation be the same if the genders were reversed?
Would it be okay to write a letter about, "I’m Tired of Babysitting Woman-Babies at Work" Would it be okay to list out all the ways women in the office demand regular check-ins and meetings that add no value, and do not advance the teams goals?
Never have a meeting except to solve a problem.
My experience is, is doesn't fall to women. She sounds like a control freak. She took over that task because nobody else can do it the way she wants it done.
You will never be a mediocre white man in a pair of Russell Moccasin Birdshooter boots.
So if a man takes notes about who said what and asks individuals to follow up, he is oppressing the women. And if no man does that, leaving it to someone else (presumably a woman) to take minutes and assign tasks to people, he is oppressing the women.
Remember, guys: Whatever you do, it's wrong.
Here's a tip: If you're seeking "advice" from Roxanne Gay, you're already irredeemably problemed.
We spent decades adjusting schools and workplaces to accommodate women's different style of learning and working. Now that the environment is wholly tailored to them, they have no patience for those with different styles. Who could have seen this coming? It's a recurring lesson that it'll never be enough.
"everyone else wrote down the parts relevant to them and sent detailed emails to their colleagues about the critical items"
Back when I was running the change control board for a large application I worked on I would keep the notes and send out an email, but the notes generally consisted of a list of action items, who they were assigned to, and when they needed to be done. These days that would be done with project management software, so the email would not be necessary.
The employee doesn't "feel" that the work is fair. I wonder if she's worried that she has assumed a stereotypically female role in being the one doing the admin/clerical aspects of the team assignment and that's not how it's supposed to be, that feminism means not doing things that women used to do.
There isn't anything inherent in those particular tasks that makes whoever is doing them a subordinate member of the team, other than that traditionally they may have been done by women or by a junior team member. But now men are supposed to do those things, to make it fair. Unless women like doing them. Some women do like that work, note taking, calendar keeping, etc. Those women would feel that the work is fair.
"it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings"
Not listed - getting coffee and emptying the ash trays. So there's that progress.
When I was in a position to be calling meetings within a multi-million-dollar contractor performing work on behalf of a major government department, I had three major rules:
a) We will not have meeting to convey information -- that will be handled exclusively by email, as will agenda items.
b) Our in-person meetings will be held STANDING
c) Time spent on a decision will be proportional to the amount of money involved.
Many of the women hated it. Note-taking rotated through the team, had to be circulated by email within 24 hours, any additions or corrections before noon the following day, and final version before end of work that day.
“I've worked in IT in large corporations for decades and my experience is that for a lot of people meetings are a way to avoid work. And these days, with the wide spread adoption of workplace collaboration software, they are very rarely needed. Oh, and project managers and supervisors are supposed to be the ones assigning specific tasks. There's software for that too. Its called project management software.”
“Group project dynamics are dysfunctional if organized such that there is no leader. A group of humans given a task to complete requires a leader. If one is not named, and accepted, then someone will take control - usually one of your "anxious over achievers". If more than one asserts themselves as the leader there will be squabbling and infighting. If the leader is not accepted by the other members then work will not get done. In any case, a group project without a designated leader will always fail to produce a quality result”
Makes and females have very dissimilar organizing systems. The make system is typically a lot more top down and efficient. The female system is much more collaborative, and typically tries to give everyone a voice. It drives a lot of guys, and even some women, crazy. The purpose of meetings is not to make sure that no one’s feelings are hurt, and that everyone is actualized, but rather to get the job done.
One of the problems with female dominated committees, which is occurring more and more often in some areas, such as academia, is that they achieve legitimacy through their existence. For some of the women, they replace the sewing circles, bridge clubs, etc, that they would have participated in, in an earlier generation. Their function ceases to really be to get something done, but rather to knit and reinforce social bonds.
The problem is that the organizing, the note taking, the coffee fetching, that these women are taking upon themselves, in order to be perceived by everyone as caring, etc, do not add to the bottom line. This works just fine in academia, since there typically isn’t a bottom line, or at least one that faculty have to deal with. And then the women involved can’t figure out why the guy got the promotion, and they didn’t. Male privilege? Probably not. Much more that the guy getting the promotion contributed to the bottom line, while the woman going to a lot of meetings don’t.
Thanks, Althouse, for this observation.
Jung talked about the animus and anima, and having the right balance in one's psychology.
One telltale sign for him of a female with out-of-whack animus was "being off the point". I worked with talented folks, but perceived that weakness clearly in some female colleagues and bosses: great attention to fussy-butt processes, little real effectiveness or results.
I do fear that with all our feminist evolution, our women's movement may all be more off-the-point, and leading in the wrong direction, than ever.
If you spend two decades drugging young boys to try to get the 'boy' out of them, then protesting their masculinity as they grow up, then accuse them of rape when you kiss them at a party, then beat them over the head with the idea that they are evil and the cause of everything bad in history from the first apple bite to the release of the Wuhan virus, and when you force them to be more like women if they want to stay in your industry...
...you should not be surprised when your industry is filled with women-like boys who cannot fend for themselves and have so betrayed their own manhood that they cannot find their cock in their own zipper.
Real men are still out and about, moving forward, taking on their own world everyday. Just not in certain circles.
The word for "organizing your coworkers and making sure work gets done" is "management." She's being offered an opportunity to show that she's suited for expansion of her role and advancement, and she's complaining that it's not her job.
"it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings."
I call BS.
Basic issue, alluded to by Althouse: what is "the work" that needs to get done?
Show me the organization that needs to get innovative, new work done, like, building, designing, software-writing, executing new stuff, where women rather than men do most of that work.
In my experience, it is the person who calls the meeting who takes notes, assigns work, and follows up.
I must therefore assume that it is women who are calling all of the meetings.
I’m Tired of Babysitting Man-Babies at Work
"There is no female equivalent to 'manchild' because women act like children their entire lives."
- (suspended account)
It's almost as if those pitiful baby-men wouldn't be able run a coal mine, launch a rocket, develop real estate, or build a factory without some wonderful women to schedule meetings and take notes.
relatively diverse, gender-balanced team.
That is probably part of the problem.
And it seems that the nyet's agony aunt takes the writer's side by default; in the next question it's "You are being undervalued" not "You might be doing a shitty job".
nyet: Research has long shown that in collaborative work settings, women shoulder the most responsibility.
Their link says: "In one [anecdote], we convened a meeting to come up with new rituals for respecting one another’s time and energy. Of the six leaders on that team, the four women attended and the two men did not, citing other priorities."
LOL. "Other priorities" = "no time for your rituals bullshit".
The first three panels are my favorite Dilbert strip.
Women assume roles that they think are required, but aren't. There's a woman's way of doing things, and a man's way of doing things. The two ways have some things in common, but you need to let the other ones go--of course, you can take them on to satisfy yourself too, but that is what you are doing, satisfying yourself. All of the "women's roles" extras get in the way of a women's productivity. It is sort of like the long fingernails that some women have--the fingernails limit what the women who have them can do.
What would happen if you ran a credible nation-wide poll that asked one simple question:
Who should be in charge?
-Men
-Women
The demographic break-down would be quite revealing. as would the demographic break-down of this follow-up poll question:
Should men be allowed to answer said poll question?
-Yes
-No
What Tom T. said. Welcome to management.
As the mother of sons, I am bothered by the way women talk about men these days. I saw it coming- and I've talked about it frequently - when my sons were in elementary school and they were inundated with "Girls are Great" and "Girl Power" and "Girls Rule, Boys Drool" messages. What was this saying to the boys.
But I would say this-- I have worked in an environment where a co-worker (female) took it upon herself to start assigning tasks. And I couldn't stand her for it. It wasn't her job and it didn't show leadership, because I had no intention of following her.
When everyone has chosen sides and formed the teams, I'll take the White men's team.
Let me know how this turns out. I'll be outside cutting firewood and then running the dogs.
This is why socialism never works. It's one ginormous group project.
I am sick and tired of the LEFT judging people because they were born white....I was always taught that you can't judge people on how they were born...you judge by their character. It is a shame these haters on the left forgot that lesson. Maybe it is time to send them back to school WITHOUT left wing assholes teaching them to hate everybody who doesn't think like them.
Once again I have to say, it's sure great to be a white man! :)
Women hold meetings. Endlessly. They talk, talk, talk. Endlessly. And don't you dare contradict them, or they'll get mad at you and seek revenge.
I've just described my experience working in advertising and publishing.
"Typical Meeting:
Woman: Someone should take and publish notes.
Manager: Feel free.
Woman (later): They assigned me to take and publish the notes!"
-- Meeting minutes and due out emails are fairly common. Often they are not actual minutes like you'd get from a parliament or something. But, when a 2 hour meeting is summed up with, "Those present [Attendee List] discussed possible changes to process flow, and agreed to meet again. No decisions were made," do you REALLY need minutes for that meeting?
Eleanor said...
This is why socialism never works. It's one ginormous group project.
Speaking of "group project"..
I see Karl Marx is trending on twitter because Tim Allen spelled his first name wrong (Carl) and everybody is mad.
More evidence for my observation that women largely prefer male supervisors. The women tend to be bitchy and have cliques.
An underlying question is whether all the note-taking and meetings and regular check-ins really need to be done.
Oh sweet baby James this.
My husband was the stay at home parent for our oldest for about a year after my maternity leave ended. When the baby was just learning to walk, I came home from work one day to find him perched on the lip of the unused little Franklin stove that was in turn sitting on a raised brick platform that extended into the room, holding onto the stovepipe and grinning his little face off at me. The child was therefore two pretty good-sized steps off the ground over all hard surfaces.
I cried, "Don't move, honey, Mommy's got you!" and leapt across the room to scoop him up.
My husband came out of the kitchen doing his hands on a dishtowel and looking irritated. "What are you doing? It took me all day to teach him how to get up there safely."
I will draw a curtain over the rest of that conversation, except to provide the endpoint: my husband, realizing that there was no way to gate off the stove and that our curious child was absolutely going to climb up on it, figured that the best outcome was for him to help the baby figure out how not to fall. And I eventually realized that he was right. My parenting changed dramatically, and for the better, that day.
Tommy Duncan said...
Let me know how this turns out. I'll be outside cutting firewood and then running the dogs.
So what you're saying is...your wife had a meeting with you and gave you your assignments for the day.
One of the main reasons Althouse retired from academia, and one of the main reasons I left academia, was all of the tedious and pointless meetings.
Good questions to ask at the beginning of any meeting:
1. What is the purpose of this meeting?
2. How will we know when we're done?
And somebody should be ready to move adjournment.
"because even white men are people too."
Writes "a woman and an Assistant Professor who obviously needs reeducation
seriously, " because even white men are people too." ???
has there Ever been a More sexist, racist, transphobic; and just plain EVIL statement?
Jamie
It's a guy thing. My mom had a shitfit when my dad took the three of us out to the garage to work with power tools. I think my youngest brother was five. I was six and my older brother was eight. There's a lot less running around and yelling and tears if you just let them help. Sometimes the 'help' consists of them beating on pieces of wood or running nuts up on random screws. And they absolutely love it. They helped dad.
Here's and angle: Roxane Gay's a talentless, whining, racist, sexist, insecure hack who has nothing to contribute to any institution to which she belongs.
Maybe she should learn note-taking.
“EVEN white men are people too.”
Yes, we are. And we should occasionally be acknowledged for our forbearance which alone allows ridiculous feminists in their pink pussy hats and their ponces to sashay around promoting nation-killing chimeras. It isn’t Wonder Woman. She isn’t real.
Come to think of it, that continuing forbearance may explain why they think we are stupid.
I'm a chronic engineering manager, involved in multiple virtual teams at all times. The medium big tech company I work for (10K employees)states commitment to gender and all kinds of other equity, and does try to live up to it.
I have observed that generally the boys just want to work on technical problems and have fun and get promoted, and the girls generally just want to work on project management and have fun and get promoted. I state it that way because I am twice the age of many of my employees and my main job is keeping the children happy and productive, and occasionally restating their baby talk so others can understand.
The gems are the ones who successfully blend those "gender roles". But, I think this is not widely recognized: we still promote mainly the uber-techie guys (though they hit a low ceiling) and the super-mom PMs (who these days can go a little higher). Many exceptions to these generalities, but that's the trend as I see it.
And, as anyone who has worked in the real world knows (please raise your hands!), we are all subservient to the salesmen (in their various guises), and those are 90% men. They get the money, but we have the fun.
This is the glass ceiling that I see all the time and I'm sure it bothers the women. We have LOTs of female VPs (and like a bank at least 4 flavors of VP), but the higher reaches are all men who bring in the bucks (+ a female CFO to count them.)
When I was department chair my goal (not always met, alas) was to limit faculty meetings to one per semester. Most of my female colleagues hated it. Now I've stepped down, & yesterday there was a mostly unnecessary 2 hour zoom meeting. I didn't attend, and actually got some work done.
Sometimes Althouse just sends the first pitch over the left field wall.
There are many women, of course, who have opposite attitudes to the whiner here in this article. I commend the women commenters here at Althouse, most of who 'get it'.
I feel lucky in that I retired from a job and company where, for the most part, meetings were shunned unless attendees felt they were useful, and were conducted well. I also had the pleasure of working with several women who were business-like and conducted themselves well in our engineering work environment. I remember one such woman who had come in from the outside as a production engineer (chemistry background). A woman in Quality Control had called a meeting because some paperwork was not filled out exactly to the standards of the QC instructions. The woman production engineer questioned why we couldn't work around this issue since it was causing a lot of work and delays. QC lady read the riot act (politely), and I remember the production engineer just rolled her eyes and loudly heaved a sigh. I remember thinking right then "I like her attitude!". As I recall, QC lady left the company shortly thereafter, and later on, the production engineer was promoted several times into management positions.
Continuing my little screed above, the boys and girls can often only see what's going on from their personality/role perspective. The best thing about the role-benders is the ability, not just willingness, to see the whole mess.
Two truisms from my consulting days, "A meeting is not a deliverable" and "Most meeting could just have been an email".
This was wasn't so great in Denmark where we would have a meeting to discuss the upcoming planning meeting about the next meeting.
I don't think Althouse enjoyed most faculty meetings.
LOL. There's a reason why the women are "Relegated" to organizing and note-taking and "Checking up" on people. 9 times out of 10, the actual GOOD WORK is being done by the men. And this is particularly true if "The work" is one person sitting at a desk solving problems, writing papers & exercising creative intelligence.
Many more women, then men, are "people persons" and are good at "checking up" on people without being overbearing or obnoxious. They're also more conscientious and make better note takers and organizers.
My own experience over 30 years in Corporate America, is that women are very good MANAGERS. But they are terrible at any sort of creative leadership. If the department or company has to strike out in a new direction, or change things or "Think outside the box", the women managers are useless. Once they policy has been set, they are good at operating within the rules and making the trains run on time.
BTW, some people (both sexes) LIKE Meetings. They love to talk and blather away and think all this useless noise is somehow accomplishing things.
These academic womyn need to get a clue.
90 percent of everything that they take for granted in the modern world for convenience and survival was invented, built, and maintained by useless white men.
Most Female engineers after a while drift into some job where they don't have to do engineering. They become customer liaisons, or somebodies assistant, or help run the Engineering department or interact with the other departments and auditors. Or they go part-time and devote their energies to their families. its only the male geeks who love to sit at their desks and do 100% engineering.
90%? more like 99%
Although I'd include Asians.
hombre said...
Come to think of it, that continuing forbearance may explain why they think we are stupid.
11/14/20, 9:36 AM
Given how well the current state of affairs works for them, can you blame them? The rootless aliens destroying your country know they would be expelled anywhere else, if not brutally hunted down.
In every difficult project, and maybe it's different for things that are more straightforward, the people that do the heavy-lifting or the effective work are only a small proportion of those actually working on it.
It's subjective but I think it's normally only 10% of the people working on something difficult who are doing 90% of the effective work. Maybe 30% are accomplishing nothing at all or are actually having a negative impact. And the remaining 60% is at least trying.
The words she uses to describe herself and her situation, "on a relatively diverse, gender-balanced team" and "the work itself does not feel fair" and "Within the project teams I’m a part of, it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings" are a big clue.
Identify the top performers and let them do their thing.
As Phil Jackson’s said: “Get Michael the ball, and get the fuck out of his way.”
tcrosse said...
Good questions to ask at the beginning of any meeting:
1. What is the purpose of this meeting?
2. How will we know when we're done?
And somebody should be ready to move adjournment.
In my company, if you call meetings without a written agenda, then you won’t be there long. And if you didn’t circulate that agenda at least a day in advance, you’ll be having a sit down with your superior. It’s not because we don’t like to have meetings, we still have too many meetings, but it’s disrespectful to the other people to call them to a meeting without knowing what their contribution is going to be before they walk in the room.
“And why does it just happen that it "falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings"? Is that "natural"?”
Oh, yeah. Perfectly natural when the producers among you think it’s all organizational kabuki and a waste of time. And how telling that this woman doesn’t get that it isn’t a man/woman thing. It’s a producer/bum-fodder thing. She probably doesn’t even realize that she’s being judged negatively because she makes it plain that she thinks this shit is her highest calling. Again, not a man/woman thing. Mediocrities of either sex embrace this stuff as a way of justifying their employment.
Then again, it could just be a sign of low morale. When no one wants to take notes, be on an interview panel, or change the freakin’ paper towel roll in the staff kitchen, that’s usually a pretty good indicator that it’s time to look for a different job.
The male approach to division of labor is contract. The female approach is nagging.
"...because even white men are people too."
Thanks, but I actually try to hold myself to a somewhat higher standard.
I suppose that when she says it's OK to let your colleagues fail, she is taking a contractual point of view. In fact, an excessively contractual point of view. I would say, rather, first make sure that you are going to succeed. Once that is arranged, you can try to help others, if they are receptive. But that is a decidedly informal undertaking. Horse, water, drink.
there was a person where i worked, that had a small cartoon at their desk (you had to know it was there to know it was there)
it said...
Daily Meetings Will Continue: Until We Determine What is Causing Our Lack of Productivity
When you read it, you had to laugh (or cry)
My angle is everyone has aspects of their job (or lack there of) that sucks and not just because of gender differences. It is not always about you that some tasks suck, but yes, it is possible to make it about you.
The purpose of meetings is not to make sure that no one’s feelings are hurt, and that everyone is actualized, but rather to get the job done.
Eureka! Get the fucking job done and done well!
Back in the day I favored “management by walking around” over having lengthy meetings where most of the people had no reason to be there. Meetings were reserved for times when information had to be widely shared, and smaller multi-way meetings when agreements had to be handled between teams. I hated meetings where most people were just there because they were expected to be there, not because any topics where they could usefully contribute were on the agenda.
I normally asked the person who took the best notes to take notes. Duh! Often that was a woman, but not always. Once I picked my note taker because she — yes, she — would zone out during meetings and text with a friend. This was in the days of flip phones, where you needed two keystrokes to send one letter, so it was obvious what her flying fingers were doing. By having her take notes I could keep her head in the meeting. After all, if she had nothing to contribute I would not have invited her in the first place.
But I’m retired now, and loving it.
O my brothers. I was a librarian. A big strong fine-looking male librarian.
That's the classic female-dominated profession, though until recent decades the movers-and-shakers were the guys.
I worked with and for women bosses most of the time; they were pretty good managers overall, but damn did they looove them some meetings. Soon after our new, minority bosslady arrived in Sept 2001, the 100 of so faculty and staff in the library began to find themselves assigned to new committees, working groups, and task forces--charged with regular meeting, minute-keeping, reporting . . . At one point I was on nine committees, chair of three---not counting search committees, which were constant for about ten years.
Not counting professional organization committees, or campus-wide committees.
Almost everyone slacked and shirked, not being utter fools, and the whole apparatus was quietly forgotten. The enthusiastic brown-noses had shown themselves, at least.
But the campus itself was under a blanket of stale management theories (TQM anyone?) and I observed at one point that it seemed to be the ideal of the top administrators that every employee would, at some point, serve on a committee, working group, or taskforce with every other campus employee.
That's not even to mention the PC; it was just plain old human fuckupery.
Narr
Academe adopts corporate management theories when corporations start abandoning them
A bossman once said "This meeting is costing us about $5,000 per hour. Any more questions?"
This woman here is strongly allergic to meetings, thank god. Before WFH we had one meeting per week that ran 30 minutes at MOST (usually 15 minutes). I could barely stand that and would often "forget" and show up at the last few minutes. With WFH - much easier to do something else and pretend to be listening.
She's being offered an opportunity to show that she's suited for expansion of her role and advancement, and she's complaining that it's not her job.
What Tom T. commented. Back in the day, meaning the 1970s and early 1980s, one of the challenges you had to be careful about was that females often had to have it explained to them that what was happening was that they were being given a chance to show that they had what it takes to take the next step up the corporate ladder. It was a tough part of the job, because some already knew that, and resented the mansplaining, but it was stupefying how many women didn’t get it until it was pointed out what you were trying to do for her. Sometimes the woman would candidly tell you that she didn’t want the promotion and was happy in her current assignment. And that’s okay, too.
Al this put me in the mind of the early days of Gardner Fox's Justice League, where, naturally, Wonder Woman was the league secretary and took all the notes!
"Well-behaved women seldom make history“
This is sexism that's worst. It's actually criticizing women for their greatest natural trait of agreeableness. Of course that's according to Jordan Peterson as heard on the Joe Rogan podcast before he went completely mental on benzodiazepines
Diversity (i.e. color judgment) dogma, not limited to sexism, is an obfuscating layer that breeds adversity.
It's tradition in my former group (I retired 3 years ago) to have an offsite lunch on Wednesdays, usually taking about an hour from portal to portal. There are now so many meetings at Boeing Defense that they are scheduled during lunch. Only the four of us who have retired can now make the lunches, the working guys don't have time to leave from their work-at-home locations, drive to a central site (Gene Coulan Park in Renton), eat, then drive back home. The four of us retired-folk now have plenty of time to talk, since we don't have to meet the 1-hour cycle time anymore.
We had two different types of meetings: 1) Project Status and 2) working meeting. The project status meetings would review developments in the project/subproject and assign action items. Action items would always have a who and a when along with a subject. The project status often included powerpoint presentations for review in the meeting, to highlight are part of the project and for management, and sometimes the customer (Navy) to agree to our approach and progress. At times, these meetings could get contentious, but that just meant that meeting had a purpose.
Working meetings reviewed progress in our task, discussed approaches and problems in meeting our goals. They were usually collaborative, with members taking their own notes for further work outside of the meeting.
Gender and race never figured into any of our meetings. We were there to get a job done, not to praise each other for being woke. Action items were always aimed at getting the job done in minimum time/effort, not in creating studies without an objective. Such clueless studies were always dismissively described as "Science projects." They could burn through hundreds or thousand manhours of effort without producing anything of value.
Yes, I used that unwoke word, manhours. That's because most of the people doing the work were men.
Operator: "This is 911. What's your emergency?"
Homeowner: "A group of men are breaking into my house which is also on fire. Please send help, but only women."
Operator: "That may take a while."
"its only the male geeks who love to sit at their desks and do 100% engineering.”
Right, the trick was to avoid being promoted.
"More evidence for my observation that women largely prefer male supervisors. The women tend to be bitchy and have cliques."
When this producer launched a women-only TV company she thought she'd kissed goodbye to conflict...
Guess what happened.
You guys are the perfect example of white male fragility. Why do you feel the need to demote womens and pump up the mens? Your like a clucking swarm of weak candy ass Yentas on estrogen.
Hey gals, guess what, well-behaved men rarely make history either.
Narr
Not the kind anyone cares about anyway.
Yes, Howard- the world needs more white knights.
In my experience, it is the person who calls the meeting who takes notes, assigns work, and follows up.
Yes. I ran a 40+ Person Zoom meeting last week. I organized it, found the speakers, etc. You better believe I took the notes, sent around the next day to all participants with links to all presentations.
Most meetings are worthless.
"And why does it just happen that it "falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings"? Is that "natural"? An underlying question is whether all the note-taking and meetings and regular check-ins really need to be done. "
THIS is why I am an Althouse fan, in spite of some of the other stuff...
I forget where I read this, but it is absolutely true--the only worthwhile purpose of a meeting is to get approval/authorization/agreement for what you have already decided to do.
(or if you know that people are not going to approve or agree, to tell them that this is the way it is going to be).
Its fun watching Howard desperately clawing about and constantly trying to prove himself to his lefty betters by swallowing whole every woke nonsense that comes down the pike.
It's especially ironic that he seems to feel that he needs to comment, as though the "You go, grrls" wouldn't be able to competently address the issue.
But hey- white knights gonna white knight.
I forget where I read this, but it is absolutely true--the only worthwhile purpose of a meeting is to get approval/authorization/agreement for what you have already decided to do.
Along the same line, when I first started working at the Fed, I asked a more experienced colleague what I should put in my Performance Planning Review goals for the coming year. His advice was to only put things in there that you had largely already accomplished. In most technical and research jobs, your boss doesn't actually know what you're doing from day to day, so this can work. And it lets you just breeze through all the performance evaluation crap without any stress.
Oh geez, performance reviews. Our Bosslady took refuge in niggling paper wars on the topic of whether the person who was barely making minimum wage really deserved that 4.5/5 for reliability, or if 4.4 wouldn't be better. One department head colleague ended up writing eight pages of reasons why a staff member deserved the high score assigned on one measure.
Most years there wasn't even any merit money, and if there was the difference between the 4.4 and the 4.5 might amount to 60 cents every paycheck.
I myself was not evaluated for about four years running, and never very thoroughly, which was fine by me. Being left alone was the best thing, since there was no prospect of rising or making more money anyway, not in that structure.
My last year, I gave everyone high scores, recommended raises, and told the admin that they pretty much sucked.
Narr
Exit interview? What dat?
"the work itself does not feel fair" because "Within the project teams I’m a part of, it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings."
Fair?
Does that seem like the HARD part?
Group projects suck. You end up carrying the whole team on your back sometimes. God forbid, back in school when I was designing, from stem to stern, the low-flow flush toilet retrofit mechanism for our Engineering Fundamentals class, that any of the other three mopes on the team (all men or should I say boys), who all stepped backwards when leaders were asked to step forward, could have been arsed to "take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings."
That would have been a big help. No. In the end I didn't even bother letting them share the presentation. Why should I, I would have had the extra effort of making them understand it!
Meetings suck. A fountain with everyone tossing in two cents. And if the leader of the meeting is a “meeting person”, it’s even worse.
Another "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus" moment. In a female-dominated workplace, process and paperwork become more important than what men think of as action and results. In a male-dominated workplace proceduralism can be regarded as trivial paper-pushing, and caricatured as "touchy-feely" (even though bureaucracy is anything but sensitive to human feelings), but where women predominate the men who resist the paperwork are seen as "big babies."
These conflicts probably went on in the Mad Men era between men, the impetuous rebels saying "We took Guadalcanal in spite of you officious paper-pushers behind the lines," and the proceduralists responding "No, we took Guadalcanal because of the structures and organizations and procedures we put in place." The men versus women conflict is a dispute over whether the world perishes because of a lack of passion or because of an excess of passion, a lack of discipline or an excess of discipline.
When it comes to academia, I presume that, for the most part, the males are typical leftie cuck man-babies, and the women, with rare exception, are shrieking bug-eyed leftie harridans. Entitlement reins supreme, and once tenured, the objective is to do as little as possible, particularly when unions are involved and taxpayers are footing the bill.
- Krumhorn
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