This article came up on my RSS feed from the IET this morning.
The headline is “Workplace pressures deter female techies from having children”.
As a woman who used to be a ‘proper’ engineer and has always worked in some form of technical environment I think about these sorts of things from time to time.
According to the article “of the 31% of women respondents with children, 70.4% of these believed this had adversely affected their career”.
This is very sad. And it is very boring.
Gentlemen, I think it is time that you accept that human beings need to breed. Not just because of the ‘ticking biological clock’ annoyance but because, at a very basic level, we need to breed in order to survive. If we do not have children then who will be paying taxes when we are old? Or, more significantly, who will be treating us in hospitals when we are old and falling apart?
Who do you want to breed with?
Too simplistic? Well, so is the idea that once a woman is pregnant or has had children she somehow becomes worth less or, much worse, once she is of an age where she might possibly consider breeding she is a risk.
I know that many of you are very well balanced men for whom these kind of issues simply don’t exist – great! – but there are still many who simply don’t know how to think about women and their place in your lives.
Consider these statistics (also from the article):
- 65.5% of women feel there is ‘macho’ culture in the IT workplace, while 69.6% of men do not.
- 65.7% of men do not think women are discriminated against, but 78.2% of women believe they are.
- 54% of women believe that being female has worked against them.
It is a miracle we are able to exist in the same world with such differing perceptions!
I was very lucky and grew up in a household where the fact that I was female was never a factor when I was deciding what I did and didn’t want to do. From ballet to karate classes, advanced mathematics to helping to fix the car, learning to knit and cook, my gender was never a factor. Sexism was something I encountered when I walked out of my front door.
I no longer want to have to justify my abilities because I am female. I am a woman. I am happy being a woman. I get on with my life and work. I contribute. Please stop with this nonsensical discrimination.
Let’s start playing a new game. I don’t want to have to join in with tiresome ‘dick-swinging’ but I do want to be counted. How about we measure each other on performance alone and forget about the genitalia?
Question which must be asked after this essay:
Do you like when (gentel)man opens door for you?
Yes, I do. Why?
I think this is a desperately interesting report… and particularly because of the focus it has on perceptions.
Perceptions are so incredibly powerful.
Does it matter if management are actively and consciously discriminating against women? Sure it does. But it matters just as much if the women (or anyone else for that matter) *perceive* discrimination, or intimidation.
If you want to have a workplace where people feel empowered and enabled and encouraged to work to their full potential, then you not only have to worry about what you, as management or co-workers, are *actually* doing, but also about the perception that is created in the workplace.
Now that I think on it some more… the perception is probably almost *more* important.
oh, and I have to add… I don’t think that door opening has anything to do with it at all. This is not about women being angry and aggressive feminists, this is about women feeling that they are able to contribute and achieve to their full potential, regardless of their gender or whether they have chosen to have children.
I think door opening is about manners.
The perceptions reported in that article were the scariest bit for me – it makes it all too ‘us vs. them’. I would’ve hoped we would all be a bit more integrated by now.
Perception is everything.
But perhaps we should change it and stop dividing the answers by men and women and start considering things in a more general ‘this is what society thinks’ sort of a way? I was reading this article you sent me and it is the ‘what society values and measures’ angle that caught my interest.
Also, what if instead of banging on about women in the workplace research went into how much fathers love their children?
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