The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

A friend on FB bragged this week about how she got a car salesman fired because he kept hitting on her during a car sale.

This kind of thing pisses me off. It's one thing to make a complaint to a company about the way you've been treated by a member of their staff - it is quite another thing to revel in destroying someone's career because they acted like a dick.

I've been in the professional working world for a quarter of a century, and for that entire time, my bosses have all been women. For over half that time, their bosses have been women. Maybe my personal experiences don't match others, and maybe it's because I'm in a field with a lot of women in it (paralegals) but from where I'm standing, I don't see a need to help women to gain more power over men.

Unfortunately that is something of an exception. Paralegals began as a mostly female thing - it initially came out of secretarial support for lawyers. There are industries where women make up a reasonable percentage of management - though statistically speaking, even in fields that are female dominated in terms of work force (primary/elementary teaching for example) management still tends to be predominantly male.

This is one of the difficulties, I think, with feminism generally. For some people, their life experience is one of strong women in positions of power - and it can make the inequalities that do exist seem less prominent or relevant. It is also important to bear in mind that whilst statistically women may fare worse in the world of work overall (pay disparity, promotional disparity, and the unconscious biases that affect hiring practices) there are areas in which men fare worse (male teachers of younger children for example face a lot of discrimination in hiring) and their experience of discrimination is just as valid and just as potentially damaging to them as individuals.

An interesting look at gender in the legal profession:

http://www.legaltechnology.com/lates...w-infographic/

And a piece by a male paralegal :

http://paralegalhell.com/2010/11/10/...ale-paralegal/