Making it all add up
Hello, middle-aged heterosexual male here, so feel free to judge the following story on the basis of your prejudices about me.

Wavy lines back to the mid-1990s when I used to work for a large, well known telephone company in the UK in the department known at the time as Operator Services. As a newly-promoted manager, I had to attend endless courses and workshops to ensure all the necessary boxes were ticked to show I was capable of performing my job properly. One such event was the one-day “diversity workshop”.

We did the usual bits about race, disability and so on, but the part that sticks in mind is when we got to the fact that, although the operator population was about 80% female, the gender ratio between their managers was almost exactly half-and-half male to female.

What surprised me was the next statement from the course trainer: that they were going to try to align the managerial gender mix to match that of the operators within 3 years. As a bloke who’d just got promoted, I was a bit miffed by this and asked the trainer if I should just “get my coat now”.

I don’t think the trainer was too keen on my attitude as she went on to talk about how change is inevitable and we must all adapt to it and that people must be given opportunities without thinking in such sexist terms, etc.

Unfortunately, she had no stock answer when I started doing a bit of maths. At the time, it was a big organisation, with about 5,000 operators and team managers at a ratio of about 1 for every 25 operators. Unless the company intended to increase the number of managers, roughly 60 male managers would have to be replaced by female ones within three years, meaning 2/3 of us would either have to fall on our swords or get promoted elsewhere, which kind of defeats the object.

That assumed, of course, that women would fill every team manager vacancy that arose, despite the company’s avowed policy of every applicant for a vacancy having an equal chance. Yeah, right.

Anyway, the trainer wrote my “issues” down on a flipchart and promised to get back to me. Fifteen years later, I’m still waiting.

Sorry for length and lack of funneh. To make up for it, here’s a joke that did the rounds on the e-mail before the thought-police stopped it:

Always keep the sexual harassment complaint forms in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. That way, she’s got to bend down to get one.
( Snappyuk gets BIGGER with free sample., Mon 28 Dec 2009, 9:03, 1 reply)

You should have said..
That since the ratio of male:female managers was representative of society as a whole then they should really be aiming to even up the ratio among the operators. To do otherwise was sexist ;)

But seriously, if every post was recruited on merit and every applicant was given equal consideration then there is no need to start worrying about how many women or men you have. If the work is more attractive to one gender for whatever reason then more will apply for the post and presumably the same proportion will succeed given an even distibution of aptitude.

Positive descrimination is still descrimination, just as bad as negative in my view.
( TheFinch is getting to grips with the complex plane on, Mon 28 Dec 2009, 11:34, closed)