The boardroom. Many of us have found ourselves sitting around a table brainstorming and meeting to try to better our company. One thing I noticed yesterday is split of responsibilities in meetings, despite titles. Yesterday my co-workers and I met to discuss our plans for 2011. Instantly, the owner (male) turned to a female in the group and asked her to take notes. Immediately I thought 'she isnt a secretary,' yet we have a male data entry clerk who was hired to input data and organize company reports and minutes from meetings. The topic of budgets came up and even though we were in a mixed group, it became a one-on-one with the males. The owner asked a male co-worker (who has never done a budget in his life) what he thought about the costs for a certain topic. In reality, the manager (female) should have been the one answering these questions as she constructs budgets and has an idea of where to spend and how much.
Afterwards I was thinking about the meeting and realized the split was even bigger. The outcome required many tasks to be completed and followed up on, yet the split was simple. The men took the business end and were asked to investigate contracts, expenses and possible deals. The women were given housekeeping tasks like thinking up slogans/logos and transcribing notes. How is this fair when both sexes are involved in each of the tasks. It was almost a phoneme to me how clear the line was drawn. Creativity goes to the women and business goes to the men.
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I always found it ironic that men and women have different titles for the same job. For example, when a woman is hired to be someone “right hand” she’s a secretary, but when a man is hired, he is given the title of confidential aide or a more notable title. A woman is the assistant to the Director and a man is the Assistant Director and the assistant to the Director (the woman) probably does twice the work.
ReplyDeleteI experienced a very similar situation at work this week. We were on a phone conference and one of the men a manager turned to his new hire a young pretty female and asked her to take notes. I then looked around the room and noticed most men were managers and every one of them had an administrative assistant that were female. Then I thought about all the hiring I've seen go on since I've been there and could not come up with 1 male that has been hired for that position and then I thought even further and realized I've nver seen a female hired by another female at this place. Is it me or are men hiring women for low level positions and men for upper level and at the same time are female managers hiring women or do female managers feel threatened by other female managers? I would think that female managers might want to hire other females to hiher positions because they know what it took for them to succeed but I'm not to sure this is the way it's happening.
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