Post No. 1,284 - Cross Posting: Male vs. female in the workplace

This was originally posted at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/02/male-vs-female-in-workplace.html

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For personal reasons, this is going to be a rushed post: apologies in advance.

To begin with, it is a simplification (ESPECIALLY AS IT USES A BI-POLAR MODEL OF GENDER, AND THAT IS WRONG - but it is hard enough to get some people in workplaces to accept a 2nd gender in the workplace . . . ), but it is possible to present the strength (or proportion of a gender with) characteristics using what is typically termed "a bell curve".

If we look at the above diagram (and apologies for the cropping), and say it is showing height, you could say some women are shorter than average (shown on the right - I've reversed the pattern of showing female on the left because that is art of the building of discrimination against women in patriarchal societies, because of the association of left and evil [which also affects left handed people]), most are around average (under the peak), some are as tall as men (some are actually much taller than most men), some men are shorter than some women, and so on.

If we were to call it something that is stereotypically (and thus it is a misleading simplification, in many cases) ascribed to men, such as aggression, you would see there is some overlap between the two genders, and a minority have an excess of aggression.

This affected by things like social conditioning. This curve a few decades ago could have looked more like the following:

Note particularly the areas of unfulfilled lives (for both genders) and severe personal problems. Such still exist for many reasons, but one is that we continue to condition (or socially engineer) people into bipolar stereotypes.

If we move to the modern workplace, which has changed a little in recent decades, we could portray the situation as being as follows:

Where workplaces has moved slightly towards a more balanced position, but:

• thee fact that some women have coped in a male-dominated workplace is incorrectly used to resist change; 
• some of the behaviours shown or expected in workplaces (such as a belief in competition, or resistance to changing language to be inclusive or, at the very least, gender neutral) are characteristic of a more extreme expression of gender stereotypes.

All of the above helps to illustrate, in my opinion, the fact that we need to continue addressing gender bias, as well as discrimination, in the workplace. Whether they like it or not, the predominant gender in any workplace will have to change as human beings throughout most of the organisation to properly, sustainably, address discrimination.

As a final point, this also applies equally to female dominated workplaces - representatives of which I have heard within the last few years using exactly the same arguments and words as men did two or three decades ago.