Anyone remember the job ads titled “Office Help”? You knew, when a job ad was titled that way, that they expected, or wanted, a woman. Women help. They don’t actually do a job, they just help someone else do a job. So the someone else gets the credit. And the big bucks and the benefits. …
Category: work
work
Feb 02 2014
Show a Little Initiative!
If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative. Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded. Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in …
Nov 01 2013
Surrogacy – Why Not?
Sure, women should be allowed to be surrogates. We all do work with our bodies, some of us also include our minds in the deal (some of us are allowed to include our minds in the deal), so why not? As long as they get paid for service rendered. Being a surrogate is sort of …
Jun 02 2013
The Gender of Business
Business is male. Make no mistake. Everything about it smacks of the male mentality. First, the obsession with competition. You have to be #1, you have to outcompete your competition. So hierarchy, rank, is everything. As is an adversarial attitude. It doesn’t have to be that way. Business could be a huge network of co-operative …
Feb 14 2013
A Gold Watch. Seriously.
At one of my previous workplaces, we had a little ceremony each year honouring employees who had worked there for five, ten, or fifteen years. I used to go. (There was free pizza.) But then I stopped. (After three years, I could afford my own pizza.) It’s a curious thing, this esteem we have for …
Nov 27 2012
Crossing the Line
I crossed a picket line once. The Ontario Federation of Secondary School Teachers (OSSTF) in the Toronto area was on strike in 1983, and one of their demands was that union members be hired to fill night school and summer school teaching positions. They were concerned about quality of education: they didn’t want these courses …
Sep 14 2012
Kept Women (and Men)
There is something objectionable about a perfectly-capable-of-working adult being ‘kept’ by another adult. It seems to me the epitome of laziness and immaturity to be supported by someone else, to have someone else pay your way through life. But, I suppose, if someone wants to pay someone else’s way, if a man wants to ‘keep’ …
Jun 04 2012
Combining Family and Career
People say that women can’t have, can’t combine, a family and a career, that it’s having family responsibilities that keeps them from advancement – the inability to work late or on weekends, the tendency to need time off to tend to kids… I’m not so sure. I’ve never had such competing obligations, and I don’t …
Apr 25 2012
Being There
I recently read a lament about work attitudes, about how more and more people seem to think that just being there is enough, that their paycheque is for putting in time rather than for actually doing anything, let alone for doing a good anything, that people feel no guilt about the mistakes they make, nor …
Nov 14 2011
King of the Castle
Octavia Butler got it right in Xenogenesis when the aliens identified one of our fatal flaws as that of being hierarchy-driven (they fixed us with a bit of genetic engineering) – but she failed to associate the flaw predominantly with males. And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that …
fiction
