Stereotypes Are a Joke, but Not the Funny Kind
Ahh… women bosses, always so bitchy, snapping out orders. Unless they don’t, in which case, they’re typical vacillating, indecisive females. And when they’re not alternately being bitchy or indecisive, they’re also being weepy and emotional, and possibly man haters. Sound familiar?
These are common tropes in late night comedy, in movies, and even in casual complaints about work that we tell our friends. These are common stereotypes, and you can debate the truthfulness or the percentage of accuracy of the grain of truth of certain stereotypes till the cows come home and never reach a definitive conclusion.
You want some kind of study showing that men and women have different kinds of brains and they make decisions differently? With the male brain being rational and the female brain being emotional? Look away on the internet and you’ll find so many.
You want some kind of study showing that men and women may have different kinds of brain circuitry impacting their behavior, but in the end, competent ones will make probably the same correct decision or choose the right path towards achieving a certain objective? Look away online again, and you can find sources to back you up.
Butter used to be considered bad for you, and people started gravitating towards vegetable oils and margarine until they were told that, oops, these fake butter substitutes are way worse than butter, which isn’t exactly a health food, but isn’t that terrible in comparison.
The thing is, MRI scans of a few hundred (or even a few thousands) of men and women (when there are billions of people in the world) can’t really give you an accurate representation of what goes on in those male and female brains, even after you use that favorite word of statisticians: extrapolate. Decades from now, these kinds of far ranging conclusions from such limited technology will be viewed as no less primitive as phrenology. Not to mention brain chemistry can’t really predict actual behaviour accurately enough to make hiring or business decisions based on it for a whole half of the world.
Flash some picture or show a video clip of some scenario and watch whose brain lights up in what area, and suddenly you can predict how an entire half of the world may or may not behave? Come on. It may show some certain tendencies or predispositions to certain stimulants, but even these are not set in stone.
Back in the day of telephone switchboard operators, boys were initially hired for this role, as they were cheap (no child labor laws back in the day) and nimble. But their jackassery like pranking callers on live calls caused too many headaches, so women were hired instead. Women did very well at this until the 70s, when firms began hiring majority men again for this job, most likely due to economic crises.
The thinking at the time went as such- teen boys were too rowdy and keep wanting to prank customers, women would be more docile and obedient. But are these behaviors really because of the male/ female divide? Look at those boys, they’re paid peanuts to work crappy hours doing a repetitive, stupid task. Where’s the incentive to suppress the natural playful instincts of kids and go all Ashton and punk some unsuspecting caller? If they hired girls, perhaps girls 2 years younger who haven’t been socialized into obedience and docility by their peers and parents, they’d probably end up punking the callers just as bad as the rowdy boys.
After they hired these polite, docile women though, switchboard operating started being viewed as a woman’s job for decades. Because it’s pretty much rote tasks, people viewed this as something suited to a woman’s simple brain. And the fact that this is a customer-facing job is viewed as perfectly suited for women- as their sole purpose in life is to please.
Why were these women seemingly much more polite and docile than the rowdy boys who preceded them? Is it because of their oh so special XX chromosome? Or is it because they weren’t random street urchins picked up to get extra hands, but were educated women who were very happy to land these jobs as not that many professional jobs were open to them at the time, despite their degrees. Perhaps the reason after all is because the hiring process has started becoming more professionalized and selective.
Secretarial work was originally viewed as more suited for males- women can’t keep confidences ya know and are probably too dumb to know how to take notes and dictation properly. Until one day it was viewed as more suited for women- it’s too lowly a job for men, who’ve moved on to newly opened fields in a rapidly industrializing world.
Computer programming back in the day was considered female work.
God knows coding is full of repetitive, rote, grunt work. That’s why, on the 8th day of Genesis, God invented plug-in libraries. Alleluia. But before this happened, males felt it was beneath them to do such kind of lowly mental tasks, and relegated this to women. But oh, only the high level creative work of big ideas for them.
But today, computer programming is considered a guy thing, something women’s brains are too emotional or irrational (depending on the study of the day) to grasp.
This type of stereotyping hurts men too, because if men behave in a supposedly atypical male behavior at work, then he is branded a “fag”, a “crybaby”, “too emotional to make decisions”, etc.
And refusing to do business or chiefly preferring to work with a whole half of the world simply because of stereotypes that are pretty much societally constructed and are fluid depending on perspective to start with is just stupid. You’ll lose out on talent, qualified men and women will shy away from your company or want to leave you. You’ll be much less competitive, and endless re-readings of Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus won’t be able to tell you why.
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Gem was a participant in Exosphere’s boot camps and is now part of the Athena team.
