On a similar theme to yesterday - MJR was watching a TV programme about plane crashes. There was one crash in which the pilot had taken a risk and flown through an area of severe turbulence when he could have avoided it - trying to be the big macho man who could do anything - MJRs comment not mine! MJR then asked me if I thought if there were more female pilots there would be fewer crashes because women would be less bothered about their image and more concerned with avoiding risks to the plane and their passengers.
It made me stop and think and I wonder whether anyone has done any research on the subject. Do female airline pilots have fewer crashes? I haven't tried Googling.
Supermarket checkout operators - following on from KCM's comment on yesterday's post. It can be an interesting job - if you make it so as several books about the subject have shown - The Checkout Girl by Tazeen Ahmad; Checkout: a Life on the Tills by Anna Sam; Shelf Life: How I Found the Meaning of Life Stacking Supermarket Shelves by Simon Parke. I've read the first and the last of these and they were both interesting and entertaining reading. Both books showed how the job could be inteesting however mudane it might seem.
Showing posts with label men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label men. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Women in the workplace
I was reading an article about the the possibility of there being more women working in the next 4 years than there are men. Not sure why this is news but it apparently is. Since there are more women in the population this might be part of it. Inevitably many of the comments were along the lines of the destruction of manufacturing has led to there being no jobs for men. My immediate thought was - so men are only capable of doing jobs that involve brute strength then?
The comment that stuck in my memory was - 'The most degrading sight I ever see is a man working as a supermarket checkout operator' So is the job itself degrading or is it degrading for a man to do the job? Either way the comment makes no sense unless you assume that men and women are meant to stick to their own particular jobs. I would have said it was more degrading to be unemployed.
Many of the comments suggested that men should not have to work in service industries as it's not natural. They used to in the 19th century - think of all of the ticket collectors and clerks in railway offices; then there were men doing what we would now call PA work; men being domestic servants; much clerical work would have been done by men because working class women frequently did not have the educational skills to do it. So when did such jobs become beneath a man's dignity?
The comment that stuck in my memory was - 'The most degrading sight I ever see is a man working as a supermarket checkout operator' So is the job itself degrading or is it degrading for a man to do the job? Either way the comment makes no sense unless you assume that men and women are meant to stick to their own particular jobs. I would have said it was more degrading to be unemployed.
Many of the comments suggested that men should not have to work in service industries as it's not natural. They used to in the 19th century - think of all of the ticket collectors and clerks in railway offices; then there were men doing what we would now call PA work; men being domestic servants; much clerical work would have been done by men because working class women frequently did not have the educational skills to do it. So when did such jobs become beneath a man's dignity?
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Books
I am pursuing my interest in the gender war - not that I like that way of describing it because to me it isn't a war. I'm currently reading Gender and the Media by Rosalind Gill which I am finding fascinating even though it is really an academic text. It's about how the way different sections of the media portray gender so it's not just about women but about men and masculinity and about what is apparently called Queer Theory - i.e. lesbians, bisexuals and trans gender people as well as homosexuals. It covers newspapers and magazines as well as books - though not apparently the Internet.
I tried to read - and failed to finish - Dick Masterson's Men are Better than Women. It is basically a misogynistic rant and the author appears to think there is absolutely nothing a woman is good at or good for. I'm all for not having censorship but if he had written the same thing about any ethnic group it would have been an incitement to racial hatred but there is no law that covers hatred of women - or men for that matter. It made me wonder whether I would have felt the same if it had been a book written by women about men and I concluded I would have done. It is just completely distasteful. It is advertised as humour but even some men reviewing it on Amazon didn't think it was funny.
Audio book
As light relief I am listening to Jane Austen's Emma - read by Jenny Agutter - very relaxing and her voice is just perfect for this book. I had forgotten how bitchy some of the dialogue is. Mrs Elton especially is just so unpleasant in such a civilised way. I'm nearly up to the famous Box Hill incident. I really like audio books and listened to two of the discs before I got up this morning.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
The World According to Women
I'm currently reading The World According to Women by Jane McLoughlin. It is trying to show how popular culture has ruined women. She appears to be excluding The Guardian - for which she does/has work(ed) - from her definition of popular culture. I would be more impressed with her theory if there was a contents list, an index and a bibliography in the book. I'm just over half way through and at the moment it seems to be her own views about Margaret Thatcher et al and how they emasculated men by depriving them of their traditional jobs. Um, really? So the miner's strike is all the fault of feminism - or at least women?
I'm not quite sure how encouraging women into work emasculates men. She seems to be saying popular culture excludes men and tells women how to denigerate them so that they feel worse about themselves. If she could really support her theory with facts and figures I would be interested. What she seems to be saying is that the 3 million unemployed in the 1980s were all men and women had been put into jobs at the expense of the men. She may well be correct most of the unemployed were men but for totally different reasons.
If women were unemployed they would not have been able to register and claim Job Seeker's Allowance because their husbands were working. Also a lot of women paid the Married Women's rate of National Insurance and therefore weren't eligible to claim Job Seeker's Allowance so again they wouldn't have been registered.
By creating jobs which are part time and low status the author is saying men became marginalised because the only jobs available suited women and made use of their inherent skills - caring, domestic work etc. These jobs were demeaning to men. Oh right - now I see. So it's women's fault because she goes out to work and because she's willing to do the jobs other people won't do.
If men have become emasculated and marginalised by society how come they can still be found at the top of most big organisations in far greater numbers than women? In the organisation I worked for once you got above a certain level 90% of the jobs were held by men. For those of you who are familiar with general civil service grades I was an Higher Executive Officer when I retired. In the job I did women were in the minority - only about 35% overall at that grade are women. The area I worked in was very macho and male dominated so the percentage was probably less.
This is an interesting book but it seems to be a manifesto in support of Guardian Women rather than anything else. I do agree though that the magazine Nova was excellent and in a class of its own. Even though it was resurrected a few years ago the new one wasn't as good as the original. My mother - not a lover of women's magazines - used to buy it and we both used to read it.
I'm not quite sure how encouraging women into work emasculates men. She seems to be saying popular culture excludes men and tells women how to denigerate them so that they feel worse about themselves. If she could really support her theory with facts and figures I would be interested. What she seems to be saying is that the 3 million unemployed in the 1980s were all men and women had been put into jobs at the expense of the men. She may well be correct most of the unemployed were men but for totally different reasons.
If women were unemployed they would not have been able to register and claim Job Seeker's Allowance because their husbands were working. Also a lot of women paid the Married Women's rate of National Insurance and therefore weren't eligible to claim Job Seeker's Allowance so again they wouldn't have been registered.
By creating jobs which are part time and low status the author is saying men became marginalised because the only jobs available suited women and made use of their inherent skills - caring, domestic work etc. These jobs were demeaning to men. Oh right - now I see. So it's women's fault because she goes out to work and because she's willing to do the jobs other people won't do.
If men have become emasculated and marginalised by society how come they can still be found at the top of most big organisations in far greater numbers than women? In the organisation I worked for once you got above a certain level 90% of the jobs were held by men. For those of you who are familiar with general civil service grades I was an Higher Executive Officer when I retired. In the job I did women were in the minority - only about 35% overall at that grade are women. The area I worked in was very macho and male dominated so the percentage was probably less.
This is an interesting book but it seems to be a manifesto in support of Guardian Women rather than anything else. I do agree though that the magazine Nova was excellent and in a class of its own. Even though it was resurrected a few years ago the new one wasn't as good as the original. My mother - not a lover of women's magazines - used to buy it and we both used to read it.
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