Well there is the whole “you are male so you can’t be trusted with or near children”.
I have rarely seen a qualified woman being overlooked solely because of her gender, there is always some other reason (s). I have seen many many qualified men being overlooked solely because of their gender.
I do a lot of work providing legal services to an NGO and let me tell you, trying to get people to accept that there was abuse on boys is very very difficult. People will first say that the lad is lying, “it was horseplay”, and that he was willing, before they reluctantly accept that the matter must be looked into.
For a girl? Even the smallest suggestion that something might be amiss will get the police, social services, Feds and seems like the army, navy and airforce involved.
I’ve been rejected from a job because the ad called for an ingeniero “in-ge-nie-ROOOOOOOOOO”, ingenieras abstain.
And had a production manager exclaim “but, but, but it’s a girl!” upon entering the room where he was to interview a candidate for process engineer. I’d say that my name is quite the clue, but hey. Maybe he just hadn’t read the resume. The HR guy didn’t kill him but I think it may have been because there was a witness.
In general, a large reason why there are so many female engineers in Purchasing, QC or EHS has to do with getting negative reactions when we try to join the holy ranks of Production. Lots of first and second-hand stories about that.
A couple years ago, I told my mother that a certain asshole the client had hired “to help” was “one of those ‘the girl’ guys”. Jay said “my gf also talks about ‘the girl’ guys, and I know there is something I’m missing, what is it?”
“Well, I’m not talking about those guys who call everybody lad and lass, but about those who’d call you Jay or Mr Lastname, but me ‘hey girl’”
“Oh God :smack: Yep, I can see the problem.”
There is a HR selection firm, local to us, that’s got a reputation of being heavily sexist. Jay has both benefited and suffered from it: benefited, because being a male means that they will send his resume to positions that say “manager”, and suffered because they never, ever, send a male to an administration position which does not say “manager”, never mind that posts such as “controller” aren’t exactly the bottom of the heap. He’s had his current job for almost ten years and eventually convinced his managers to switch to a different source.
That’s because saying “we rejected her because of her gender” can get you into legal problems, so always another reason is found, made up, or manufactured by the legally savvy.
Reminds me of the “shopping while black” issue that was in the news a few years ago, in which black customers browsing store merchandise were monitored much more closely than white customers.
Still, if you were reviewing applicants for daytime babysitters for your kids, and the two best individual applicants were a man and a woman, which one would you pick for the job?
Thats certainly possible. Its also possible that disappointed candidates will more easily believe that their gender was the real reason and ignore the other considerations (men as well), its human nature to underplay your own deficiencies.
However, in this day and age, most firms are (officially at least) very very eager to be seen to be hiring women.
I work as a cashier in a store owned by Chassidic Jews, and we get a lot of Muslim customers.
I cannot tell you how many times one or the other has asked for a male cashier. We always keep some guy around who knows how to do the job, and I’ve been told “You have the right to think it. You don’t have the right to say it.”
Seriously, some of these types think that women have no ability to think. One such person told his son in front of me “When you have a girl cashier, always give them correct change. They’re too stupid to count money.”
You’ve never been expected to pay on the first date, told to “man up”, or registered for the draft? I understand why the sexism discussion has focused on women but that focus shouldn’t extend to ignoring sexism against men. Take college graduation rates, for example. The gap between the sexes is the same as it was before the big feminist successes starting in the 70s. Except that it is reversed so no one cares any more. In fact, we still take it for granted that men are the privileged ones in education despite women being much more successful.
I think we’ve moved passed the point where being a woman is always a disadvantage and being male is always an advantage. I’m a programmer and in my particular industry I’ve never met a female team lead, let alone one leading a project. I’ve never seen overt sexism but I can clearly see that it’d be a uphill battle for a woman to reach those levels. My GF works in early childhood education. It’s equally clear that if I chose that as my profession I’d be at a disadvantage compared to her. Her specific job entails a great deal of time where it is just her and a child. As a male, I view that as an unacceptably high risk and there’s no way I would ever take her job.
I’ve worked in assembly, played a traditionally male sport, fixed my own car, and grew up in a fundamentalist religion, so of course, but only minimally so. Mostly, I just ignore that crap. I’ve heard women told to remain “barefoot and pregnant,” among other witticisms, but we all see that for the BS that it is. Overall, I rate it as not enough to matter.
You mean like the time my boss told me that he had to recommend my male co-worker over me for a promotion (even though he said I had the better work record), because my co-worker was going to get married one day and have to support a family, whereas I was just going to get pregnant and stay home.
Of the HS algebra who refused to acknowledge any of the girls in the class, because we were taking his time away from the boys who needed the math class.
Or the boss who told me it’s okay for women to be secretaries or in the data entry pool, but we didn’t belong in other jobs.
Or the boss who told me he could give me only a 2% raise because there was no money in the budget, who then gave my male co-worker a 10% even though I could work circles around him. That was the company who still had ‘file clerks’ on staff, whose real job was to entertain the out of town businessmen.
Or being told I was an hysterical female when I complained when my male co-worker picked me up and slammed me down in a chair and told me if I moved he’d beat me up because I was working too fast and making him look bad.
One time in a movie theatre, my girlfriend slipped out an epic silent-but-deadly. As the odor spread out through the surrounding rows, all the heads turned and glared at me. Not the female trying to suppress her giggles, but the male :mad:, because girls don’t fart or something.
I found out I was paid 30% less then the men in the same job - despite having the only college degree among us and more years of experience.
I was sexually harassed and raped by my boss. I ended up having HR switch my professions on me (which turned out not to be bad - I went from accounting to IT in the 1990s - on the other hand, I ended up disliking IT - and I’m back to being an accountant).
I’ve interviewed for jobs multiple times to have the dingbats on the other side of the table admit that I’m only there because “HR said we had to interview a woman.”
I’ve had issues buying cars and getting my car fixed (“do you need to check with your husband?”)
Although I insisted on having my name first on all the mortgage paperwork, it was switched “by policy” by the mortgage company - when I got separated and later divorced, my ex filed a change of address - so he got all the mortgage notifications - I almost lost my house because I didn’t get the notice escrow had changed.
I’ve been pulled over by police and offered “ticket or blowjob” (I took the ticket). On the other hand I suspect I’ve also not gotten tickets because I was a cute white woman.
In high school my math teacher was consistently surprised that girls could do math. Boys who struggled were “just making mistakes and not paying attention” and managed to pull of Cs anyway - girls who struggled should be content with their D because you couldn’t expect more. On the other side of the scale, girls who got As were treated like purple unicorns. “You really understand log functions?! That’s really unusual in a girl.” (Really, asshole, because in a class of thirty, about twenty of us aren’t having an issue - and half of that twenty are female - and you’ve been teaching this course for twenty years…you should have caught on by now that numbers don’t fall out of our pretty little heads just because we are women). He was the worst, but he wasn’t the only.
Then there is the catcalling, the objectification by society, the interrupting and patronizing…
As a man I have been, because sometimes when women get in power and bring in more women to surround them, they start pulling the same old ‘good old boys’ bullshit. And when you point out that they’d be fired if they were a man doing what they’re doing, they don’t much like it. (Hiring a male stripper to come into the office when female strippers have been banned, not hiring people because they’re male and you want to be a good empowered feminist and only hire women, sexist and inappropriate jokes in meetings, etc) My Manager/Director back in the late 90’s was particularly bad at this.
Heck, in the late 90’s, a male friend of mine emailed this very anti-male screed to me. I took the wording and completely reversed it, making it anti-female. Changed only the gender. My friend blew up, ranted about how anti-women I was and said he never wanted to speak to me again. My response was “I have no issues with that, since all I did was reverse the gender on your screed. If you’re so anti-male and so goddamned sensitive about it, I don’t want to know you either.”
Guy hadn’t even notice that I sent the exact same thing back to him with the genders reversed, he was so jumpy about it. In the end, he calmed down and our friendship continued. And he never sent me that kind of bullshit again.
Not sure, probably (but don’t remember), and yes. Perhaps those were instances of sexism – if so, they were so incredibly minor that they didn’t make any sort of impression on me.
Yes, including being told by my now ex-husband that women had it so easy because “none of them ever died in a war.” Yeah, history was not his strong suit.
And, just last week, when I had pulled my car into a huge service bay at a car dealership to have a small thing checked. When I was leaving, the service guy, who I’m sure thought he was being nice to a midde-aged woman, asked me if I wanted him to back my (smallish) car out of the service bay for me. I said that, since I routinely backed up a big truck and horse trailer, I didn’t think the car would be a problem, but thanks anyway. :dubious:
I’ve been subjected to a hefty amount of differential treatment based on sex. Some of it has been favorable by my own measure. Some of it has not been pleasant for me but would be found favorable by others so treated or regarded. Some has been pretty compellingly negative by any reasonable measure. All of it took place against a backdrop in which it appeared to me that girls and women did not get a fair and equal shake and had the worse overall set of differential treatments.
Men have power in this social system. To some people, being in a position of power over others is an unmitigated benefit, a wonderful thing. To others, the valorization of power is, itself, a priority from within an overall masculine compendium of values. I tend towards the latter viewpoint. I do not wish people to have power over me but I do not hunger for power over others myself and find unequal power between the sexes to be horribly destructive of the best opportunities for happiness and communal bonding. Also, power is not something that one possesses; it is, instead, an aspect of one’s relationship to others, and even when and where one’s position is clearly granted power in relationship to others, the individual in that position is as much defined by that power relationship as those who are disempowered by that same relationship.