NYT OpEd on Sexism at WalMart

Great Debates
1

From a recent New York Times OpEd:

[QUOTE=NYT]
There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.

Why? Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.

For young men in a hurry, that’s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.

The obstacles to women’s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
[/QUOTE]

Anyone else having trouble seeing the sexism supposedly at work here? Yeah, I’m sure it is easier for a “young man in a hurry” to move to a new store than a middle-aged woman with children. It’s probably also easier for a young woman to do so than a middle-aged man. So what?

And the fact that more women might balk at the idea of working extra-long weeks during the holidays…well, how is that Wal-Mart’s fault? In fact, the only potential discrimination I see is if managers pre-emptively assume that any woman won’t put in extra time during peak seasons. But the author seems to think that asking for extra work around the holidays is in and of itself discriminatory. Am I missing something here?

Please note that I’m not looking to start a conversation on Wal-Mart’s other labor sins, or even other aspects of this particular suit. (I haven’t followed it, and for all I know there are plenty of other reasons why Wal-Mart is a sexist company.) For the purposes of this thread, I’m just curious to know what others think of these two arguments - as they apply to Wal-Mart, or to any job.

2

I tend to agree with you. The assumption that women would not want to relocate or work 60 hours, and therefore not offering them promotions, is sexist. The fact that the jobs actually have those requirements is not – that’s just a fact of the retail industry.

3

I think the reality of life in America includes a majority of middle-aged women who shoulder a disproportionate amount of their respective family-care duties, yes.

Now, whether those duties are such that they prohibit or unfairly limit those women especially from moving to another place in order to take better jobs - I don’t know if there is an official answer to that.

However, to me it seems that ANYONE in an established family or community (male or female) is going to be more hesitant to move away from support networks (or simply have a harder time of it even if they want to, due to children/other family/social life/friends/spouse’s employment) than someone who is unencumbered.

Therefore, I’d say that the established policy is biased **towards **unencumbered people.

That those unencumbered people tend to be young males is just a feature of how our social structure is constructed at this time.

Going farther than that gets into sticky situations dealing with whether you think companies and goverment should be actively involved in mediating the consequences from the way society is structured.

ETA - Extra hours. I don’t think *asking *anyone to work extra hours is sexist. However, if there are *sanctions *involved for employees being unable to pick up extra (presumably voluntary) shifts at whatever times, THAT would be discrimination. On the other hand, if the employment contract states that the hours are subject to increase around x holidays with y warning time, then the employee agreed to the workload by accepting the job, and is screwed again. I find it hard to believe that statements to that effect aren’t part of the legal paperwork for a company as massive as WM.

4

Right…but really, what job isn’t to some degree “biased towards the unencumbered”? Teaching kindergarten, pumping gas, digging ditches, and baking cakes are all biased towards people who aren’t encumbered by the need to sit by a sick relative’s bedside 24/7. No?

5

What I think in the end actually makes this sexist is that this requirement isn’t necessary, or at least I can’t see how it’s necessary. Do they really need to make all new managers move?

It’s understandable that the job might require 60 hours per week, even more on holidays, and therefore that aspect isn’t sexist, it’s just a reality of the work world.

For that reason I think the practice represents an institutional bias that quickly weeds out not just women.

6

The sexist outcome, as opposed to a sexist intent, is due to the social pressures in our country. Women are still expected to do more work at home and to take primary care of the children. This is starting to change, but it is still true for the majority of people in the work force. Single mothers with primary custody vastly outnumber single fathers with primary custody. I could not find numbers, but I would guess a lot of Wal-Mart employees are single mothers. And for married mothers, they still are more likely to be the ones doing the drop offs and housework.

7

This is pushing the example to an extreme. But taking any of those cases, what if all new teachers were required to work outside the county they lived in? Or all new teachers had to first spend a year in Florida or teaching English overseas? If the requirement isn’t part of the job, it sets up an institutional bias. What if all new gas attendents had to first eat a package of Slim Jims? It seems harmless enough, but prevents Jewish, Muslim, and vegetarian workers from taking the job.

What’s odd is that this group targets Walmart management, but completely ignores careers like medicine, the military, and some police forces that require relocation. I know in Canada there was a push to make new doctors spend time working rural areas. And the RCMP had a standard practice of sending new recruits to extremely remote stations for their first few years.

The result from a lot of this analysis has been jobs that realized they don’t actually need the person in a specific location at a specific time, thus allowing people to work remotely. As long as you get your job done, what does it matter if you did it at 2pm or 2am? Some jobs allow for this, others clearly don’t.

8

No arguments here - it’s undoubtedly still tougher for women to have both full careers and families. But that gets to the question of whether Wal-Mart needs to disrupt its management policies to account for society’s problem - and whether not doing so is actively sexist, and worthy of being sued for. It seems to me that should not be a requirement - that, as long as they are willing to take any qualified man or woman who is willing to sacrifice what’s required to become a manager, they’re not being sexist at all.

It’s also worth noting that while society still disproportionately encourages women to take care of their families, men who sign on for tough career paths are also making sacrifices. The male Wal-Mart manager who has to work 80-hour weeks during the holidays would surely much prefer to be watching his kid in a school Christmas pageant than slaving away till midnight. He may even prefer to be the one in charge of dropoffs and housework. No one has an easy time having a full career and a full family life.

9

Not just women, but who else?

Yeah, it’s pushing the example to the extreme, but that was kind of the point - unless you want to legalize the “encumbered” (as understood from the description in the earlier post) as a group deserving protection.

Anyways, there are reasonable job requirements and there are unreasonable ones that clearly have no purpose other than to discriminate against certain groups. There’s no compelling reason I can think of to require a gas pumper to eat Slim Jims; there are, on the other hand, reasons to require chefs at barbecue joints to taste the food, even if that means eliminating observant Jews, Muslims, and vegetarians from the job. It just goes with the territory.

Wal-Mart’s reason for transferring managers may be tough and may arguably be unnecessary (though there’s at least some sense in it), but it doesn’t strike me as hugely unreasonable, nor does it appear to be a sly way of weeding out women.

10

WAG - the person who’s promoted from within is moved to a new store so that they won’t have personal entanglements/friendships/live next door to any of the people they’ll now be responsible for supervising, thereby eliminating the possibility of personal bias. When I ran a fast food restaurant (see the Cafe Society thread on that), most people promoted to management level were transferred to a different restaurant for the same reason.

11

I mostly agree, but your examples are of new employees, and new employees, in almost any job, understand they have to move. The WalMart example forces people with established jobs to move. I’m betting they don’t give a lot of spousal support. Some companies force people to move overseas, but they give lots of support, and the military does also, at least judging from a friend whose husband has moved several times and has also spent time in Afghanistan and similar vacation spots.

I’d be interested in seeing numbers about how many women get offered these management jobs, and refuse, and how many women, relative to men, do not get offered the jobs on the assumption that they will refuse.

I think what is more interesting than potential sexism is a kind of assumption that a manager has to be such an asshole that they don’t think he could fulfill this role adequately managing people who are friends or at leas former co-workers. It is not like managing former colleagues is unique to WalMart - I just don’t know any other company who feels they need to move managers to avoid the problem.

12

The sexism is when you don’t offer jobs to women on the account of ‘oh, they’ll bitch, anyway’.

13

Right, and that was meant to be my point. If Walmart has a policy that says,

“new managers are not permitted to run a store they previously worked at.”

With the stated reason being that they encountered too many problems with cronyism and favoritism.

Then they have an established and reasonable purpose for the policy and no sexism exists. It’s simply an unfortunate coincidence that “the encumbered” won’t be able to take a position at another store.

To re-use your fast food example, if the stated rule is “the manager must taste all the food,” to me that represents an unnecessary bias against people that for what ever reason are not able to eat some of the food (ie peanut allergy). Tasting the food before it’s served is important and must be done, no question, but is it possible that simply someone taste the food? Does it have to be the manager, and does the manager have to taste ALL of the food?

A person with a peanut allergy is obviously precluded from working at a peanut factory, I think that goes without saying, so it’s not a bias to exclude that group. But nearly all restaurants have peanuts in one form or another, and a worker with that allergy could still function perfectly fine. When I was a cook there was always someone with some allergy or sensitivity, and things still got done. I guess the easier way to put this is to say it’s part of being in a team. I used to get really frustrated working with short people that constantly needed me to reach stuff, and I joked once that I only wanted to hire tall people.

On the other hand, if a person is meant to work solo for what ever reason, the criteria get a lot stricter. I saw a job posting recently for a baker, and due to the nature of baking the work was done over night, and the person would be alone during the shift. The posting specifically mentioned that the last baker was a woman that was too scared and quit. Going back to the beginning, it’s obvious that baking has to be done over night due to space constraints, and the need for bread during the morning shift. So as long as there is a reasonable justification for the policy there isn’t a bias towards women who are more likely to be scared working alone at night. But if the baking could just as easily be done during the day, the policy will contain a certain amount of bias.

14

“Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.”

“The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons.”

Calling these policies sexist, or unfair to women, is boneheadedly missing the point. They’re not anti-woman; they’re anti-family. They impose a high burden on fathers as well as mothers.

15

What pisses me off, and not just about Wal-Mart, is the observation that the primary reason women don’t make the same money than men do is because they are too soft at negotiating for salary or raises. Women want to placate, and make people like them. Men will stand up for their rights.

Well, I suppose. But a man who stands up for his rights will be admired for his guts. A woman who stops placating, and starts standing up for her rights is just being a bitch.

16

True but only just. This graph shows the percentage of household work shared has dramatically narrowed over the past 30ish years. Women still do more but men and women are pretty close now (and the trend is all up for men and down for women).

(The above graph was taken from the article: Overworked America: 12 Charts that Will Make Your Blood Boil)

17

As a guy who is 5’7" tall I find it unfair that taller men are more likely to be hired and get paid more (and women are more attracted to them). (cite)

Is it because the taller men assert themselves and I am being too soft and bitchy if I try?

18

I dunno. Maybe you are. I personally can’t stand bitchy men.

Do you deny people tend to resent an abrasive woman more than they do an abrasive man?

19

I think you answered your own question.

To wit: “I personally can’t stand bitchy men.”

Unless you want to say bitchy women bug you even more.

20

They can, on occasion.

Let’s at least agree that even the word “bitch” has a distinct female connontation. Or will you even deny that? When someone says, “What a bitch,” do you picture a man or a woman?