Glass Ceiling???

From: Amber Valeris DeWine (Your_Honor@mail.findlaw.com.criticalpath.net)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 12:43:56 EST


I once heard a well-known feminist author relate this story: She was in an
office, and noticed that all the secretaries were female whereas all the
managers were male, and wondered that at least some of the women must be
suited to a manager's job but systemic gender bias in how they were raised
had pushed them all into secretary's jobs, and that probably at least some
of the men were not the most ideal for a manager's job, but systemic gender
bias had given them this privilege in spite of that. She concluded that
action had to be taken to correct these injustices.

Yesterday I had a series of meetings at my bank's head office (I'm an
intern). If there is a glass ceiling, it is so high up that I can't see it.
Every single person I met, from the secretaries to the Head of Finance, was
a woman. Until I came back down to the ground floor, where every janitor I
passed, every road worker slugging it out in the cold, every subway worker
eating train grime, were men.

As many can attest from experiences with tellers and branch managers
that just don't seem able to grasp the simplest ideas sometimes, not every
woman banker is really intellectually suited to the task, to put it
politely.

It's time to start thinking about those poor high school boys who are
labeled because they don't fit into the feminine design of school, who are
left to drop out in droves while attention is focused on getting girls into
engineering programs, who are assumed to belong there through their own
fault when they end up digging ditches at the feet of women curled up in
their cushy offices complaining they don't have a shot at the presidency.

Hugs
Amber V. DeWine
your_honor@justice.com



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