Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Sisterhood in workplace

Sisterhood in workplace, a call for women to stop sniping at each other (with other women) – sounds good, no?

Well, not really.

The author make it sounds like as if guys do not do this kind of stuff, but only women do (and they do only to other women), and therefore themselves becoming the last obstacle to gender equality in workplace. But the fact is that, men do it all the time as well.

Then what's the point of the article? Well, to begin with, office rivalry and sniping are not really the nicest thing to do to your colleagues, boss, subordinates, be they men or women. I agree, but then why an emphasis on working women? The true motive of the author's seemingly benign call could only be understood in the framework of a class struggle, a class struggle not between capitalisn and proletariat, but a class struggle between the two opposite sexes.

Let me elaborate; since it is important to break a glass ceiling and into a male-dominant world of corporate boardroom, it naturally follows that all the women of the world must unite. The enemy is not other, more successful, highly placed women, but men.

Only by viewing all men (in workplace) as a class enemy, the author's call will make sense. Office politics, sniping and backstabbing are commonplace in most if not all of workplace, and it happens between men, between men and women, and between women. However, the author thinks only the last case, women sniping at other women to be problematic.

If you replace a woman with another woman in the board, it doesn’t help bring up the percentage of women in the boardroom. The percentage will only go up if you replace a man with a woman. Therefore, immediate ceasefire among professional women is in order, while pretending that the problem concerns only women and let men continue fighting each other to their own detriment.

1 comment:

WooZoo said...

Wrote about the same article myself.
I just find it amazing how women continue to delude themselves about their true character.
Though, these paragraphs are telling:

Many of us, however, find it hard to even acknowledge mistreatment by another woman. We fear that bringing our experience into the light and talking about it will set us back to that ugly gender stereotype we have fought so hard to overcome: the one about the overemotional, backstabbing, aggressive (and you know what’s coming) bitch.

Yet, expecting women to be universally supportive of one another or to give preferential treatment to anyone with two X chromosomes is an equally unworkable view.