I don’t think I’ve ever read such a deeply toxic comment in my life. On the surface polite, but underneath such a corrupt worldview. Good on Sheryl for just surviving in an environment with people like that.
Not saying this to nitpick or attack. I just wanted to point out that exaggerated outrage fuels the trolls and tends to make reasonable people tune out. I think it would be sufficient to simply state it was "a negative and misguided comment".
I find this pretty hard to believe, you must have read something on the internet more toxic than that!
I don't think the person being quoted means what you think they do, unless you assume the absolute worst about them, and I don't see how we have enough information to make a judgement one way or the other about this persons worldview.
In the previous paragraph we read another quote from the message boards “One does not simply fire the author of ‘Lean In’ and pretty much the sole female executive in top leadership,”
Isn't the part of the culture that is truly toxic that she is "pretty much the sole female executive in leadership"?
Agree on the last point too.
Should men be able to "play the male card" to get something they otherwise wouldn't have?
You either say yes to both, or no to both. If corporate politics has cultured an environment where there is even such a thing as a "female card" or a "male card", then that's a failing.
Same with the comment from the black ex-employee about how there are more Black Lives Matter posters than actual black employees (which I don't doubt for a second). There is no way to play these progressive games at work that won't come back and shoot you in the foot from the left, right and center. Keep politics out of the workplace.
...which makes your take, i. e. That removing the posters would solve the problem sort of funny, in a very depressing way.
It's very obvious that gender equality being achieved in the workplace is not via reduced discrimination, but by hiring women at a very flexible bar. It's so painfully obvious in my organization and frankly im embarrassed for the qualified women who are getting tarnished by the changes.
Or maybe you keep such shitty things to yourself and the painfully obvious is visible to anyone but you.
Its not shitty, its insanely normal (and its a joke) and youre just being dramatic.
It is true people would expect you to “change the way you act” so as not to make women literally uncomfortable around you, how outrageous that you should have to do this.
> The slightest criticism against women needs to be considered through a lens of misogyny and if it's plausible you keep quiet.
> It's very obvious that gender equality being achieved in the workplace is not via reduced discrimination, but by hiring women at a very flexible bar.
Wrong on both, and you have no evidence to support this.
Growing up Mormon, I felt extremely uncomfortable when co-workers drank alcohol in the office, even in after-hours social contexts. Does that mean I had a legitimate grievance to ask those around me not to drink?
We can certainly come up with gender neutral standards about what kind of speech or activities are OK and which are not OK, but if we go with "does it make women feel uncomfortable" then we also need to extend it to "does it make Mormons feel uncomfortable" and "does it make polyamorists feel uncomfortable," and so on ad infinitum.
I think the hbr article has cause and effect backwards.
It’s obvious that wealthy stable high margin businesses can afford to focus on diversity initiatives.
If we were actually confident that diverse teams were better then gender and race would no longer need to be protected groups.
One could make a similar argument for not calling out racism to avoid making people uncomfortable.
Here are two meta studies based on 20 and 140 other studies, respectively, and they only find a weak to no link between gender diversity and productivity, so neither does the science prove that gender diversity is particular beneficial, nor that it is harmful:
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amj.2013.0319
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I wish you could do a study on it, but you can't right now.
> those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
Let's play spot the difference...
I don't know how to get through to people who are absolutely convinced that people who claim it's happening are just being paranoid insecure sexists leading to biased assumptions, and I don't understand why their mind refuses to consider the possibility that these people are correct.
Is it even surprising? Of course it's going to happen. Everyone is getting sued over this, and there is activism and PR wars everywhere. How do you think companies are going to respond? Nobody wants to be next, so they have to increase representation. Executives cannot actually do anything to increase representation, other than set goals for their employees to carry out. That is how execs manage. By the time it gets down to the rank-and-file, how to do it doesn't matter. They know it needs to get done, and nobody wants to be the reason that an exec's goals are not met, so they will just make it happen. This happens with goals all the time, and number of women hired is in no way different. Remember when Microsoft told shareholders they were going to get 1 billion devices running Windows 10, and what they started doing to forcefully upgrade machines? If the rank and file resort to force installing Windows to meet that goal, how do you think a company like MS are going to handle meeting their diversity targets? Or Wells Fargo with their account opening scandal that was motivated by executive goals for numbers of new accounts?
This sucks for everybody, but most of all for the people it's supposed to help. Now, those who did meet the bar look just like those who didn't meet the bar but were hired as tokens. Looking the same would not be an issue were it not for identity politics.
It's hard to separate one's ego from something as visceral as that.
It's easy to posit that those unaffected could form "more objective" observations when emotions are not in play.
I say this while aware of the potential biases inherent in both of these statements. So what can be done to better approach this? It's hard.