Ernst and Young subjected women employees to "training" about keeping the company's men happy

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/gender-essentialism.html

7 Likes

Apparently, a lot of people walked away from their marathon viewings of “Mad Men” with lessons not intended by Matt Weiner and his crew.

18 Likes

Was Marsha Clark frozen in the 50s and thawed out only for this conference?

Holy crap, that score sheet has a box for “Gullible”, and it implies that the woman would be better if she scored higher on it (like all of the other categories).

20 Likes

Did she mention that women’s uteruses also tend to roam around their bodies, causing them to act weird?

Because unless women can be trained to keep their wandering wombs under control, they can’t really be expected to function effectively in a modern corporation.

32 Likes

This is like a manual of how to get sued under the Price Waterhouse v Hopkins gender stereotype decision of sex discrimination under Title VII.

Consider that when you hire consultants…

25 Likes

What the hell is that scorecard about?

I’d probably rate well on the “Loves Children” side for Feminine, but would fail on the “Has Leadership Abilities” on the Masculine side because Jesus H. Christ I can’t control my kids that I love.

12 Likes

I can’t believe some people swallow this tripe * remembers that gender roles are assigned at a very young age + continually reinforced throughout life * oh yeah maybe I can.
Stop the madness! Diversify your child’s experiences!

15 Likes

Patriarchal misogynists gonna patriarchal misogynist.

20 Likes

That fucking score sheet made me throw up in my mouth a little.

Also:

They were advised that women’s communication styles were a problem in business, because they both “speak briefly” and “often ramble and miss the point” while their male colleagues “speak at length ― because he really believes in his idea.” “won’t shut the fuck up because he’s too in love with the sound of his own voice”

34 Likes

Not to mention “childlike” is somehow an attribute we should aspire to in a professional business setting.

Women’s brains are generally physically smaller then men’s brains. Because women are generally physically smaller. But anyone who passed high school biology knows that the weight or volume of one’s gray matter has fuckall to do with intelligence.

Elephant brains weigh 4 times what a human brain does. I don’t see any men arguing that elephants are therefore much better at being CEOs.

24 Likes

Ah, Myers-Briggs. That thing was huge when I was in med school. To the point that they tried using it to advise us as to what specialties we were best suited for. I was strongly advised that those with my “personality type” (INTP if you care) were singularly unsuited to pediatrics and I should look into something like pathology or radiology where I would not have to deal with people. 29 years later, I think I can say with some authority “bullshit.” It is interesting, like a lot of “personality inventories” are interesting, but seriously, it is not science under any definition whatsoever, and has zero predictive power. Best left on the scrap heap.

22 Likes

Hey, if we’re playing the Brain Size argument, all CEOs should be people of African descent, since they have the largest average brain volumes!

18 Likes

WTF does that even mean? Most of the rest of this is just standard bad sexist tropes that should have died a half century ago, but “women are pancakes, men are waffles”?

24 Likes

I expect the vast majority of these “leadership and empowerment” workshops are based on junk science and serve little purpose except as a bullet point under the mission statement during some annual meeting or another, even if they aren’t brazenly nuts.

I am pleased that such things have no place in my current workplace, but then I don’t really have to talk to anyone at my job either.

7 Likes

TBF, elephants haven’t sent anyone to this class, so you probably have a point…

:slight_smile:

9 Likes

She was hungry? I know I am. I skipped breakfast. It was a mistake. Now I want pancakes and waffles. My stomach actually growled right when I finished writing that.

As for the topic of this post, holy shit. I’m having trouble believing this is really happening, and that they are defending it. That checklist alone is rage worthy. But I’m also glad we aren’t taking a , “Yeah, and?” approach when hearing about it, and that they are being sued. It gives me hope, even though it’s a tiny hope.

I really need to stop thinking about breakfast.

10 Likes

He’s just a man, not a muthafuckin’ grizzy bear, FFS.

The woman who spearheaded this nonsense can go choke for all I care.

The only thing I despise more than unfair systems of oppression and denigration are the self-hating tokens who enable and reinforce those systems, even to their own detriment.

Aye, that was a bullshit piece of misinfo that seems akin to phrenology.

I think that assessment can be accurately applied to the entire ‘training workshop.’

31 Likes

EY claims that Huffington Post’s writers and sources are taking Clark’s work “out of context.”

I can see saying that one slide from a presentation was taken out of context - but an entire 55 slide deck? The context of each slide is the other 54 slides in the deck.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, Marsha Clark’s presentation is from Uranus.

27 Likes

I was a child that couldn’t fit the stereotypes no matter how hard I tried. So delicious, considering suicide around ten years old daily #not

9 Likes

I would have left the seminar.

That is time you could spend working.

9 Likes