33. Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend – Marilyn Munroe 1953

 

Men grow cold

As girls grow old

And we all lose our charms in the end

 

I have a boss. My boss happens to be male. He also happens to sulk - A LOT - and assume that things will just happen around him - that I’ll take care of things for him - without him having to get concerned about them.

This sounds like a 1950s husband and wife scenario doesn’t it?

I mean, when I was a kid - in the 80s, not the 50s by the way - if my mum wasn’t around to cook dinner, we were lucky to get fish fingers nuked in the microwave for dinner ‘cause, unless there was a barbeque involved, my dad had never concerned himself with learning the basics of cooking for himself. Then when my big sister turned about ten it was suddenly her responsibility to feed the family if Mum wasn’t around, again because Dad really couldn’t be arsed concerning himself with domestic chores.

Given this childhood, I found myself cutting my boss some slack when he started sulking about the trivial stuff in the workplace. I’d tell myself that, like my dad, my boss was just a product of his generation and gender.

Then I had an epiphany.

My boss was closer to my age than my dad’s age.

Slack is no longer being cut and he’s having to take care of the trivial himself these days.

Unfortunately, while I can address the issue with my boss, addressing the behaviour of other males in the office is harder to do. My workplace seems to have a glut of Baby Bomber males that assume that others – ‘Oh my God! Women!’ – in the workplace will take care of their dishes. I mean, these men have a degree of capability because they’ve managed to gain meaningful employment, but doing the most basic of tasks, such as cleaning and putting away their own dishes, seems to be beyond their capabilities. That said, I find many of the women in the workplace tend to comply and clean up after the men, mainly because they get sick of he mess.

I learned about the gender disparity in the workplace early in my working life. My first fulltime position was as an Office Assistant in a female dominated workplace. This workplace had what was termed the executive bathroom within the office space and much less impressive toilets for all building tenants and visitors to use out by the lifts. While the term executive bathroom was used, I found that every male in the workplace was free to use the bathroom, yet the one out of five female executives would hike over to the common toilets if she needed to go.

Even at age nineteen I could recognise that this situation perpetuated the idea of male importance, rather than efficiencies or practicalities. This was further evident through the fact that, as executives, the majority of the few males in this workplace spent less time in the office as they travelled for work a lot.

Then there’s the situation of a much later position I had as a Field Supervisor on a youth traineeship program. While in this position a fellow, male, Field Supervisor who had a team of eight boys and two girls said to me something along the lines of ‘I just don’t understand girls’. He only had two out of ten to at least try to understand. He clearly understood the boys, so gave them the lions share of the opportunities because he was pretty confident of the outcomes. This was despite him having an obligation to all ten trainees. So how were the female trainees meant to get value out of the program?

Back in the office environment about ten years back and I was told that a particular, male, executive’s, female, assistant was referred to as ‘his brain’ because she was the one that made him look competent. Why was he being paid an executive salary if his low paid assistant was the power behind him?

Just pondering a few situations here, not looking for or offering any divine insight.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knLd8bfeWtI