A recent HuffPost article discusses a 2018 workshop aiming at teaching executive women how to thrive in a corporate environment. The story is hilarious and made me think that the 1950s want their workshop back. But then in some ways we are not now terribly removed from the 1950s dogma on women' supposed essential nature as a definition of what a woman is.
Anyway, this bit, about the teachings of that workshop, is absolutely delicious:
When women speak, they shouldn’t be shrill. Clothing must flatter, but short skirts are a no-no. After all, “sexuality scrambles the mind.” Women should look healthy and fit, with a “good haircut” and “manicured nails.”
These were just a few pieces of advice that around 30 female executives at Ernst & Young received at a training held in the accounting giant’s gleaming new office in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 2018.
“You have to offer your thoughts in a benign way,” Jane said, recalling the seminar. “You have to be the perfect Stepford wife.” It felt like they were being turned into someone who is “super-smiley, who never confronts anyone,” she said.
“You have to be the stereotype of what a woman is,” Jane said. Like the worksheet described it, she added.
Attendees were even told that women’s brains are 6% to 11% smaller than men’s, Jane said. She wasn’t sure why they were told this, nor is it clear from the presentation. Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.
Bolds, they are mine.
Don't you just love that? It made me think what my brain might be. I think a French crepe. Nothing soaks into it the way I make it, unless I want something to soak into it. Amaretto, say.
What's fascinating about that view of humans as various foodstuffs is that I can trace the long and drunken path it has taken from some initial extremely iffy research, over-interpreted in a biased manner, and then popularized with even more errors and leaps of imagination baked into it. That final result, then, was poured, like maple syrup, into the skull-box of the presenter at that 2018 workshop*.
It's an odd workshop which begins by trying to make the participants lose all self-confidence and self-esteem, but that's the kind of workshop for working women you get if you believe in the most extreme form of essentialist gender norms. Those cannot be influenced at all, of course, so the best the little lady sprats can do is to gently swim around the guy sharks,without making any waves while avoiding their direct routes and grabbing whatever crumbs might be left behind**.
To be fair, Ernst&Young, the company in which the workshop was held, has now distanced itself from its basic tenets and has canceled future similar workshops. Better ideas about how corporate culture can be influenced to make women and men both thrive can be found in this Harvard Business Review article.
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* This phenomenon is not uncommon. John Maynard Keynes:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”And this is the main reason why researchers should be held to high standards of objectivity and modesty about the reach of their results.
** I adore mixing my metaphors (waffles and fishes), possibly because of that soggy brain.