It's truly unfortunate when any woman who identifies herself as a feminist tries to validate negative stereotypes about women. Self-professed feminist (I don't believe she understands what the word means) Clarissa (her last name is not listed on her blog) posted a scathing blog by a guest blogger who appears to be unnamed, denouncing women from any future employment at her company. The title of her post? "I Don't Want To Hire Women." It's obvious that she has not read the slue of reports citing that companies with multiple women in their top leadership positions outperform companies with no women in every single criterion.... but let's just humor her for a quick second.
In the blog post she says, "Over the years, I have hired outstanding women - educated, intelligent and highly articulate. Yet, I am exhausted. I have become profoundly tired of being a therapist and a babysitter, of being drawn into passive-aggressive mental games and into constantly questioning my own worth as a manager. I have had several women who quit to stay home to 'figure out what to do next.' No, not to stay home and care for children, but to mooch of a husband or a boyfriend while soul searching (aka: taking a language class or learning a new inapplicable skill that could be acquired after work). Incidentally, I have not had a single male employee quit with no plan in mind."
Reading this paragraph, I don't know where to begin, the blatant sexism, lack of emotional intelligence or obvious misogyny. The author makes an extremely weak and unintelligible case for suggesting that women are essentially unemployable due to the fact that they may get emotional, passive-aggressive and occasionally gossip. Hmmm...really? You mean men never get passive-aggressive? Have gossiped or gotten emotional. What planet does this woman live on? The author seems to value masculine characteristics and is judging the women in her company by those characteristics. Now, if the women were emotionally distant and unapologetically egotistical (two qualities we assign to men), she may appreciate them better. She is wrong to assume emotional distance equals professionalism.
The sexism in this article is incredible. I truly could not have summed up the problems in this article better than playwright Lauren Gunderson who said:
We excuse men for being overtly sexual with women, with being aggressive to a fault, with acting only for value and not for community, with abandoning their families for work. But we don't excuse women for having emotions, having babies, being harmonizers instead of bullies, being pretty, being not pretty, having sexuality.
Now if you were to replace the word women in her blog with blacks, gays, men, transgendered, brown folk, I don't know frogs? It would sound just as stupid. I implore you to try it. It makes little sense when any person uses a blanket statement to judge an entire group or assume that one characteristic in one person applies to all. I believe history has taught us not to judge others based on our prejudice and lack of understanding about how to deal with them. I'm sure I don't even have to name people who might have persecuted others based on how they judged them; you can easily bring them to mind.
Read the rest of this article at Lipstick & Politics