FOF friend D and I were discussing a mutual male acquaintance who has a vile reputation with strong, smart women. They threaten him.
This man has a big job with a big company, but he isn’t especially talented and he prefers to surround himself at work with really vulnerable women. They’re so grateful he’s given them a job, they practically quake in his presence.
This man often makes sexual comments to women and acts like Mr. Macho, although he’s anything but macho. “He stood in my way when we worked together,” said D, a uber succcessful woman. “He’s disgusting.”
God knows why, but I used to defend him until he showed his true colors to me, too. Fortunately, men like this are dwindling away and we are seeing more women in positions of authority and influence.
Strong FOF women have paved the way for our daughters and showed our sons we can be the boss.
0 Responses to “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superwoman”
Maureen@IslandRoar says:
Amen!
Toby Wollin says:
In terms of stumbling over men like this, it seems to depend a lot of where you are, the company culture and the industry the company is in. I’ve worked for an electric and gas company for years and because it is dominated by engineers (and I think that was the standard until very recently), the atmosphere is heavily male. Even female engineers are not treated well. The attitude really reeks of “If you were any good, you’d be an engineer”. Engineers seem to not respect any other discipline, no matter how numbers oriented (accounting, for example, is dismissed as a ‘clerical’ function but I think part of that is the heavy influx of women into the field over the past thirty years). Also, in terms of location, our area has a culture where if the husband is an engineer, computer programmer or at the same sort of professional level, the standard is for the wives to stay home. Part of it is that the cost of living here is relatively low (I once saw the demographics on the two county area and we had one of the highest ‘non working college educated spouse’ percentages in the country at one time) and a family can live a reasonable lifestyle on one really good salary. The other thing is that there are few well-paying jobs that are not technical in nature – so unless a woman is an engineer, computer programmer, technical person of some sort, the choices for career development are few and far between. The women I’ve met locally who are heads of businesses are those who formed them themselves.