Ask Dr. Helen: Workplace Discrimination Against Men
My PJM column is up:
If male, have you dealt with discrimination in the workplace? If so, how did you handle it? Read the column and let us know.
Reader Len writes in to ask for advice on how to handle discrimination against men in the workplace.
If male, have you dealt with discrimination in the workplace? If so, how did you handle it? Read the column and let us know.
Labels: men's activism, PJM column
posted by Helen at 7:35 AM
35 Comments:
A commenter there makes a good point: You are doing a legal assessment and telling him his chances of winning a lawsuit.
The only problem is that you are not a lawyer - and the further problem is that stupid people may act on your advice if they see "Dr." in front of your name. Cuz doctors know everything.
I think advice like "another approach may be to sue - see a lawyer about that" is OK.
But when you start citing cases and giving an estimation of whether someone can win a particular type of suit or not, I think you are stepping over the line.
And I was a bit flip in my post above, but stupid people who have never gone through the process REALLY ARE overly impressed by someone's titles in a lot of cases, even titles that have nothing to do with the advice that is being given.
JG,
Here is my reply at PJM:
"First, telling someone to find a lawyer is not “making a legal assessment.” The lawyer can let this young man know if he has a claim. Second, all the women and minorities who brought discrimation suits had to be brave enough to be the first. If no man is that brave, it is a pity."
"First, telling someone to find a lawyer is not “making a legal assessment."
---
Right, but citing cases and saying "But men do win suits if they bring them." is getting closer to an assessment of his chances of winning.
BTW if you cite cases, shepardize them first.
I'll give up now, because I don't really care about this issue.
Almost 11 years ago I applied for a computer security job w/ a government contractor. After the first round of interviews, there were only two candidates left, me and a woman. She had two months of experience and a high school education. I had 2 years of computer support experience, 2 semesters of computer programming courses, a degree in Intelligence Collection, and six years in Air Force intelligence.
I didn't get the job. Maybe I was unfriendly and rude at the interview or maybe they had a quota to fill. Either way, for an entry level position with an aggressively "EOE", it didn't seem worth a fight.
I love how mommadonna over there blames men for women acting badly! She is obviously one of those who believe that white men are the only being on the planet capable of responsibility.
Trey
Cross-posted here since I actually have experience in the area:
In law school, I did a year long employment discrimination clinic. We were chomping at the bit for something more unusual than the standard sexual harassment against women cases, and at the end of the year took a case of male-on-male sexual harassment (that I didn’t think was particularly strong), looking for something to do. We’d have loved a case like this.
Helen, you’ve gotten at something important that a lot of people don’t realize: Sexual harassment is more than just the “A pressures B for sex” type behavior that we usually see. It also includes cases where a workplace makes employees’ lives miserable because of their gender. It also covers retaliation claims, like what your correspondent talked about–where the other employees punished him for complaining about gender discrimination. All of this behavior is illegal, and definitely worth talking to a lawyer about.
Helen’s advice is absolutely correct:
1. Don’t tolerate sex discrimination, no matter which direction it goes.
2. Document everything.
3. Find a lawyer. In addition to contingency plaintiffs, there are also other free or low-cost legal services such as law school clinics, legal aid, and maybe there’s even a men’s rights group or two out there with a legal department.
Edgehopper,
Great comment, thanks. I agree that law school clinics and legal aid are good places to go--they can often advise at no charge. If more men would take up this cause instead of just changing jobs as others on the PJM comment site suggest, the sexist behavior would lessen.
I once worked at a movie theater at 15 and had trouble with a boss there who took advantage of the workers, taking money from all of our paychecks weekly as the "till" was short. My sister insisted that I call the Better Buisiness Bureau who put me in touch with the wage and hours board. They not only had this boss fired but gave us all of our back wages that she had taken. I learned early that it is better to stand up against an unjust workplace than to just walk away and let others suffer with it.
My two little cents:
People discriminate illegally and abuse other people in the workplace for two principle reasons:
1. It's enjoyable, profitable, convenient or serves one's self-interest.
2. The overwhelming majority of people who are abused or discriminated against either (a) assume this behavior is legal, (b) assume they couldn't win because they are puny little citizens, or (c) take the view that lawyers cost $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ and it just isn't worth the hassle.
That, in my 35 years of workplace experience, is why the BS continues.
Get. A. Lawyer.
Ok, jg
Real cute comment
" shepardize them first"--- no one who cites cases in the popular press "shepardizes" them first.
You knew no layman would know what that means and you would sound... intelligent.. but to make that comment means you are just a poseur. You aint got no JD.
Having shepardized cases ... by hand as a first year law student... all that means is to check the subsequent history of the case ( appeals, etc) and what other courts have cited the case and for what reasons.
Encouraging a person in this situation to seek a legal assessment and noting that victories in this area of the law are possible-- is not engaging in the practice of law.
Geesh-- if you told a person who has been depressed for months to see a doctor and that medication is available that may help-- would you be crossing the line into clincal practice-- nope.
To Kevin M:
Yep, those are pretty much the reasons that come to mind, especially the last two. (I sometimes wonder if lawyers didn't create the current American legal mess as a make work project for themselves.) This is especially true since I work for a company that has a couple "career development" programs restricted to women and nothing comparable restricted to men. Believe me, you'd recognize the name of the company if I was suicidal enough to mention it.
Yes, Lovemelikeareptile, that was a dick remark on my part and pretty much for the reasons you outline. I do have a JD, though.
Helen: I would have to agree with you that the first order of business for this gentleman is to check with Human Resources at corporate. Fast food restaurants can be either corporate owned or franchises. Naturally, the corporate owned restaurants have more oversight and a more stream-lined employment policy. The management of this restaurant may be conducting employment matters outside of corporate policy and may need some retraining. If this is a franchise some corporate oversight regarding employment might still apply, especially if the franchise is in violation of federal, state and local laws regarding gender discrimination.
But let's get back to the matter of the young man. He seems to think "taking it like a man" is akin to keeping quiet on the matter. When did this cultural change take place? He needs to ask himself whether he wants to be popular with his managers and coworkers, or adequately compensated for the job he is doing. Apparently, he can't have both.
Life isn't fair. If you plan to stand up for what should be yours, be prepared to make a few enemies along the way. Suzy Orman sued Merrill Lynch for $50K while she continued to work there, and won her suit. If this gentleman isn't comfortable with a few nasty barbs while at work, then he might consider either keeping his mouth shut OR taking his qualified resume to the fast food establishment across the street and finding a better deal.
Not everyone is going to love you all the time.
JG,
Is something up? Seems like you are annoyed on this board lately. I understand if it's none of my business, just mostly an observation. I hope all is well with you and that you just find me and my posts annoying! That is fine, I just hope all is okay in your world.
Well,
I guess it's cheating for me to chime in as I'm in academia...
Where to start: women get targeted searches, better start-up, bigger raises, tenure even when they don't deserve it; and we get... workshops on how to defer to women faculty, and how to come to grips with out inner racist, misogynist. We are also reminded of that any success we may have is only because we gamed the patriarchy.
Jg---
that was a classy response.
Cheers.
I wonder if they still make first years " use the library" without the aid of computers.
Westlaw and Lexis were big even in 1989-- but we still had to physically work the library. To handle the endless tomes of Shepard's Citaitions, to pull out hard copies of case Reporters, and to use "photocopy machines" which always broke down and had lines of people waiting.
Westlaw made legal research so much easier.
Helen:
Nothing major, I'll snap out of it.
Lovemelikeareptile:
I was in school in the late 1990s - we had exercises in the first year using the physical books in the library. After that, people came in from Westlaw and Lexis to show us how to use the programs and we got free access for the rest of the time we were in school. I just used Lexis to look up cases after that - never really touched the books in the library.
Someday physical law libraries are going to disappear. Computer look-ups are far superior.
Discrimination in the workplace takes many forms. Sometimes it manifests in a selective application of an "anti-sexual-harassment" policy.
At a large company where I once worked, some shenanigans involving a manager with his arm around a subordinate ("Worse than a treasurer with his hand in the till" -- Robert C. Townsend, former CEO of Avis) resulted in our entire workforce being subjected to a four-hour harangue about sexual harassment.
The "seminar" was conducted by the usual types: all women, all instantly ready to leap down the throat of anyone who dissented from The Gospel According To Catharine MacKinnon, and not one of whom could have gotten a smile from a prison full of rapists. The thrust of the thing was what you'd expect: sexual harassment is bad, bad, bad; the company will can your ass for it faster than a tuna at Star-Kist; the definition of the "offense" is anything that makes a woman uncomfortable about you; so whatever it is you've been thinking, doing, or thinking of doing, don't!
You could almost see the venom dripping from their fangs as they relished the thought of bringing all us evil white males to heel -- the company was 95% male, which is normal in aerospace -- with their new powers to prosecute this undefined crime.
I stood up.
"Yes, what is it?" the head harridan demanded.
I gave my full name and employee number and said, "You've just instituted a system where a man will be considered guilty unless he can prove himself innocent. Worse, his accuser will also be his jury."
"Yes, what of it?" she said.
"That's un-American and unworthy of a company that sells to the federal government. But if it's corporate policy, I suppose the Board of Directors knows all about it and is prepared to deal with the consequences...?"
The room was preternaturally silent. "What consequences do you have in mind?" she said.
"Loss of your best and brightest engineers, for one," I said. "A decent man won't stand for what you've described. But tell me, just out of curiosity, what penalty will the company impose on an accuser who's been shown to have acted out of malice?"
She wouldn't answer directly, preferring to say merely that "all accusations will be fully investigated and the proper corrective actions applied."
"That's not an answer," I said. "Unless you're prepared to deal with the consequences of the incentives you've created for false accusations motivated by malice or professional envy, you haven't done your homework and don't deserve your job, Miss...say, what's your name? And your badge number, please?"
The "seminar" broke up a few minutes later.
Ah, company sponsored sexual harassment seminars. At the first one I went to in the early 90s, among all the male engineers were three female engineers, one of who was a militant feminist. The other two females spent most the meeting verbally tearing the presenters and militant feminist to pieces. It was a hoot.
When I was a teacher, I taught my students grammar. The principal called me into his office and asked why I was teaching grammar.
I told him, "Because these students don't know it."
He ordered me to stop teaching grammar, but I didn't. I wrote whatever whole language BS he wanted me to teach in my lesson plans, however I kept teaching my students grammar.
Then came the state exam. Three times as many of my students passed than the "honor students" in the advanced classes. So the school asked me to attend an Advanced Placement seminar over the summer, which I did for a month.
The week before the next school year began, I was ordered to turn over all the AP materials to another teacher. This girl had a bachelor's degree, one year of teaching experience but had been a cheerleader at the school when she was young. I had two bachelor's degrees, a master's degree, eleven years of teaching experience, and two years of experience teaching at the college level.
Yet I was required to attend a seminar and turn the materials over to her so she could teach the AP course.
I resigned the next day and transfered to another school district. There was nothing else for me to do.
Helen,
You ought to check out that thread now. Your co-blogger Mary Jackson has gotten pretty blatantly misandrist. She apparently can't stand Americans or America either. Is there anything you can do to help her?
Jim,
"Is there anything you can do to help her?"
Just leave her words up there as an example of why it is so important to fight back against such blatantly misandrist and sexist ideas?
I am very lucky. There are no females where I work.
Said commenter is a self-proving example of a woman who would take great delight in abusing a man in the workplace.
I worked for a federal government affiliated corporation when Lorena Bobbitt did her thing to her husband. The women in the office had a field day laughing about it. I complained to management (I'm not a complainer, esp on workplace issues) and said "What would your attitude be if all the men were whooping it up b/c a husband had cut off his wife's breasts?"
He couldn't figure out if I was a troublemaker, insane, or just kidding.
It never dawned on him that I was serious.
Related article, from iFeminists:
http://www.journalrecord.com/article.cfm?recid=91577
@jim: "has gotten pretty blatantly misandrist"
Misandry doesn't exist. Want proof? If you have Microsoft Word, open it and type in "misandry." It will be flagged as a mispelled word.
Sad, but true.
@labamigo: "He couldn't figure out if I was a troublemaker, insane, or just kidding."
Funny, when your coworker REALLY did laugh at it when it REALLY happened, managenent never worried if SHE was a troublemaker, insane, or kidding. You turn that around into a hypthetical that DIDN'T happen to illustrate how wrong it was, and they are then worried about you. Very sad.
I'm going to say something that may offend, but I think it is true. It is the general consensus in our society that women are the "more compassionate gender." Yet, it has been my experience and observation that men generally have far more compassion for women than women generally have for men. If anything, women generally seem incapable of compassion for males. Now, I'm not saying all women, our lovely hostess certainly is not like this for example. It's just an observation that there isn't much compassion for male victims out there.
"Yet, it has been my experience and observation that men generally have far more compassion for women than women generally have for men."
-----------
On the whole (this isn't true of all women, but maybe 80% of them), women can only see you in terms of what you are able to do for them. Otherwise, men are invisible and have absolutely no value.
Remember too that women wear their compassion just like makeup. If they were straightforward, even the most naive, dopey man would catch on to what they are all about (e.g. Paul McCartney seeing what Heather was all about). They HAVE to act as if they are compassionate; it doesn't mean they are.
@jg
I think a lot of it has to do with media/entertainment/etc and the information pumped into modern american women. They almost reflexively think men deserve it and should be able to take it, but if a man believes the opposite he's cruel and abusive.
The opposite happens in the middle east. Men have very little regard for women due to the way they are indoctrinated. Here, it is the women indictrinated against men.
Briffault's Law: The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place. -- Robert Briffault
It has always been this way, and it always will be. Women's ability to empathize with men is similar to a child's ability to empathize with adults. This not to say that women have the intelligence of a child, because that is not what I am saying - just simply that the ability to empathize can be compared to a child's ability to empathize with adults. A child loves its parents, but the child will always be more selfish than the parent. In the same way, a woman can love a man, but her concern will always be more selfish than the man's.
The great social engineers that are committing treason against their own people have recognized this well, and this is why they attacked the relationship between men and women first. The next step is to attack the relationship between women and children, which has a similar working system to that between men and women.
This is how the human race works:
Men --> Women --> Children
This is what has happened:
Men <-- (pushed away by) Women --> Children
This is what is starting to happen, and will continue to happen in the future:
Men <-- (pushed away by) Women <-- (pushed away by) Children.
And then our social engineers will have done what they aimed to do all the way from the 2nd wave feminists right back to Frederick Engels - Destroy the Family.
Once the family is destroyed, individual humans become quite malleable, and then the social engineers can go about creating Marx's Utopia.
Ain't you excited?
Women will never feel the compassion for men that men will feel for women. The problem is that men are too stupid to realize that women aren't like men, don't think like men, don't have the same desires as men, and have no desire to try to emulate any of the above.
Man perceive women as he would like her to be, not as she truly is.
It's the same way that a woman always perceives her children to be superior and inherently good, even when they aren't. She perceives her chldren as she wishes they were, not as they actually are.
Nature gave us some blinders.
We have been hoodwinked into thinking men and women are the same. "Gender is a social construct," remember?
It is complete hogwash.
Women manipulate men in the same that children manipulate women. There is nothing evil or sinister about it, it is just the natural order of things. We are, after all, still of the animal kingdom, and we see all kinds of such manipulations throughout nature and we certainly don't call that "unfair."
Also, I don't think that the men in the Middle East have little regard for women. Perhaps the stupid worker drone men do, because they have been indoctrinated to believe so (in much the same silly way that we have been indoctrinated to believe that the silly notion that the sexes are equal in all things).
In fact, once one begins to study a little bit of human nature, it becomes obvious that cultures in the Middle East have an enormous fear of women's sexuality and their ability to use it to malign men and society.
Kinda similar to how adults have to put their foot down and over-ride a child's desires and not allow themselves to be manipulated by a child's whining and crying as they do everything to get their way.
If one lets a child get everything they want, tomorrow they will expect more.
The same goes for women. Women are never going to stop demanding men do more and more for them, while offering men less and less in return.
Perhaps the Middle East goes to far, and perhaps we don't go far enough.
One has to only look at the evolution of the bikini to see that women tend to push, and push, and push until it appears their are no limits at all.
Throughout history, civilizations have descended into decadence shortly before their collapse, and then things reset again from a much more misogynist point of view. (That's the facts, as ugly as they sound).
It would be a huge leap forward if the human race could sit down and discuss these things fearlessly and rationally, and seek a suitable solution that serves us all (without the help of Academia, thank you very much - they have done 90% of the damage, and it is time for them to sit at the back of the bus for a few centuries).
Sadly, such notions of rationally discussing things are about as fruitless as discussing with a 5 year old the value of good nutrition, then setting him free in the grocery store and seriously expecting him to bring back Bran Flakes cereal instead of Coco Puffs.
Nature rules us, we don't rule it. At best, we can temper it and harness it.
I applied for security position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2005. The requirements were a background in law enforcement and at least a BS in an education related field. There was also an EEO candidate highly sought line in the listing.
I have a MS and was a Military Police squad leader at the time of application (I am now a commissioned officer in a NG Military Police unit). I called the number on the notification letter when I was not even offered an interview. The idiot who answered said they had found a female for the job.
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