Wednesday, May 27, 2009
I have discovered...
That the days of women as subservient property are still around. As long as you work in a gender specific role such as, say, a secretary you will always be someones property. You are no the secretary you are my, his, her secretary. The same would go for a maid or nurse. These jobs are not really careers (other than a nurse, that's a career for sure) but they are jobs that are essential to the people who are hiring them. Pretty much things would fall apart without these people who do the behind the scenes work. So do they deserve your respect or do they deserve to be referred to as property? Do they deserve you talking about them while they are less than a foot away or do they deserve you asking them your question seeing as they are quite competent, capable beings? Seriously people! Can we get over the "I'm a man, I'm the only one who knows how to do it right, I'm the only one that's competent" thing? Because when you act like that you are actually portraying yourself as the opposite of all those. Yay for equal rights now can we work on equal respect regardless of the job title?
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3 comments:
I dunno, my sergeant is a girl but when I say "my sergeant" or "my boss," I'm certainly not implying that she is my property. Back when I worked for a guy, I would refer to him as "my sergeant" the same way. My sergeants have usually referred to the officers working under them as "my team" or "my troops" or some such. I don't think that's disrespectful, and I don't really see how "my secretary" is different.
On the other hand, I know I could be missing something. If someone's attitude or other actions convey disrespect, I can see how an otherwise innocuous expression could be the final straw.
Yeah that makes sense. I guess it's just the icing on the cake. People treat us inferior all the time and then add that. Plus i'm just getting more and more bothered by the little things like this at work lately.
Yeah, I agree that it's probably more of the tone in how it's said than actually calling someone "my secretary," since secretaries are often hired to be serving one or a couple particular people. However, I know that in a lot of cases, the secretaries end up doing a lot of work that is credited to the person they are working for and that to me is VERY wrong.
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