Feminism

In the late 60s I remember seeing an organisation chart for my department which showed me as senior to my male colleague who, I had just discovered, was earning more than me. When I asked my manager about this he looked at me blankly and said 'But he is a man!' Needless to say within months I had found myself a new job and moved on.

Mind you in the 1990s I picked up the phone of a male member of my staff to be asked 'are you X's secretary?'. I replied,' no, I am his manager' and enjoyed the embarrassment and confusion at the other end of the phone

When I started work as a designer in 1967 my boss suggested I should be employed as a draughtsman as, being male, they got paid quite a bit more. I therefore became a draughtsman until I left to have a baby.

It is interesting that on the @everydaysexism site on Twitter many young women are mentioning unwanted attention in the street or in pubs. There are still some encountering sexism in the workplace though just like the 70s e.g. being told to wear something sexy to impress a client in work etc
I think women are better protected under the law these days but far from equal - you only have to look at pay differentials. They are under huge pressure to be perfect in all kinds of ways.
I did notice that we have a few female refuse collectors recently - but there are still many jobs that are overwhelmingly male.

Gracesmum my favourite all time spell check suggestion (have I posted this before on GN? I might have at some point in the last 2 years but you want to hear it again? Oh alright then.)
I had mis-typed the word relate. With a double L.
Spellchecker suggested I really meant it to retain the double L but start word with an F. Much office hilarity. But could have been horribly embarrassing if automatic correction had gone out.

Are spellcheckers MALE - discuss.

Today on Twitter the @everydaysexism are rightly outraged by Boris Johnson in Malaysia, who "quipped" on being told about high percentage of females going to university that they were going to uni to find husbands.

It's also knows as face ache, and I'm sure lots of other things, rather than Facebook. I confess to having joined after I retired. I was always anxious about the amount of information shared on the site and limit my "friends" to family and very close friends. It's a great way of keeping in touch with friends who don't live locally, grandchildren, children away travelling or at university.

OMG, I remember getting outraged in the early 1960s when one of the men in my year said that the women at university were only there to find husbands. The vast majority of women left unmarried so I presume the quality of the candidates was so poor they decided to look elsewhere.

Flickety - the press this morning is quoting Boris as saying women go to university to get a husband ..... and we wonder why feminism still needs to be alive and well in the UK

Flickety - the press this morning is quoting Boris as saying women go to university to get a husband ..... and we wonder why feminism still needs to be alive and well in the UK

iam64 - as I posted last night at 19.22.

It is just depressing that 50 years after I graduated there are still British men in high places mouthing such stupid opinions.

I think we should be encouraged that the present generation of young women are becoming a bit more aware, after the materialistic have-it-all boom years.
Possibly because one of the products of all that was a rise, rather than a decline in laddish bad behaviour.
There is a lot more discussion of feminism on mumsnet last time I looked, than there is on GN.

Iam64

My late wife did not go to university to get a husband.
She met her future husband on the first day of grammar school.
The headmistress said I made a very good choice.
I must have done as she was her mother.

Frank

Surely Boris was just jesting ?

What do I know ?

Well yes of course he would say he was "jesting" but the problem is nonu that not all jokes should be told on all social occasions. Problem with this one is he has offended:
Huge numbers of young women who will not now ever vote for him [doh Boris]
Malasians possibly - because he was on official business in a different culture - where you would expect a bit of caution, rather than the assumption that they will all share his dubious sense of humour.
If he'd said it at a private party one of the women (or men) would probably have told him off and nobody else would have known about it.

We do not really know whether huge amounts of women will not vote for him.

Perhaps they , like me took it as a joke !!!!!!!!!!!

Why is Boris Johnson's comment funny?

Me too Nonu wonder if I've missed a compulsory sense of humour bypass required for women.

X

On my first day as a Probation Officer in Durham City Office I was almost knocked over by a lady clutching a brief case and grabbing a large felt hat with an 12 inch feather on one side. She apologized profusely but said she was late for Duty PO at Durham Magistrates Court. A member of the office staff, female to a woman of course, explained that the lady was the statutory woman PO prescribed by law to be appointed one per division and that hats must be worn by females in court and the length of the feather marked the persons importance in that particular court ( 1973 ). At first I was amused but then very angry. Being a new boy my only way of silent protest was to trim a 1/4 inch per week off the feather and eventually to hide it. Not sure if I did right but as a direct result hats became optional. It took me a good 12 months to convince my wife to describe herself, both when answering the phone or discussing her then, new promotion to Manager and not Manageress of a small packaging company she was headhunted to run in Skelmersdale.
Strange decade the 70s
Cheers
Peter

It wasn't all that different in the 80s, MOGGSY. Our Deputy Chief Probation Officer came to visit we lowly students, prior to our interviews for qualified posts. She arrived wearing a hat and gloves, and said she expected us to have matching shoes and handbags at our interviews, but they were relaxing expectations about hats.

The previous year's cohort had tipped us off that she was a bit strange, so we just smiled and nodded, then dressed as we wished. After the last interview, she commented to another member of the interview panel 'one day they will realise that dressing smartly and conservatively will hold sway with judges! And there was me, thinking that intelligent, analytical court reports were going to influence sentencing!

One of my friends was unable to go to university in the 60's as her widowed mother couldn't afford it. She got a job in a laboratory at Unilever where her boss told her he had never employed a woman before and wasn't that keen to take her on! I'm glad to say that she went to evening classes, got the necessary qualifications and ended up running her own department.

Has there really been a rise in laddish behaviour in our children's generation? Could it not be that today's young women simply make more noise about it on average than our generation did? And good for them!

A wordf to the wise MOGGSY , you might be considered to going off subject by the thread police .

just saying !

You seem to have got your MOJO back , I am soo pleased .