A favorite pastime of media outlets and their audiences alike is dragging out vintage advertisements from decades or years past and remarking on how profoundly sexist they are. These 25 are outrageous! The 45 here are shocking! The 35 ads here are extreme! In the face of explicit claims that women belong in the kitchen and are probably just a little bit stupid, it is easy to feel superior in our progressive, gender-equal ways. But a closer look at the way we talk about women’s place today shows that our eventual time capsule of media artifacts will hardly be less embarrassing upon review by future generations.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way we talk to women about their workplace behavior. Each day ushers in a new onslaught of advice articles and listicles blaming women for not getting ahead at work. They scold women for the way they talk, for their hesitation in interrupting, and for their failure to ask for enough raises. Even the way we discuss the topic is alienating. “Women in the workplace” positions women as foreigners in someone else’s terrain. Despite the fact that men are known to dominate group conversations in the workplace, where women still hold only 14.6 percent of executive office positions, we insist that maybe women are the ones not taking control of their professional situations. Despite mountains of quantitative data suggesting that women are at a disadvantage, these stories continue to focus on women adjusting their behavior at work to get ahead. But several new pieces of evidence suggest that women’s behavior at work is far less worrying than men’s.
[For more of this story, written by Alana Massey, go to http://www.psmag.com/business-...u-little-man-jk-stfu]
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