Overcoming problems caused by prejudice.
In the electronics lab which I teach there are two groups of all girl students in one batch.
The professor and the lab attendent have a low opinion of them. They are considered slow.
One batch is bright and the other, not so. They are given faulty components and the wrong set of equipment. They struggle hard under the given conditions. They receive no help from the attender and they have no independent source of knowledge.
If they were knowledgeable and networked into the boy’s groups, they would be able to recognise their problems and solve them.
Given that there is no help or sympathy for the weak and that it only reinforces people’s prejudice, women need to build on their competence. And on their circle.
Then the same jokers will queue up at their door as beggars.
So for all minorities, develop your technical and organizational strengths, your awareness. Blend in with the non-minorities and do not stick out.
Technical expertise can translate earning power. Proper networking can lead to strengths. You need to make the right, dependable friends….
Thursday October 5, 2006 – 02:21pm (PST)
A small corporate victory – concalls from home.
The ability to take concalls from home is a great corporate leveller from a working mother’s perspective.
This is commonly available in most software companies in India, but it was not available in one organization that I worked for in the division that I was in.
A general e-mail to the managers trying to find out who would support me in this venture only resulted in criticism, discouragement, back-biting comments and negative feedback from my manager asking me if I thought that people before me were idiots. I told him that technology would have changed, laws would have changed and I would give it a try.
I found a senior manager willing to support this effort, a few members of my team who were willing to exert themselves and a champion for business process improvements willing to guide and back us.
The team did a survey of what was available and at what price and they created a whitepaper. With the support of the senior manager, we presented it at various levels, to various people in the organisation answering questions, popularising the results of our survey and generally just keeping at it.
On the day before my last day at that organisation, I was told that the solution we had recommended was approved.
So what worked? Teaming up. The idea came from a thinker, the work came from an executor, managing the senior management came from the senior manager, process support came from the champion and the drive/leadership came from me.
Good or bad it is organised teaming up that wins. When people from various levels and different abilities come together to achieve something, they generally win.
(Unfortunately my ‘evil’ detractors who did not like the changes that I worked for, teamed up too and drove me out… Hmm…)
Sunday July 30, 2006 – 08:20am (PST)
Struggling with women’s issues.
For the past few weeks, my focus has been shifted from developing women to self-preservation. I am not very confident of whether I will survive this battle and if I do, what shape I will be in. B’s advice was to learn the rules of the game and have some perception management strategies. This is valuable advice from someone who has made it, against the odds. I need advice from someone who has fought such battles for self-preservation and won. I need advice from someone who has succeeded in bringing about positive changes in corporate society and corporate social order. If you know any such person, please put me in touch with them. I have read and continue to read Gandhi and Nehru. They both were lawyers who knew British Law. (They won freedom for India.) I need to understand the rules and laws of the corporate. I also need to formulate clearly the goal that I want to acheive for women in the workplace. It has to do with a level playing field, it has to do with developing women, it has to do with dissolving prejudice. According to Gandhiji and I believe this: when women achieve equality in the workplace, their social status in the family will also improve. This will stop the social problems of women in India such as female foeticide, girl child “un”-education dowry deaths and a bunch of other problems.
Sunday July 30, 2006 – 07:48am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0
Another call centre girl killed today in Bangalore…
One was killed 7 months ago in Bangalore and at least one in Delhi in between.
And yet when I left an office dinner at 9.30 pm, with a 1 hour commute to cover, my manager indiscriminately yelled at me in a meeting next day and said that I showed lack of commitment to the senior managers invited to the dinner. He thought nothing of organising a late night dinner instead of an afternoon lunch and made no arrangements for a safe drop at home. If he could treat a senior and experienced woman like this, what of the young girls who are afraid of their bosses and of losing their jobs?
My manager was wrong and he is sitting happily in a highly paid job, while I am sitting at home blogging….
Wednesday July 26, 2006 – 06:31am (PST)
Affirmative Action
Lines quoted from the pdf in this link are within quotes. My thoughts follow.
http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Political-Science/17-01JJusticeFall2002/70B6C…
1. “To see why not, we need to understand an ambiguity in the ideal of a color-blind society. On one construal, a society is color-blind just in case people do not think in racial categories at all; on another, a society is color-blind just in case no one suffers disadvantage on grounds of race. Surely the latter is the right way to describe the goal: it should not be a goal of public policy to ensure that people stop using racial categories—any more than religious or sexual categories. People classify each other in all sorts of ways. Justice does not condemn the classifications, but that we ensure that differences are ‘not’ turned into disabilities. But if the goal is to ensure that racial differences are not turned into sources of disadvantage, then why can’t policies that use racial categories help to produce a color-blind society? “
In my experience the biggest “discriminators” or “crooks” refuse to allow you to ‘talk’ about the issue. They talk as if the people who mention the issue and talk openly about discrimination are really the ones doing the discriminating. How can you fix an issue unless you allow yourself to label it?
2. “we might think of affirmative action as a challenge to rethink our ideas about what it is to be qualified.10″
3. “6 More precisely, should we adopt the very strong presumption that all racial classifications are malign, and are acceptable only to rectify past injustice; or should we presume instead that the use of such categories to benefit minorities is acceptable, and presume that their use in benefiting majorities is unacceptable?”
Every time, I tried doing something for women, even as simple as organising a seminar, there would be at least a few men who felt that it was discriminatory to men. If you cannot have a networking group for white men, can you have one for black women?
4. “9 It would be analogous to a heckler’s veto: to depriving someone of protection for their speech because heckler will start trouble.”
I have seen this rationale presented in many organizations in India. The “good” are controlled and restricted because the “ill-behaved” cannot be corrected by those in charge.
Wednesday August 16, 2006 – 06:33am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0
Justice
This entry quotes from the lecture notes indicated by the link below: and gives my reactions/responses to those quotes.
Sentences in quotes are quoted as is from the lecture notes.
http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Political-Science/17-01JJusticeFall2002/7D038…
1. “justice is a matter of ensuring to each person what he or she is entitled to, and refraining from taking what is rightfully his/hers.”
2. “political philosophy will not tell us how to design a tax system or whether schools should have equal resources. But it may help to understand the basic principles that an acceptable solution should satisfy. “
3. “But some people have a reductionist view of political disagreement, and they treat that hope as an object of mockery. Disagreements about justice, they say, are disguised conflicts of attitude and interest; while participants pretend to argue about what justice requires, they are really angling for advantage and using high-minded rhetoric to maneuver others into going along. If you have enough power—and a willingness to use it—they say, your tastes and interests will win: justice will mean doing what you want. In the Republic, Socrates’ opponent Thrasymachus said that justice is the advantage of the stronger—that justice is not an aspiration beyond the naked struggle for power, but is instead simply another move in that struggle. “
My thoughts: I have actually observed the behaviour described in point 3: as I sat through calibration of performance appraisals. A group of managers belonging to the same department sit together to decide who should be promoted and who should be rated at what level. This determines how much the individuals get paid. After each manager ranks their own team, they sit together to do a collective stack rank of all the individuals in all the teams. At this time, each manager has a partial view of who they want to reward and to what extent. I have directly observed people quoting whatever principles they like, that support their argument. they do not use a consistent set of principles. For each case in point they use that principle, that justifies their end. Even though, anyone may attempt this, those that “win” are those that have power. In the case i observed: it was power of “aligning with” or teaming up with the boss.
The hypocrisy of this is what made me really sick. I want to expose the hypocrisy and eliminate the injustice.
4. “no one ever says with a straight face: I am right because I am more powerful, that my might makes me right. We point to principles that support our side of the argument, and that other people might reasonably be expected to endorse”
This hypocrisy does not make others sick. People admire, fear, copy and “align with” those in power. This hypocrisy or ’reality’ is accepted by everyone as natural and as a game that one must win at. I have observed no one choking over it. Even the so called “victims” bow to it as inevitable. No one wants to fight it.
I realise that my ideas and reactions are not original. So I cannot publish a paper on this subject. But I have observed that people like me are very rare in the corporate sector.
5. “..a provisional commitment to the idea that ordinary political arguments really are what they appear to be when we are in the middle of them: namely, arguments about what we owe to each other, about the most reasonable way to live together, not simply power struggles masquerading as something elevated…”
Today, I take the cynical view. That means I have ‘accepted’ that the ‘evil’ is natural as have the others: but instead of ‘playing the game’ as others do, I have stepped out of the game. And I feel bitter and disillusioned. I feel cheated. I feel that, to play, I have to give up my principles. And the alternative to play is to withdraw into solitude and beome a recluse.
I have another recent experience. People are giving me advice based on ‘principles’ that justify their desires: what they want to do or what they have decided to do. To refuse their advice is to refute their principles and deny them the “rightness” of their desires.
6. “We owe it to others—as equal members of the sovereign people—to argue with them about politics on the basis of values and principles that we think can withstand reasonable scrutiny.”
7. ” If we aim to develop more reasonable views than those we now have, then we needn’t decide at the outset whether there is a single objectively correct position to which all reasonable people will converge. Even if reasonable people will always disagree on issues of justice, some views may be more reasonable than others, and we may now be on the low end of reasonableness. And that observation suffices for getting down to business: the business of pursuing, in a more systematic and reflective way, the reasonable arguments about the demands of justice that members of a democratic society owe to one another.”
Wednesday August 16, 2006 – 05:35am (PST) Edit | Delete | Comments: 0
