Rosemary, you and i may not put down ALL women, but in this Visiting Nurse Agency, where i would suppose only a minority of women there would consider tbemselves feminists- largely because they have bought the Rush Limbaugh rant against "feminazis- i heard it almost everyday, even, and maybe, especially by the managers. I was stunned! How could you be a woman who has studied and worked primarily w/ women and have such prejudice against women!?! Well, as i said, i think they had bought the mass media -this was in 1995 & 96- and societies' negative sterotypes about women and because they hadn't worked in male dominated agencies, they believed the positive sterotypes that men are more organized, more businesslike, less snarky, more goal oriented, less gossipy, etc. Believe me! I worked for DofA for 13 yrs, 90% of my co-workers and superiors were men........there is very little difference, except that men have much greater competition build into them. There egos are often much more fragile then many women i have worked with.
My classic example was that at one point the Chief-of-staff was a 6'7" full bird colonel -the highest rank before "general". In the hierarchy of the installation, he had authority over a 6'5" Company Commander, but the Co Cmmdr had seniority in terms of time in rank. In other words in a situation outside the installation, the Co Cmdr would have outranked the CofS. So
in staff mtgs where the C of S had authority, they had a constant running battle on almost
every subject that came up. As one woman captain said to me "we're wasting an hour a week on a p...ing contest." and that mgt was full of the highest ranking people om post, so it was a
lot of wasted time and resources.
Jean
