The Barack Obama Administration Should Hire More Women

I've worked in male dominated jobs all my life. I've trained horses, worked as a chemist for oil refineries, been maintgenance forman for a small town and now I regulate irrigation wells. I have an M.S. in Water Resources Engineering. I started competing with men for jobs in high school, when I was riding horses. If my horses performed better, I got the horses to train. In other words, it was up to me to prove my worth.

I find the notion that the government should make more "woman's work" kinds of jobs offensive. Women can do anything we set our minds to, and it is time to stop treating us like we are "less capabale men" or helpless. I was never given anything because I was a woman. I got the jobs I had because I worked my ass of and was better qualified than the men I replaced.I do think that sometimes I got the job in spite of being a woman. But, I proved I could do those jobs as well as or better than anyone else.

So, stop whining that the jobs are all hard work. Work hard. There is no reason why a woman cannot work on a highway crew. I know many who do. Not as many as there should be. I worked in a wastewater plant. It was interesting and I liked it. Women are not going to melt if they get a little dirty and strain a few muscles.

Stop telling women they should settle for low paying "women's work". I heard all the time for years that I was "taking a man's job". My response was I'm better qualified, I work just as hard and I hd a family to feed just like those men. My mother never once in my life told me I needed to settle for being less. I was told I could do anyting.

If all the new jobs are hard work, trhere is no reson women are exempt from working hard. The difference between waiting tables and working on a highway crew is not the amount of strength or knowledge it takes to do the job. It is what you get paid for doing it.

Kathy of CO 1:18AM December 15, 2008

IF, and I capitalize IF, there was truly equal opportunity, then yes, you are right, RL. BUT even after 30 years of pushing for equality, there is not equal opportunity--as evidenced by our last election, given the acceptance of sexism in the treatment of Sarah Palin, who was no less a lightweight than Geraldine Ferraro. Or in the numbers of women on the short lists for Obama Cabinet positions. If it is so obvious in such public areas, then how could it not be pervasive in the less public sectors ?

Bonnie, you are wrong about physical demands of construction. The everyday workers are male because only a few women are that physically oriented or hands on mechanical in their thinking. Yes, there are general differences in brain function.

Yet, in the field of medicine, with which I am most familiar, women now constitute over 50% of the medical students, yet they are overwhelmingly in the "softer" specialties, such as pediatrics, family medicine, and ob/gyn. Distribution is lagging far behind the numbers of women involved, as is the number of women in the upper management levels.

Some of this is male bias--if I see that I will put up with much more sexism in one field, then I will tend to go into another; plus males preferentially picked for certain specialties--which are then more likely to be given supervisory roles. Some is life choice--having children makes it very difficult to keep up the production numbers for most surgical practices, for example. If you do not want to run your practice as a cattle mill, it can make for strained relationships with your partners--or bosses. Women tend to have more personal obligations AND the desire to be more involved in home life--though that too is changing.

Lastly, as I experienced when returning for further training a few years ago, it is sometimes the women who are the ones beating up on each other. I was subjected to much more competitiveness, manipulation, back-biting, slander, and all around harassment from three of the other women in the department than anything from the men. I emerged from the program with symptoms of PTSD from the psychological abuse I had received. Yet, it was seen as "hen fights" instead of being addressed by the male department chair--would a male in the same position have been ignored and blamed? Plus the underlying dysfunction in the department stemmed from actions which had undercut the elderly woman, who had helped build the department, to remove her influence--and that was in part male chauvinism. Males, or females who behaved like males, were the ones who had power. In the clinical realm, strong females were definitely punished--even some males who were "too female" in their behaviors--not competitive enough, asking for more cooperation and less pulling of rank. Interestingly less so in the research area--but excellence in research is less subjective than management or clinical skills.

MontanaMountainWoman of MT 1:51AM December 11, 2008

The only important thing in equality of opportunity, not of result. "Result" based stats simply lead to social engineering and artificial quotas... I think all, but the most obtuse purveyors of "victimhood", such as Ms. Erbe, understand this.

R.L. Schaefer of CA 5:05PM December 09, 2008