Do we really need another greeting card day?
I just found out that this morning is Administrative Professionals Day. I have been an administrative professional for about 20 years and I feel as moved by this day as I did about International Women’s Day, which is to say, not at all.
March 8th was International Women’s Day (IWD). Did you have as much fun as I did? All those glamorous parties honoring the achievements of famous women, the dancing in the streets, the costumes, the awards shows, the televised parade with high school marching bands and (not safe for work) giant vulva* floats in a parade down Fifth Avenue? Sigh…no, I must have been imagining it all because this day passes in the United States without so much as a whisper of mention except for a post on BlogHer, which is really kind of expected considering it’s where all the cool blogger chicks hang out.
Naturally suspicious and always looking for the catch, I started poking around the IWD website. It is a fairly simple website with no social media tools, no Web 2.0 in site, and after spending about an hour clicking around I have some idea who they are, but no clue about what they do. There is a place to upload your local International Women’s Day events to an International Women’s Day calendar with links to events being hosted by organizations around the world, seemingly of many different ideological viewpoints. There are articles about women’s issues, that come to the website via a Reuters feed if the article includes the keyword “women.”
The one mention of organizational background on the the IWD website is this:
The International Women’s Day website provides a free service to women around the world wanting to share and promote their IWD activity, videos, opinions and ideas. Please feel free to submit gender-related items for the site that you consider relevant and useful.
This service is provided by Aurora, a company that connects business and professional women and actively supports the promotion of employer brands and career opportunities in progressive organizations. Aurora believes in equality, access to information and networks, and choice. Dr. Glenda Stone who leads Aurora, has worked in various gender equality roles for almost two decades. Amongst other gender-related products and services, Aurora runs the annual Where Women Want to Work Top 50.
A quick Google search supplied some background information on Dr. Stone. She has held several public positions both in in her home country of Australia, and in England where she now lives. And according to this Rueters article, “Glenda Stone is chief executive and founder of Aurora, a recruitment advertising and market intelligence company, and co-chairs the UK Women’s Enterprise Taskforce established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.” And in this article in the U.K. paper the Telegraph, she is quoted saying; Women should focus less on their “favourite red handbag” and more on “making money”, says the head of the Government’s new women’s enterprise taskforce.
Aurora seems to be several things: a) a job search website based in the U.K., and b) a marketing firm with lots of famous brand name clients. They have put up the IWD website, which seems to be merely a place for users with a free account to read articles (without source information) that are imported with the Reuters feed and they also seem to be the people acting as webmaster for the site.
I find this website, which was supposedly created for women to communicate with each other, completely lacking in any real means to communicate, and to be merely a front for an employment agency doing some data mining and gathering e-mail addresses. Oh wait, there is a “Networking” section where you can follow IWD on an inactive Twitter account, or join a Facebook group. Of course, you can also network with IWD on Linked-In and I guess share your resume with Aurora while you are at it? Puh-leeze.
The first thing I noticed on every page are the very large banner ads with links to corporate “sponsors.” I have to wonder what that money funded. Micro Loans? Women dying from a lack of proper obstetric care? Ending violence against women? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
Overall, I’m not impressed with this website and the more time I spent clicking around, the more upset I felt. There is nothing I find more irksome than bandying about “facts” without any links to corresponding research. Such as the fun “gender facts” about women. Did you know that females in developing countries on average carry 20 litres of water per day over 6 km? And because I am the kind of woman who asks these questions, I want to know why they don’t provide any kind of backup to this claim. Which developing countries specifically, and how did they gather their data? I’m not saying that it might not be true, but I like to have some backup.
They also, sadly, include misinformation since retracted by its author, Dr. Louann Brizendine (clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco) in her book, “The Female Brain.” Dr. Brizendine asserted that women use 20,000 words a day and men only 7,000, which I always thought was a bunch of hooey and Mark Liberman totally agrees with me. Men are stoic and silent, women are gabby, blah blah blah. Same old misogyny. It’s total bullshit, another example of contagious misinformation. The truth is that men and women use about the same amount of words every day. By the way, the same is true about the Inuits and snow – they have about the same number of words for snow as anyone else.
Among the many accomplishments of this day that no one has heard of, are thousands of women marching down the freezing cold streets of Washington, D.C. on March 8, 1908. Seriously gals, if we’re so advanced, can’t we just move this whole thing to Cancun?
So why do this at all? Why have a website for a day celebrating women? Why should there even be a day singled out specifically to celebrate women?
Maybe I am too critical, and I should be looking instead at the fact that this day is recognized all over the world and that the exception is the United States. But honestly, all over the world this day is celebrated as a second Valentine’s Day. I don’t know that the lack of interest in the U.S. has to do with a patriarchy as much as the possibility that American women don’t like to be conned and this just feels like a con. See little lady, we gave you an entire freaking day so why don’t you just stop whining all ready?
For 20 years I have seen women with business degrees hired as new employees to be admins because “there would be room for advancement,” only to never advance, and men with equal degrees, ability, etc., get hired as a new employee to be an Associate Vice President. For years I have seen executives promote men and have their female assistants fetch them coffee. For years I have seen women like me, do the work their bosses give them which often includes writing the reports that their boss (both male and female) take to the Board Room with their own name on the front page. Injustice and inequality around the world and in the workplace won’t go away just by having a once-a-year, socially acceptable spa day.
- Author’s Notes
:
Mark Liberman is Trustee Professor of Phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, on whom I have a huge geeky linguistic crush.
*Thanks for the Vaginacycle created by Finnish artist Mimosa Pale.
I have been an administrative professional for over 8 years at the same organization, a church. The first time they remembered the big day, 3-4 years ago, they showed up at my office when I had three volunteers in to help me with projects for an upcoming event and tried to insist that I leave for them to buy me an ice cream. Whoopee! To which I had to say, no thank you, about four times.
Then, the second time they have even remembered the holiday, on Wednesday late afternoon, they herded the 3 admin profs into a room where they were already having a meeting, and handed us a card with a gift certificate. The head pastor announced that here’s something I don’t like at all, so if you don’t like it, I guess you’ll have to sell it to someone who does. Gee…THANKS! It was a massage gift cert, which is not something I’m interested in. I’m so effing broke with what they pay…give me a gift cert to where I get my car fixed (we all go to the same place about a block away) or something that I can really use. They didn’t bother at all to find out what I might like or need. It actually made me feel LESS valued.
The BigLaw firm I work for (after laying off 10% of its support staff in April) was so insensitive on Administrative Professional Day as to send out a US firm-wide memo announcing that all Assistants would be required for the new Evaluation Period to pass a firm designed Word 2003 Skills Test! Talk about being cold-hearted.