> I’ve been the project manager, the marketer, and the recruiter. These comms-oriented endeavors require conscientiousness, verbal agility, and relational capital, but they are highly competitive precisely because competence is difficult to measure. Thus, the people doing them can’t be evaluated but for the proxy of social capital: how well their peers think of them
I can imagine recruiting success being quite measurable - how many people into the funnel, eventually hired etc. I can also imagine ways to measure marketing success - campaign reach, conversion to key business metrics and the like.
I do find this article interesting though - perhaps one level too abstract for me - more concrete examples of your experiences in these roles and how the evaluation was so much about relational capital would be really interesting to see.
One thing I wonder about: people value consensus and agreeableness because it is more pleasant to work when everyone aligns. Being able to disagree without insulting people is a difficult skill - most people don't bother and just pretend to agree and behave perhaps passive aggressively instead. Sometimes I have witnessed people who are willing to ruffle feathers but fail to communicate in a way that others can hear, so feel they are being dismissed merely because they disagree - when it is that + an inability to disagree by e.g criticizing ideas, not people, couching criticism with recognition of good intent etc. Perhaps it would be better if everyone was less sensitive about receiving negative feedback, but there is an art to being able to disagreeing with consensus. The people who are best at it are rare but do seem to excel.
Keep in mind the vast expansion of middle management and middle management jobs in recent decades.
These jobs are ideally suited for many of the professional women I have known. For that matter, very few of the professional women I have known really want to be seen as running large organizations, nor are many really suited for such roles.
I think corporations were paralyzed by analysis long before this so called feminization.Size matters and not in a good way! Lean startups will always have an edge of agility regardless of what gender the employees have.
I must readily admit to being very much like one of the women you're referring to, trying after a decade to get the hell out like you did and feel like I'm meaningfully contributing to tangible outcomes at long last. My participation in credentialism and asenine gatekeeping for folks I could otherwise usher into upward mobility is nauseating me.
Granted, my background is a tad different from the women you have in mind - a guy from a working-class single-mom background and of a more autistic persuasion - the story of how someone like me ended up as a recruiter and stayed there for ten years is an odd one, to say the least. Whatever the case, I have finally hit the end of my rope and am desperate for genuine fulfillment.
I feel you, and I've heavily regretted my own participation. I did get to climb by participating in the career I have now, but looking back, the misery is strong in my memory. You can get to genuine fulfillment, I think. It's a matter of building rare and valuable skills. Cal Newport's work basically changed my life.
"I’ve been the project manager, the marketer, and the recruiter. These comms-oriented endeavors require conscientiousness, verbal agility, and relational capital, but they are highly competitive precisely because competence is difficult to measure"...how are you distinguishing between Project manager and Product manager? (the latter has widely varying definitions from company to company)
I do a lot of projects work and database work. Its just one skill set i have.
Jack of all trades master of all, either by choice or need.
Also, dont get me wrong. Prior managers were good at prioritizing and other team based organization, but their need to be in the good graces of the site manager (she was a tyrant), made them lay on their backs and get their belly's scratched. The male managers kept a colder distance to deal with her. Truely an interesting dynamic to watch.
Wow! You nailed my female managers almost to a tee. I was at a biotech place for 15 years, often they would undermine eachother by using their charges against eachother by operations that had some leeway in certain duties. Also, regarding making decisions always always process and procedure, that only goes so far because competence becomes nil, and when decsions need to be made they often relied on me to do it, because I am not afraid to stick my neck out and make things better for my coworkers. Of course then you are penalized and thrown under the buss.
My last manager was an analyst numbers type. She was the best because she didn't coddle or manipulate. She trusted my competence and drive and let me do what was needed to get things done, if I made a mistake i took ownership. But the most important thing is she defended me and stood by me, even if I made the wrong choie and didn't throw me under the buss.
Similar to "erniet's" comment, I too retired recently from corporate pharma/biotech. All that you've written, Anuradha, about women's prestige-seeking and covert competition is so very accurate! Although I wish you were busy writing these things in my last 2 decades of working (which is when things really got lopsided when HR and the compliant class took over), I am smiling now because I have found kinship with you and this group. I couldn't verbalize things as they were evolving, but I knew this was not how progress happens. It takes risk and the ability to know you can fail. I was surely an outcast, with a single degree from a state college versus the multiple degrees held by the females in middle and upper management. But I held my own and sometimes surpassed them in terms of productivity and determination. I reached a point when I realized I couldn't move any further but I just quietly observed the backstabbing and coerciveness and fighting from a happy distance.
"Credentialism rewards compliance..." This is the fundamental truth of what has happened in the U.S. during my career (I retired a year ago). I watched, for instance, a move driven by Human Resources to "professionalize" certain specialties by eliminating the promotional path into management from non-degreed "technicians." When I started, you could fly a job and advertise for "a degree in such and such OR equivalent experience." HR used the argument to management that it was difficult to have an objective PROCESS to evaluate "equivalent experience" so we were told we could only advertise a job as one or the other; either require a degree or fly it as a technician position. Of course, within a year or two HR came back and argued that we needed to eliminate the "equivalent experience" option entirely because it was "inefficient" and took up too much time to screen applicants (which shouldn't have been their role anyway but that's another story). They argued requiring a degree would "professionalize" managent as well. So leadership went along with it.
When I started my career it was common to have people in management who just had a high school diploma but had worked their way up into middle management and even executive positions. By the time I retired this was non-existent, and at the same time the organization was increasingly dysfunctional and unable to meet its core mission.
Wow, what a perfect encapsulation of the issue. I haven't seen that sort of thing happen with my own eyes, but HR will indeed do much to keep its grip on process. Recruiting and HR are compliance-driving functions, but at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of pay and prestige, so they find other ways to exert control. And the elimination of "equivalent experience" hurts people of either gender who aren't already from well-off backgrounds. People look around asking why social mobility is dead, but no one wants to question the role of the women in HR. A while ago I was in a "writing group" that was really a therapy group. I had a line in a draft about HR limiting competition through credentialism and a woman in the group said I lost her with that one line because "women in HR are just doing what the CEO says to do" as though they have zero agency. This woman was herself in a symbolic profession, and eventually kicked me out of the group.
Exactly; credentialism is responsible for much of the loss in upward mobility and is driven by desire for "processes" which are supposed to create a level playing field but ultimately wind up restricting who gets on the field in the first place.
Your average proggo will renounce every meaningless "privilege" but try getting them to renounce the privilege of their degree. No! -- to them, their degree is the epitome of justly earned, deserved, social power. ...To be used for good, of course. Not class self-interest.
The irony of it, of course, is everyone these days is taught that uncritical acceptance of that attitude is critical thought.
And it is all taught by authorities who say that obeying the ideals they impose makes you anti-authoritarian.
Everything in the progressivist world follows this pattern.
The belief content says one thing. But the way the content is believed says precisely the opposite and produces stark performative contradictions.
We could call this hypocrisy if progressivists had even a smidge of the the self-awareness they imagine themselves to possess -- but, once again, following the pattern, they believe their self-awareness content in a self-oblivious way.
We really do need to name this condition. I've called it "metanaivety", but that's not good enough. It needs to be snappy enough to sting.
Anyway -- when progressivists eventually wake up from the nightmare of this deep wokeness sleep they'll be so disoriented they won't be able to comprehend how they believed such nonsense. And they'll persuade themselves that, now that they think about it, they never really did believe it.
> I’ve been the project manager, the marketer, and the recruiter. These comms-oriented endeavors require conscientiousness, verbal agility, and relational capital, but they are highly competitive precisely because competence is difficult to measure. Thus, the people doing them can’t be evaluated but for the proxy of social capital: how well their peers think of them
I can imagine recruiting success being quite measurable - how many people into the funnel, eventually hired etc. I can also imagine ways to measure marketing success - campaign reach, conversion to key business metrics and the like.
I do find this article interesting though - perhaps one level too abstract for me - more concrete examples of your experiences in these roles and how the evaluation was so much about relational capital would be really interesting to see.
One thing I wonder about: people value consensus and agreeableness because it is more pleasant to work when everyone aligns. Being able to disagree without insulting people is a difficult skill - most people don't bother and just pretend to agree and behave perhaps passive aggressively instead. Sometimes I have witnessed people who are willing to ruffle feathers but fail to communicate in a way that others can hear, so feel they are being dismissed merely because they disagree - when it is that + an inability to disagree by e.g criticizing ideas, not people, couching criticism with recognition of good intent etc. Perhaps it would be better if everyone was less sensitive about receiving negative feedback, but there is an art to being able to disagreeing with consensus. The people who are best at it are rare but do seem to excel.
Keep in mind the vast expansion of middle management and middle management jobs in recent decades.
These jobs are ideally suited for many of the professional women I have known. For that matter, very few of the professional women I have known really want to be seen as running large organizations, nor are many really suited for such roles.
I think corporations were paralyzed by analysis long before this so called feminization.Size matters and not in a good way! Lean startups will always have an edge of agility regardless of what gender the employees have.
Excellent
I must readily admit to being very much like one of the women you're referring to, trying after a decade to get the hell out like you did and feel like I'm meaningfully contributing to tangible outcomes at long last. My participation in credentialism and asenine gatekeeping for folks I could otherwise usher into upward mobility is nauseating me.
Granted, my background is a tad different from the women you have in mind - a guy from a working-class single-mom background and of a more autistic persuasion - the story of how someone like me ended up as a recruiter and stayed there for ten years is an odd one, to say the least. Whatever the case, I have finally hit the end of my rope and am desperate for genuine fulfillment.
I feel you, and I've heavily regretted my own participation. I did get to climb by participating in the career I have now, but looking back, the misery is strong in my memory. You can get to genuine fulfillment, I think. It's a matter of building rare and valuable skills. Cal Newport's work basically changed my life.
"I’ve been the project manager, the marketer, and the recruiter. These comms-oriented endeavors require conscientiousness, verbal agility, and relational capital, but they are highly competitive precisely because competence is difficult to measure"...how are you distinguishing between Project manager and Product manager? (the latter has widely varying definitions from company to company)
I do a lot of projects work and database work. Its just one skill set i have.
Jack of all trades master of all, either by choice or need.
Also, dont get me wrong. Prior managers were good at prioritizing and other team based organization, but their need to be in the good graces of the site manager (she was a tyrant), made them lay on their backs and get their belly's scratched. The male managers kept a colder distance to deal with her. Truely an interesting dynamic to watch.
Her problem was being a tyrant. And I think we all know more male tyrants than female 🤨
Wow! You nailed my female managers almost to a tee. I was at a biotech place for 15 years, often they would undermine eachother by using their charges against eachother by operations that had some leeway in certain duties. Also, regarding making decisions always always process and procedure, that only goes so far because competence becomes nil, and when decsions need to be made they often relied on me to do it, because I am not afraid to stick my neck out and make things better for my coworkers. Of course then you are penalized and thrown under the buss.
My last manager was an analyst numbers type. She was the best because she didn't coddle or manipulate. She trusted my competence and drive and let me do what was needed to get things done, if I made a mistake i took ownership. But the most important thing is she defended me and stood by me, even if I made the wrong choie and didn't throw me under the buss.
Similar to "erniet's" comment, I too retired recently from corporate pharma/biotech. All that you've written, Anuradha, about women's prestige-seeking and covert competition is so very accurate! Although I wish you were busy writing these things in my last 2 decades of working (which is when things really got lopsided when HR and the compliant class took over), I am smiling now because I have found kinship with you and this group. I couldn't verbalize things as they were evolving, but I knew this was not how progress happens. It takes risk and the ability to know you can fail. I was surely an outcast, with a single degree from a state college versus the multiple degrees held by the females in middle and upper management. But I held my own and sometimes surpassed them in terms of productivity and determination. I reached a point when I realized I couldn't move any further but I just quietly observed the backstabbing and coerciveness and fighting from a happy distance.
Just a note that there are two sections in this piece numbered III
thank you, fixed
"Credentialism rewards compliance..." This is the fundamental truth of what has happened in the U.S. during my career (I retired a year ago). I watched, for instance, a move driven by Human Resources to "professionalize" certain specialties by eliminating the promotional path into management from non-degreed "technicians." When I started, you could fly a job and advertise for "a degree in such and such OR equivalent experience." HR used the argument to management that it was difficult to have an objective PROCESS to evaluate "equivalent experience" so we were told we could only advertise a job as one or the other; either require a degree or fly it as a technician position. Of course, within a year or two HR came back and argued that we needed to eliminate the "equivalent experience" option entirely because it was "inefficient" and took up too much time to screen applicants (which shouldn't have been their role anyway but that's another story). They argued requiring a degree would "professionalize" managent as well. So leadership went along with it.
When I started my career it was common to have people in management who just had a high school diploma but had worked their way up into middle management and even executive positions. By the time I retired this was non-existent, and at the same time the organization was increasingly dysfunctional and unable to meet its core mission.
Yeah, credentialism is a real problem.
Wow, what a perfect encapsulation of the issue. I haven't seen that sort of thing happen with my own eyes, but HR will indeed do much to keep its grip on process. Recruiting and HR are compliance-driving functions, but at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of pay and prestige, so they find other ways to exert control. And the elimination of "equivalent experience" hurts people of either gender who aren't already from well-off backgrounds. People look around asking why social mobility is dead, but no one wants to question the role of the women in HR. A while ago I was in a "writing group" that was really a therapy group. I had a line in a draft about HR limiting competition through credentialism and a woman in the group said I lost her with that one line because "women in HR are just doing what the CEO says to do" as though they have zero agency. This woman was herself in a symbolic profession, and eventually kicked me out of the group.
Exactly; credentialism is responsible for much of the loss in upward mobility and is driven by desire for "processes" which are supposed to create a level playing field but ultimately wind up restricting who gets on the field in the first place.
Your average proggo will renounce every meaningless "privilege" but try getting them to renounce the privilege of their degree. No! -- to them, their degree is the epitome of justly earned, deserved, social power. ...To be used for good, of course. Not class self-interest.
Anyone who believes corporate cranial labor is more important than parenting is deficient in critical, independent thought. Come on, dummies!
You're not wrong...of course I was taught the opposite.
Both are important. Who taught you otherwise?
The irony of it, of course, is everyone these days is taught that uncritical acceptance of that attitude is critical thought.
And it is all taught by authorities who say that obeying the ideals they impose makes you anti-authoritarian.
Everything in the progressivist world follows this pattern.
The belief content says one thing. But the way the content is believed says precisely the opposite and produces stark performative contradictions.
We could call this hypocrisy if progressivists had even a smidge of the the self-awareness they imagine themselves to possess -- but, once again, following the pattern, they believe their self-awareness content in a self-oblivious way.
We really do need to name this condition. I've called it "metanaivety", but that's not good enough. It needs to be snappy enough to sting.
Anyway -- when progressivists eventually wake up from the nightmare of this deep wokeness sleep they'll be so disoriented they won't be able to comprehend how they believed such nonsense. And they'll persuade themselves that, now that they think about it, they never really did believe it.
Very difficult and winding, complex ideas that are very precisely articulated.
I will take that to mean they're winding but eventually get somewhere