Workplace Buzz: Today's Headlines
Cleaning Women’s Restroom at the Workplace—Who’s Responsible?
Harry Wessel for OrlandoSentinel.com reports on one workplace issue rarely discussed.
Question: The company I work for has about 50 employees, about half of us women. Not long ago, all the company's female workers were called into a conference room and harangued by a manager because an on-site women's restroom was "completely disgusting."
We were told cleaning supplies would be provided in the future and that we had to clean up after ourselves. If the bathroom was not properly maintained, disciplinary action could be taken, up to and including termination.
Needless to say, this meeting was highly insulting. I was unaware of any problem with the women's restroom, and not only did I have nothing to do with the disgusting conditions described, I'm sure at least 98 percent of the women at the meeting had nothing to do with them, either.
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Does Gender Matter in the Blogosphere?
Blogcritics.org writes about cyberspace’s domination.
Just as women walking the streets are different than men, Women bloggers are different from men who blog. How are we different? According to the recent Washington Post article by Ellen Nakashima we are harassed in more sexual terms. The new war zone then is cyberspace. Women are "singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms."
The Post article was sparked by the case of Kathy Sierra, a woman whose blog had a large readership and international attention. After she became the target of anonymous threats including "photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth," she suspended blogging.
According to the article, the reaction of women bloggers has been to stop blogging, self-censor, get gender-neutral noms de plume or turn to private forums. Nakashima concluded "the effect of repeated harassment, interviewed bloggers and experts said, was to make women reluctant to participate online — undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum."
More About the Opt-Out Discussion
The “new” trend of professional mothers leaving the workforce has been written about in the New York Times for the last 20 years, says Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law. Last fall, Williams published a study analyzing 119 newspaper stories written since 1980 about the opt-out phenomenon, writes Jennifer Barnett Reed in Arkansas Times.
But the storyline really picked up steam in 2003, when the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy piece called “The Opt-Out Revolution” that profiled a book club in Atlanta and a moms’ group in San Francisco, both made up of Ivy-League-educated women who’d left their high-paying jobs to care for their children full-time. Two years later, another Times story claimed that 60 percent of female Ivy League students the reporter had surveyed said they already planned to quit their jobs or work only part-time when they had children.
Tory Johnson
