84 – Women Employees, Are they Worth It?

This topic is about women in the workplace. When I say women employees, there are all kinds of things that pop into people’s minds, and probably everybody’s thinking something different. What I’m going to get into is (and there’ll be a bunch of recommendations at the bottom, both for women and for men) are women cheap and inexpensive employees? Are they worth the risk? Are they an opportunity?

What happened was I was talking about something with a woman, I’m talking about the topic in planning of an episode, and all of a sudden she started talking to me about incidents that happened. How other women set a really bad example and hurt other women’s chances.How opportunities are ruined or restricted because of the way some women behave in the workplace. I’m not talking about how they go after each other. That’s well-noted, well-documented. It’s happened over and over again where it seems like the woman boss doesn’t really help out a woman who’s coming up. Those things may be changing over time. Hopefully they are. I’m talking about something a little different.

What she was talking about was the fact that here are a lot of women who are trying to show and demonstrate that they are really good employees, workers; that they’re creative, innovative, productive, etc.; all of the things that you would expect from a great man or woman regardless of what category, what sex they are. She started citing, and then another woman chimed in with other examples of women who, for example, come out of school, they go into a job, and they start out by saying and demanding on day one: “I graduated such and such, I am this. I need to have this much time off. I need to be allowed to have such and such for my kids. I’m going to be having kids in the near future. I’m going to need so many months or so much time off,” etc. They’re making these demands, because popular opinion in the media has said this is what is expected, that this is what everybody should have.

Let’s go to the other side. From the woman’s perspective, here she’s trying to establish that she is independent, just as good as a man, and then there’s a woman who’s saying: “I’m just good, and I’m so good in such a limited period of time that I can have things where I don’t show up because something happens in my family or I need time off,” etc. There’s a real conflict there.

Let me explain it by going through what happens in hiring a person or a woman. In some cases there are certain positions that people are going to be reluctant to hire a woman in certain situations. Why would that be? Take a look at it. Yes, there is bias, there’s prejudice. Is it in some cases an appropriate business decision? Nobody wants to say it. Let’s say for an example that you have (a key employee need), and I’ve had this discussion with many women, and quite frankly they understand it very well and can see the problem with it.

When a business hires somebody that would be a key employee, think in terms of how long they go out there, strive, and search for the right candidate. They don’t hire the candidate just to fill a spot, but they might spend months looking. We’re not talking about an employee that you put an ad in Craigslist or in the newspaper, or go to the local agency and say: “I need a new person to do XYZ,” or that you’re just going through the recent graduates in college. I’m talking about people that will end up being in key positions or going to be hired right into a key position. If it takes a long time to hire that person and choose them, then it’s also going to be hard to replace them, even for four weeks, three months, whatever the period is. It’s going to be very hard for somebody else to substitute during an absence. If it was easy for somebody to substitute, they wouldn’t have spent four, six or nine months searching for somebody for that key position. They spent a long time because they thought somebody else wasn’t appropriate or wasn’t sufficiently skilled.