And they probably just ran for office looking to find husbands anyway, so I wouldn’t worry too much about what they think.
Yesterday the Austin Statesman-Journal reported a on a new mandatory training given to city staffers on how to best best deal with the city council now that it has more women than men elected to it.
The training ended up being just about as sexist as one might expect, and I expect numerous peoples on the Intertubes to be noting this sexism quite a bit over the next few days. But what I anticipate will be lost in the whatever kerfuffle this story produces is what this training inadvertently had to say about men.
Jonathan Allen, the city manager of Lauderdale Lakes, Fla, … pointed out that his classification as an “expert” on the topic was based on the fact that his local council was made up entirely of women.
Allen said that instead of reading agenda information, women ask questions. He advised staff members that while it may seem easier to instruct women to read the packet, “the importance of being patient” should be remembered during these times. Allen credited his 11-year-old daughter with teaching him this lesson.
Allen also reportedly said women would prefer to hear how implementations impact “the whole community” versus being shown the financial argument. According to the paper, Allen said that while presenting the financial analysis may make sense, if he wants to secure votes with his all-women council, he has to present information “in a totally different way.”
Forget for a moment what a load of tosh all of that is, and forget that it’s a surprisingly condescending attitude toward professional (and, I presume, educated, experienced, and driven) women authority figures being pushed by a city with a reputation of being highly progressive. All of that is interesting, of course. But what strikes me as being far more interesting is what this professional city manager — not to mention the people running Austin who hired him for his expertise — is inadvertently saying about himself, about all professional men in general, and about men in government in particular: That they don’t ask questions, and that they don’t stop to consider how their actions impact the community at large.
Oddly, in crafting an argument for why we should be “patient” with the little ladies playing at city council, he instead makes a case for why you should never, ever, ever elect a man.
I’ve long believed that most forms of bigoted frameworks do damage to those on the dispensing end as well as the receiving, but it’s rare that it’s done is such obvious terms as it was done here.
Tod,
I know you’re having some fun here – and I respect that – but have you put any serious thought into the potential damage these women are doing to their uteruses? What if playing at politics means no more playing with babies? Huh? WHAT IF THAT? THINK OF THE CHILDREN TOD.Report
I mean, obviously we don’t mean you should never elect a man. There are a few good ones, and certainly one should give them a chance to prove themselves.Report
#notallmalepublicservantsReport
This is what ticks me off. We men have to do twice as good a job as you women before we get any respect!Report
It’s okay sweetie I like your butt. Oops! I dropped my pencil. Can you pick it up for me?
(Meta: let me know if this goes too far!)Report
No, we have to be twice as thoughtful & inquisitive…Report
No one expects the mannish inquisitiveness!Report
oh god I read that with a mouthful of food…Report
Wait, that’s where I live. 😉Report
By the way, this is only the most national-attention-grabbing way in which the Austin government is dysfunctional right now. The Tea Partier on the counsel has been nominating racists to positions, apparently out of spite (they get voted down). Because the counsel has so many new people on it they’ve realized that they haven’t the slightest idea what they’re doing, so they have been adding extra steps, making already slow processes glacially so. Meanwhile, Austin is facing a very serious housing crisis, as prices rise rapidly out of reach for the working class, while NIMBYism prevents any serious density-increasing development in a city-core dominated by single-family homes outside of the immediate downtown area (and when they do develop, they just build luxury stuff, which doesn’t help prices). Oh, and Austin has some of the worst traffic in the country, but they can’t come up with viable transportation ideas. This place is a mess.Report
That’s because they’ve only been considering cost and impact on neighborhood up until now.
Now, with neighborhood impacts in play (thanks, ladies!), you should expect two things. First, NIMBYISM will get worse. Second, traffic and pedestrian will receive some consideration, subject to first point.Report
To be fair, learning from his daughter is how King Stannis went from making fraticidal smoke baby assasins to sitting in on committee meetings correcting grammar sotto voce.Report
Westeros could do worse for a king than that – the man just grows more and more likeable with every episode!Report
I’m getting to like Stannis better the show. The fact that he’s the only prospective ruler in Westeros who recognizes the danger of the White Walkers is by itself enough to qualify him for the throne.
Also, it would mean that at some point we would get Queen Shireen, and that’s something I can root for. 100% literacy! Even if she has to teach every individual in the kingdom personally!Report
“Now,I know that “capital budget” sounds scary, but, really it’s very simple. Suppose you have to buy a new oven to bake your husband a birthday cake.”Report
Don’t be too hard on Mr. Allen. It was probably “that time of the month” for him, know what I’m saying?Report
Austin’s city manager has done the honorable thing and taken full responsibility for this… By suspending someone else, whom he says is fully responsible for this.Report
What he said is that women ask questions instead of reading the provided materials, which I take to mean that they ask questions whose answers are contained in the material they should have read.
Now, whether women are more likely to do this than men, I have no idea. I doubt he has a large enough sample to draw statistically significant conclusions. But it’s silly to say that his claim that men are more likely than women to do their homework actually reflects badly on men.Report
Since, generalizing from this example, all men are prone to patronizing and insulting women …Report
@brandon-berg
If information can be offered via a brief, group Q-and-A instead of a dozen people each spending several hours reading a report… isn’t the former method preferable?Report
If information can be offered via a brief, group Q-and-A instead of a dozen people each spending several hours reading a report…
If all the relevant information can be provided in a brief Q-and-A session, but the report requires several hours to read to extract the same amount of information, there are staff people who need to be replaced. If the council members can’t be bothered to read the one-page executive summary, that’s a different matter. Certainly as a voter, I expect my city council member(s) to do at least that much prep work for a meeting.Report
@brandon-berg
What he said is that women ask questions instead of reading the provided materials, which I take to mean that they ask questions whose answers are contained in the material they should have read.
No, that’s not really what he said. At least not in the clip. His point was more than you have to provide *different* information to different genders.
His claim is that men wanted just financial information, and so he used to just provide that, and they’d make their decision from that.
Whereas, he learned while working for women, it turns out that *isn’t* what women want, so if you give them just that, they will ask questions. Like, in his example, how close a racetrack is to schools.
The problem isn’t ‘women don’t read the information’, it’s that ‘they want different information’. So the solution is ‘Instead of summarizing the financial information, summarize instead how it will benefit the community.’.
This isn’t actually that complimentary to women, either, as the assumption seems to be that they *don’t* care about the financial impact, and just care that the racetrack will be ‘near schools’ instead of how much money it will bring in.
It’s all sorts of stereotyping and assumptions, in all directions. And is fairly condescending towards the elected officials they work for in general: Everyone’s making information off summaries, on a whim, without any real thought or investigation…it’s just that they have *different* whims based on their gender, so be sure to pander to whatever specific whim that is in the summary of things so they don’t actually ask any questions.
It’s sorta like the groupings of ‘soccer mom’ and other dumbass voter groups…but instead of trying to generalize across millions of people and manipulate them into voting for stuff, let’s try to generalize across *a dozen* people. So much we need a *class* in how to generalize correctly.
When you look at it that way, oddly, it becomes a good deal less sexist. It’s just condescending as hell.
Here’s an idea for the staff of small towns: Perhaps you could actually try interacting with your elected bosses and learning what sort of information they want you to provide, instead of just *guessing* based on ill-formed stereotypes that people from a thousand miles a way have shown up to impart?Report