Women in business

Yes, As long as we keep serving up topics like this the rightful place of women in business will continue to be undermined. When was the last time, better still when was the first time, we saw a discussion on men in business? Are we to deduce there to be something peculiar about women in business, or are we to think it a rarity that this species of female exists at all? Is there anything more to this title than the combination of three words?

It's been a long time since gender defined purpose, or skill, or ambition, and certainly competence, yet we continue to create vocabulary that causes us to create an aura around this phrase that expects some comment on viability. Women have proved themselves at least equal to men in virtually every sphere of human endeavor since the beginning of time, and clearly much superior to men in birthing children. It's just amazing how society, from primitive to sophisticated, has expected that nourishing aptitude to preclude women from the marketplace, until the outbreak of the Second World War when they took over most male dominated jobs while the men went of to battle, as men always have. Most then returned to their maternal chores when the men came marching home. We can picture the little box home with the picket fence that was the ideal world of the 1950s. Men went off to work, women went back to the kitchen, and two children families lived happily with the dog and the cat.

Surely we expected too much that traditional wives and mothers would simply step aside from the wider role they had played, from the creativity of managing production and participating in the wider economy than the home. Surely we expected too much that, outside the home, women would be satisfied working as secretaries, nurses, or teachers, and the bra burners of the sixties and seventies underscored that women could and would storm the gates of the corporate world and any other subservient status.

It's difficult to say how quickly the transition will completely eliminate the glass ceiling, but any observer must agree that the myth of male superiority has long since been shattered. Anyone who thought that women just didn't have what it takes to rise through the ranks have seen that they are at least as worthy as men, and as an aside have earned every right to sit at the top table as equals in every respect. Lingering male antagonism is nothing more than the last vestige of old world traditionalism, and a healthy dose of dead wood men lamenting their loss of entitlement.

The positive contribution women have made in business world is welcome to all except those who are full of envy with their heads buried in the sand. Women in business is a term that needs to be stricken from our language because it suggests an inferiority that if anything is better suited to masculine whiners.