This old comment says business is a notoriously all-male province in what I suppose is the United States. This does not match my experience in Europe. If under business we mean being employed by a corporation, generally speaking here sales and logistics and tech are male, marketing, HR, finance and support and testing are female. This is of course a broad generalization. Sales is closer to having gender balance than logistics or tech. HR and marketing are strongly female because they are understood as a “human” field, organizing trade shows or interviewing candidates, where social skills matter. Sales is a bit more male because beside all these, it is a “brave”, “boasting” field. Finance is notoriously female on the level of accountants, a male accountant is almost unusual, although higher level finance decision makers are more often men. Logistics is very male, if we mean under logistics big trucks, heavy crates and ugly warehouses. In corporate lingo “go ask the boys” invariably means descending into the scary and un-officelike world of the warehouse :) Tech/engineering mainly male but a lot of female testers, because female testers understand the mentality of users better and can simulate user behavior that more Mr.Spocky male engineers would never think an actual human user would try to do with their product. I have often seen arguments of the “But that is illogical, why would a user try that!” “Because they are not engineers!” type. About supporting users, it is fairly obvious which gender has more patience to calm down enraged users on the phone. This is my experience about business.
Maybe it means entrepreneurship, not corporate employment… but here too my experience is that it depends on what is sold. Teaching is so much female that a random small language school company here (that mainly trains people to be eligible for an office job by learning intermediate English) will be typically led by a woman. My mom did something similar and also ran a fast food booth (“cookery”). My dad was into construction.
This old comment says business is a notoriously all-male province in what I suppose is the United States.
Obviously business isn’t “notoriously all-male” in the United States. Typically HR skews heavily female. Customer support is heavily female. Most accountants and bookkeepers are women. Women are dramatically underrepresented in C-level positions, but even there “all-male” is clearly exaggerated. And C-level positions are a tiny, tiny fragment of total positions in business.
Even leaving room for hyperbole, “notoriously all-male” is comically overstated. It’s also easy to check. So why didn’t you check it?
I don’t find these things are easy to check at all. This is why I “check” them by e.g. asking here.
Sure, I could look up stats about say male and female CEOs, but it would only give me a very superficial answer, it would only answer the most literal interpretation of the question, and not the more important ones, such as why do people feel so, why does it appear so, or what kind of other questions can be disguised under this one. Mere facts are about the least important kind of information when it is about the human, social world and not the natural world. Nature is made of facts, society is of words.
This old comment says business is a notoriously all-male province in what I suppose is the United States. This does not match my experience in Europe. If under business we mean being employed by a corporation, generally speaking here sales and logistics and tech are male, marketing, HR, finance and support and testing are female. This is of course a broad generalization. Sales is closer to having gender balance than logistics or tech. HR and marketing are strongly female because they are understood as a “human” field, organizing trade shows or interviewing candidates, where social skills matter. Sales is a bit more male because beside all these, it is a “brave”, “boasting” field. Finance is notoriously female on the level of accountants, a male accountant is almost unusual, although higher level finance decision makers are more often men. Logistics is very male, if we mean under logistics big trucks, heavy crates and ugly warehouses. In corporate lingo “go ask the boys” invariably means descending into the scary and un-officelike world of the warehouse :) Tech/engineering mainly male but a lot of female testers, because female testers understand the mentality of users better and can simulate user behavior that more Mr.Spocky male engineers would never think an actual human user would try to do with their product. I have often seen arguments of the “But that is illogical, why would a user try that!” “Because they are not engineers!” type. About supporting users, it is fairly obvious which gender has more patience to calm down enraged users on the phone. This is my experience about business.
Maybe it means entrepreneurship, not corporate employment… but here too my experience is that it depends on what is sold. Teaching is so much female that a random small language school company here (that mainly trains people to be eligible for an office job by learning intermediate English) will be typically led by a woman. My mom did something similar and also ran a fast food booth (“cookery”). My dad was into construction.
“Business” means entrepreneurship. But that does not mean small companies, nor are all employees of companies entrepreneurs.
Obviously business isn’t “notoriously all-male” in the United States. Typically HR skews heavily female. Customer support is heavily female. Most accountants and bookkeepers are women. Women are dramatically underrepresented in C-level positions, but even there “all-male” is clearly exaggerated. And C-level positions are a tiny, tiny fragment of total positions in business.
Even leaving room for hyperbole, “notoriously all-male” is comically overstated. It’s also easy to check. So why didn’t you check it?
I don’t find these things are easy to check at all. This is why I “check” them by e.g. asking here.
Sure, I could look up stats about say male and female CEOs, but it would only give me a very superficial answer, it would only answer the most literal interpretation of the question, and not the more important ones, such as why do people feel so, why does it appear so, or what kind of other questions can be disguised under this one. Mere facts are about the least important kind of information when it is about the human, social world and not the natural world. Nature is made of facts, society is of words.