minoanmiss (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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agonyaunt2022-04-11 11:30 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-04-11 11:30 am
Entry tags:
Ask a Manager: Men's Group At Work
[editorial comment: oh here we go]
1. My organization has a “Men’s Forum” My organization recently sent out an email announcing its annual “Men’s Forum” and I immediately felt icky about it. To me, it feels different than a women’s forum or an ERG for minorities because it focuses on a group that, historically, is not marginalized. For context, I work in finance which has a history of “the good old boys club.” The email even mentions “men and their allies” which also feels wrong to me.
Ick, yes. What is the event’s mission? Unless it’s to be an ally to women and other marginalized groups in your field or office, what exactly is the need it’s responding to? Affinity groups exist to help demographics that have been systemically marginalized and kept out of spaces controlled by the dominant group. The point is to level the playing field in places where it’s unbalanced and good lord, that’s not men in finance.
If this “Men’s Forum” exists to provide special networking or development opportunities to men, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a hostile response to similar efforts for women and people of color.
1. My organization has a “Men’s Forum” My organization recently sent out an email announcing its annual “Men’s Forum” and I immediately felt icky about it. To me, it feels different than a women’s forum or an ERG for minorities because it focuses on a group that, historically, is not marginalized. For context, I work in finance which has a history of “the good old boys club.” The email even mentions “men and their allies” which also feels wrong to me.
Ick, yes. What is the event’s mission? Unless it’s to be an ally to women and other marginalized groups in your field or office, what exactly is the need it’s responding to? Affinity groups exist to help demographics that have been systemically marginalized and kept out of spaces controlled by the dominant group. The point is to level the playing field in places where it’s unbalanced and good lord, that’s not men in finance.
If this “Men’s Forum” exists to provide special networking or development opportunities to men, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a hostile response to similar efforts for women and people of color.
no subject
Two things I am posting here so I am not tempted to post them there:
1. Pointing out that the workplace may be legally obligated to do this is not the same thing as agreeing that they should be legally obligated to do this! I feel like there's several thread sthere of one set of commenters saying "It may be legally required" and another set of commenters answering "You shouldn't do it" and set A replying "yes, but the company needs to obey the law" and set B replying "Why are you siding with patriarchal oppression?"
2. There are a lot of people saying that straight white men already have the equivalent of things like women's or POC or LGBT groups for the workplace, and it's things like golf days and sports teams and fraternity brothers, which is at the same time super true and super not true at all? Firstly because right now of all times, a lot of that kind of "informal" networking has been shut down; people who relied on it are suddenly shut out - this is part of *why* a certain class of powerful men say remote working is bad and needs to end. Work-sponsored things like ERGs aren't at all the same but they were more able to transition to things like Zoom because they were already more formalized, and if a company/industry structure is moving to a model where informal socializing is happening differently, they need to account for that.
And secondly, those "informal" power-brokering spaces were always designed not just to filter out people who weren't straight white men, but also to filter out people who weren't *the right sort* of straight white men. In spaces that rely on that kind of thing, being a straight white man who doesn't have the passcodes to let himself into those (due to disability, class, inability to pass as straight even if you are, whatever) while also being shut out of all the systems meant to help people who don't have that access, does in fact suck. (Is it the same as being Black or trans or whatever? No, but it still sucks.)
I don't think that having a men's group is the fix for this problem, but claiming that all men always have equal access to those spaces doesn't help anything.
(I work in an industry where men are about 10% of employees and 75% of c-suite-level management. Figuring out ways to retain and support male employees while simultaneously figuring out ways to counteract male privilege in the workplace is certainly a thing.)