ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

My high school friend who currently works for a company in the home improvement sector e-mailed to ask if I have encountered sexism in the workplace, because she struggles with this problem several times a week. It struck me as very interesting question, because I did sort of feel that this was an issue at my old company. It was not a particularly encouraging environment for women. Not that I think I was really sexually discriminated against or treated poorly for being a woman, but there was only one female executive, and it was definitely a man’s world. The company had plenty of women in lower level positions, but it didn’t really look like many of them were all that upwardly mobile. That company was in the energy industry.

Conversely, my new company is connected with the health care industry. There is only one man in my entire division, and he does not occupy the top position, although he is a higher level manager. He is a cheerful man about two inches shorter than me, completely devoid of machismo. The executives are all women.

Anyway, it got me thinking, how some industries are more prone to male domination than others, even where there is no physical preclusion factor. But is this attributable to outright sexism, or is it also that these fields don’t appeal to women? How many young women sit there and say, “I want to work for a utility/petroleum/waste refining company when I grow up”?

I’m not really talking about fields like fire and rescue, where certain physical standards must be met for the job simply to be performed. I feel that gender domination is inevitable in those areas, since fewer women are able to meet the physical demands of the work. Sadly, most women are simply not strong enough to carry a 200 pound smoke inhalation victim free of a burning building. So I’m not complaining about discrepancies like that, which result from physical differences between the genders.

Are women underrepresented in some of these areas because they’re actually shut out, or because they aren’t interested in the field to begin with?  If the latter, is it really anyone’s fault?  And if they are treated differently, is it because the men are sexist and think women are helpless or stupid, or because they’re simply so used to working in an all-male environment that they don’t realize their behavior offends?