If anyone is interested in sharing their experiences:
I'm taking a class this semester on gender and race. I was not sure about the class when it started, because even though this is not a 101 kind of class it began with a couple sections on the history of sociology which had some somewhat harebrained, by today's standards, ideas.
Now we are into the good stuff and it is rather interesting. We are covering the race/gender gap. Black and Hispanic women earn significantly less than white women and black men earn a greater percentage less for the same work than white men do. The studies are also going into the number of people doing lower level status work, such as temp work, which has a higher number of black women performing these kinds of jobs which have poor benefits and are more likely to suffer sexual harassment and overall poor treatment. It has raised some questions in my mind which I have been forming a hypothesis to write about.
I used to do recruiting for a call center in Arizona. This was an inbound sales call center and despite the low percentage of the local population here who are black (about 5%) 80% of our call center employees were black. The thing I found most interesting when I was interviewing people was about 50% of the black women I interviewed were seriously overqualified for the job. These were women with masters degrees and multiple degrees. I hired them because they obviously could perform the job duties and I have always disagreed with not hiring based on "overqualified" because sometimes people just enjoy doing something low stress, but I always looked at these women when they walked past my office and thought , why are you here? You could be doing so much more with yourself. Interestingly though all of the severely overqualified women were not recruited by me from ads and postings but rather were referrals from other people who worked at the call center. We had a huge group of women and men who went to the same church and/or to the same college (which was the same one I went to by the way). So this is where this class has me pondering these figures.
These women, who were well educated, well spoken, well dressed and nice women who I enjoyed working with and who had strong work ethics, all traits any employer would very much want in an employee, were doing crappy work which had a bullshit pay structure. Between work I used to ponder why they were even there. The conclusion I came to after having smokes and lunches with them was many of them were the only ones or the first ones in their family to go to college. Or were the first generation of their family to go to college. They were segregated into a social group which left them with a terrible network for networking. Many of the black women were dating black men with less education than they had. They all applied for this job which didn't even require a high school diploma because someone in their social group had gotten the job there and told them they too should go to this place. I'm considering straying from the assignment slightly and looking into this as my deeper study for the class. Is the gap in employment because white employers are in fact racist or is the situation more a question of who you know than what you know? Is it employer racism or is it social segregation which has led in part to the wage race gap? Do black people who have a strong ethnically mixed social group have better jobs and higher pay than black people who stay more closely within their own communities, going to a "black church" and living in a neighborhood with a higher than average black population. When I lived in the south segregation was much more prevalent than it is here, but you can still tell certain neighborhoods here have several houses in a row inhabited by black families which is a number disproportionate to the overall population. Same with apartment complexes some of them have a disproportionate number of black people living in them. As a matter of fact, I live in a condo right now which I am renting until we buy our new house and it is a phase 1 and phase 2 condo, same buildings across a street from one another and this side of the street is white and Hispanic and the other side of the street (a little neighborhood side street) is probably 50% black. On this side there is only 1 black man in the whole place who I have seen and I see him on his bicycle hanging out on the other side a lot with other black people from phase 2. All condos are individually owned so there is no land lord racism here. I can only see this as a similar situation to the call center, it was all networking. People living on phase 2 will be more likely to see a for rent or for sale sign on phase two than over here on phase 1 since they are on phase 2 all the time. They then tell their friends when they see the sign go up.
Now comes the questions, since different parts of the country are very different I would love some input. I have to write a paper about the race/gender gap and I hypothesize that a lot of this gap in pay and job status based on race is related less to employer racism and more to an overall tone of segregation between groups, self imposed or socially imposed. I believe being the first in a group with a college education leads to poor networking for any race. I believe since statistically more black women have college degrees than black men black women are held back to a certain extent by the lack of education of the men they date when they date "in race" because an uneducated man will feel threatened by the better education of the woman. I believe the gender pay gap for white and black and Hispanic women is also based on bad networking since women can't go play golf or have drinks the same way men do since women who do this tend to be sexually harassed or the men's wives have an issue with them golfing/drinking with a female coworker. Anyone who cares to share any observations, agreements or disagreements with this please do so. This class is concentrating on the United States, not the world. I can look up facts and figures but I would love some real life experiences and stories. You can post here or PM me if you care to. If you want to tell me I'm an idiot please be polite about it
I'm taking a class this semester on gender and race. I was not sure about the class when it started, because even though this is not a 101 kind of class it began with a couple sections on the history of sociology which had some somewhat harebrained, by today's standards, ideas.
Now we are into the good stuff and it is rather interesting. We are covering the race/gender gap. Black and Hispanic women earn significantly less than white women and black men earn a greater percentage less for the same work than white men do. The studies are also going into the number of people doing lower level status work, such as temp work, which has a higher number of black women performing these kinds of jobs which have poor benefits and are more likely to suffer sexual harassment and overall poor treatment. It has raised some questions in my mind which I have been forming a hypothesis to write about.
I used to do recruiting for a call center in Arizona. This was an inbound sales call center and despite the low percentage of the local population here who are black (about 5%) 80% of our call center employees were black. The thing I found most interesting when I was interviewing people was about 50% of the black women I interviewed were seriously overqualified for the job. These were women with masters degrees and multiple degrees. I hired them because they obviously could perform the job duties and I have always disagreed with not hiring based on "overqualified" because sometimes people just enjoy doing something low stress, but I always looked at these women when they walked past my office and thought , why are you here? You could be doing so much more with yourself. Interestingly though all of the severely overqualified women were not recruited by me from ads and postings but rather were referrals from other people who worked at the call center. We had a huge group of women and men who went to the same church and/or to the same college (which was the same one I went to by the way). So this is where this class has me pondering these figures.
These women, who were well educated, well spoken, well dressed and nice women who I enjoyed working with and who had strong work ethics, all traits any employer would very much want in an employee, were doing crappy work which had a bullshit pay structure. Between work I used to ponder why they were even there. The conclusion I came to after having smokes and lunches with them was many of them were the only ones or the first ones in their family to go to college. Or were the first generation of their family to go to college. They were segregated into a social group which left them with a terrible network for networking. Many of the black women were dating black men with less education than they had. They all applied for this job which didn't even require a high school diploma because someone in their social group had gotten the job there and told them they too should go to this place. I'm considering straying from the assignment slightly and looking into this as my deeper study for the class. Is the gap in employment because white employers are in fact racist or is the situation more a question of who you know than what you know? Is it employer racism or is it social segregation which has led in part to the wage race gap? Do black people who have a strong ethnically mixed social group have better jobs and higher pay than black people who stay more closely within their own communities, going to a "black church" and living in a neighborhood with a higher than average black population. When I lived in the south segregation was much more prevalent than it is here, but you can still tell certain neighborhoods here have several houses in a row inhabited by black families which is a number disproportionate to the overall population. Same with apartment complexes some of them have a disproportionate number of black people living in them. As a matter of fact, I live in a condo right now which I am renting until we buy our new house and it is a phase 1 and phase 2 condo, same buildings across a street from one another and this side of the street is white and Hispanic and the other side of the street (a little neighborhood side street) is probably 50% black. On this side there is only 1 black man in the whole place who I have seen and I see him on his bicycle hanging out on the other side a lot with other black people from phase 2. All condos are individually owned so there is no land lord racism here. I can only see this as a similar situation to the call center, it was all networking. People living on phase 2 will be more likely to see a for rent or for sale sign on phase two than over here on phase 1 since they are on phase 2 all the time. They then tell their friends when they see the sign go up.
Now comes the questions, since different parts of the country are very different I would love some input. I have to write a paper about the race/gender gap and I hypothesize that a lot of this gap in pay and job status based on race is related less to employer racism and more to an overall tone of segregation between groups, self imposed or socially imposed. I believe being the first in a group with a college education leads to poor networking for any race. I believe since statistically more black women have college degrees than black men black women are held back to a certain extent by the lack of education of the men they date when they date "in race" because an uneducated man will feel threatened by the better education of the woman. I believe the gender pay gap for white and black and Hispanic women is also based on bad networking since women can't go play golf or have drinks the same way men do since women who do this tend to be sexually harassed or the men's wives have an issue with them golfing/drinking with a female coworker. Anyone who cares to share any observations, agreements or disagreements with this please do so. This class is concentrating on the United States, not the world. I can look up facts and figures but I would love some real life experiences and stories. You can post here or PM me if you care to. If you want to tell me I'm an idiot please be polite about it
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Edit: this got long
On a working level:
Since i have been in my teens i have worked Maintenance. The first place i worked for was a ski resort. The entire maintenance staff was white, even the summer help was white. I think it had more to do with the area than anything else, the ski resort is located in a primarily white area and the seasonal workers were usually college kids on winter break. To honestly tell you the truth, i can't remember anyone of a different race actually working there. There was one black and one asian ski patroller, but they were volunteer staff. It never dawned on me to talk to them about what they thought simply because i don't think on that level, unfortunately i am one of those people that is obtuse, and really doesn't think about the situation. I saw them as people, not as race.
I think where i experienced the most segregation was when i went to work at the steel mill. I saw the same thing you saw at your office and at your home. Black workers were hired for lesser jobs even though they were completely capable of doing the higher end jobs, and only a few actually held higher paying or supervisory positions. But they needed work, they couldn't turn down the money. Steel mills pay somewhat well and i think they ran into the same thing that you were speaking of. The networking was where it came from. You could go be on a non-union electrician at some place for say $16 an hour, or you could go be labor at the mill for $22 an hour, with union benefits. I know for a fact some of the people dumbed themselves down to take a labor position.
When we ate lunch, it was like actually taking a step back in time. It was like the lunch room was segregated. Blacks on one side and Whites on the other. When i sat down with a black co-worker on the other side of the lunch room, people looked at me like i was on fire. There were some people that were out-right racists there. I swear, straight out of the backwoods carrying a noose around. What made it even worse was that management never did anything to correct the behavior, they ignored it, in hopes that it would work itself out. That doesn't work. It usually led to high stress situations, and you know steel-workers. It's not like they sit down and talk things out, it usually ended up in someone going at someone, and creating a larger gap.
I hated it there. For multiple reasons, but that was one of the big ones. It sincerely felt like when i went to work i was taking a step back into the 1950's. I talked to everyone, i treated everyone the same and i honestly think that held me back in certain situations, there was a few like me, everyone was judged by who they were not what color they were, but we were in the minority. It also worked both ways. As much as there were extremist whites, there was extremist black people. It ran the whole gambit. There were different levels of tolerance, and it seems like the people that were the most tolerant of race were usually looked down upon by the majority of extremists.
I am not a fan of the word "nigger", in so much it makes me grind my teeth when i hear it. 80,000 words in the English language, and the only way some moron knows how to express himself is to use that word. I am quite surprised i never lost it. I eventually got laid off, i can't say it bothered me.
I have had a few other positions since then. The last job i left, the entire management staff was white, and the entire production staff was black. The Maintenance crew was mixed. But if you stood back and listened, management would use some very...."iffy" phrases. "Those people" and they would definitely treat production workers different than they treated maintenance workers, or other white management members.
It was weird. Definitely another instance where i felt like i was walking into the past.
In my city:
I live in a city that is 90%+ white. Houses around here go for about 125k. I can remember only one black family living on my street, about 6 years ago. They moved in a few houses down from me. I went over and made chit-chat with them, where they are from, where they moved from and it was a rather pleasant conversation. We talked a couple weeks later.
Unfortunately the reason we talked was because i was apologizing for my race. A local high school student had burned an 8-foot cross in their front yard.
It was kind of cool though, our little niche here kind of came out and i realized i have pretty good neighbors. We helped them reseed the grass, clean up what was left of the cross and basically in about a day, you wouldn't have even realized it had happened. We kind of made it into an outing, they started grilling, my mom brought down potato salad, the other neighbors brought other stuff. It kind of made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and actually gave me hope that people aren't bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
They eventually moved out, he was transferred at work and the family followed the job. They have been the only black family that ever lived on this street. Our immediate neighborhood is still 99% white, and the city itself is still either in the low 90 or high 80 percentile in white population.
anyway. i just stopped by to tell you that "dirty pootie" is my favorite phrase of the week. I may steal that for later use.