Guo Xiaohan
Achieving a career or returning to the family is a problem that many women in the workplace will face. However, British scholar Shani O'Gard's "Return to Family? "Family, Career and Difficult Equality" reveals the huge gap between the gender equality slogan and the injustices suffered by women, so that the seemingly dilemma of choice is often no choice. When the Chinese edition of the book was published, we invited Guo Xiaohan, a former media person, to talk about her workplace difficulties and recommend several books to women in the workplace to encourage them to face up to workplace inequality.
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Guo Xiaohan on women's workplace dilemma (06:09)
Back to Home? The modern workplace environment is very detrimental to women, especially mothers, who still suffer from "maternal punishment," he said. What do you think?
I started my business after having a baby. When I was doing this company, because of the imbalance in the distribution of time, energy, etc., my marriage was also over, which was equivalent to rubbing the period of time after the age of 30 that my physical strength might be the best, and I came out as an independent me, but there were a lot of things to put in.
For myself, I may not feel it if you don't ask these questions. In the workplace, a woman pays her time. Dual identity is to have double the time and double the energy. In the workplace, there is time and energy in the workplace; in the family, there must be time and energy in the family. Then, your emotions are delayed and cannot be managed quickly, so there are many contradictions. The main reason for the contradiction, I think, may be some irrational organizational structure and irrational allocation of time, as well as some very stereotypical constraints on women. Whether you accept such a fate or make some adjustments is a problem that many women who are becoming more and more professional today need to face.
Have you ever experienced inequality in the workplace?
One of my previous jobs was in an Internet company where I was working in a management position. Some inequalities in the workplace, and so on, must be there, but in the circumstances at the time, my choice was not to argue and argue about whether these equalities or inequalities, or to solve the problem. Saying this is a bit like dissing someone else, but it really is. For example, everyone is a manager, there are men and women, but when making decisions, even if women's opinions are correct, they have to go through many rounds of discussion, and even everyone obeys each other for the sake of power or face. This is a very waste of time for me.
To put it bluntly, it is a management meeting, but in fact, it is very likely that I, as a woman, am just a "companion chat".
I also have a sense of urgency about women's age and time, but the choice I have to alleviate this urgency is that I don't want to talk with me anymore, I want to make a decision. If I can't decide on a bunch of men in suits and shoes for meetings, then I'll make my own decisions.
How do women build confidence in the workplace?
Get to know yourself first. You're definitely getting to know yourself over time in the process of work, but speed it up as much as you can. Understand what you are good at and what you are not good at, what you are really willing to do, which are the things that are particularly fishy, and then you must quickly and real-time correct and improve, and find the best and most irreplaceable part of yourself in a group with the same values or a common sense of mission.
Encourage women to face up to inequality in the workplace, have the courage and confidence to challenge, what books would you recommend to everyone?
I can recommend some of Hesse's works, such as Siddhartha. This book teaches you how to learn from the world, to learn from everything, you can learn from trees, you can learn from rivers, you can learn from people, you can realize what you are, you can know where you are. Moreover, this book is very easy to read. I love these wise books.
Siddhartha
There is also a book that I have read in an Internet company and still have a great influence on my living habits, called "Zen of Programmers". A German programmer, he was tired, but he had to do very intensive mental work. He liked the things in the East, such as Zen Buddhism in Japan, and he used this Zen concept to combine it into the work of programmers, and solved his life, work, and the problems he encountered in Zen methods and methodologies. My current schedule and living habits, etc., are all found in this book a template, and then adjusted according to my own personality and living habits.
Programmer's Zen
Back to Home? In this book, I will feel very empathetic, and I will feel that the problem i am facing is not my personal problem. For a long time I would feel that it was because of my personality bugs, my shortcomings, my temper, my inability, or my lack of IQ, which caused me to have a very broken life at one point. But when I read the book, I found that this collapse did not happen to me, it may be a stage of social development, and there is a contradiction between the traditional collective organizational structure, whether it is a company or a family. The manifestation of this contradiction is that women have been wronged a lot, or have been much unequal. You should see that the inequality you are in is not all your fault, and the current society, the way time and values are measured, is different from the calculation method when the traditional company was first invented or when the family structure of marriage was invented. After you know this, think about what I can improve, what I have to endure, and what you really want.
【Further reading】
Back to Home? - Family, Career and Unattainable Equality
Shani Ogaard / by Liu Yu / Translation, Guangxi Normal University Press, Republic, September 2021 edition
In this book, Shani Ogaard, a professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science, interviews many highly educated London women who have worked as lawyers, accountants, teachers, designers, journalists, and doctors, but have all eventually returned to their families and become full-time housewives. The media and policies encourage working women to maintain a work-family balance and build partnership-style equality, but the reality is quite the opposite. By listening to these women, Shani Ogaard hopes to help them achieve true equality in their family life and work.
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Luan Meng