Comments

  1. John Morales says

    Now that you mention it, they do all have quite similar hair-styles, though one is a touch curly.

  3. throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble says

    I give it at most 2 days before they claim their hiring practices are a sign of their “feminism”.

  4. says

    Damien Counsell posted something interesting on Helen Dale’s FB:

    I mean that you need to work out exactly what’s going on in a specific case before generalizing and that you need to identify the locus of the discrimination if you want to fix it.

    For example, I (briefly) worked in a private sector company that employed scientists. Its junior staff were overwhelmingly female. A senior female staff member invited me to participate in her recruiting a new trainee.

    The company advertised for employees in the usual places, but didn’t publish starting pay. Instead it invited applicants to send in their CVs and a covering letter “stating salary expectations”. Every single applicant who quoted a number higher than a (derisory) management specified threshold was binned. None of the applicants who made the cut was male.

    The wildly skewed sex balance at the lower levels of this firm would look on the face of it like the result of systematic sexism, but the only discrimination that had take place on the premises was purely economic. It was as colour-, creed- and gender-blind as you could imagine. Nobody even looked at the names of the applicants at this stage. The result *was* a product of real sex discrimination; that sex discrimination was entirely external to the company. This was in central London. Most of the women hired lived with better paid male partners.

  5. suttkus says

    If the correlations being displayed was merely that all the lower staff were female, that might be a legitimate excuse, but look more closely. There isn’t a single overweight woman in that lineup, in a country where the obesity rate isn’t lower than 20% in any state. Most, if not all, the women are classically attractive. I would find it very difficult to justify that without outright discrimination.

  6. Pierce R. Butler says

    Lookism, as suttkus notes in # 9, plus ageism. Maybe one of the blondes has blown out more than 28 candles at a time.

    Compare that to the demographics of “business managers” in general, and I betcha certain discrepancies will jump out.

    Silly me, I thought “staff” and “managers” were non-overlapping categories. In CellularSolutionsese, perhaps “business manager” means “booth babe”…

  8. left0ver1under says

    I thought the end was going to be different. I was expecting the positions to be actually held by men and the
    pictures and names used as “eye candy” to bring in customers. I wouldn’t have put it past them.

  9. jaggington says

    suttkus #5

    How can you possibly tell from those portraits whether any of those people are overweight? How do you choose to define overweight? Also, these photographs were almost certainly taken for the website and other promotional materials. Many people can appear less “… classically attractive” in real life than they choose to appear in publicity photographs but certainly some of the women appear to me to be not “classically attractive” and some might also be overweight.

    I am, however, surprised at the lack of ethnic diversity amongst the staff.

  10. Minow says

    The irony here is that if Cellular Solutions employed fewer women, nobody would even have noticed. Not sure that would have been better for the women though.

  11. unfamiliar w/ your ways says

    @#9 jaggington

    new to observing humans, or just human females?
    You can tell from the neck how overweight someone is. Note the depth of the shadows, you can see how deeply recessed the neck is under the jaw. These shadows are less prominent or not present at all in an overweight human.
    There are exceptions, of course, but none of these women look exceptional in that way. With necks like those, I would not expect any of the pictures women to exceed ~190lbs (and that is generous, making all sorts of allowances for postpardum adiposity, spare tires, pear shapes… should I feel sexist for being able to objectify a body like this? I promise I only learned to do it so I can artistically render humans in all their variety… It seems more likely none of them exceed 145lbs)

  12. throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble says

    jaggington

    I am, however, surprised at the lack of ethnic diversity amongst the staff.

    South East England is ~92% white or beige.

    minow

    The irony here is that if Cellular Solutions employed fewer women, nobody would even have noticed.

    They thought they did employ fewer women. It just so happens that the titles the women didn’t occupy were all senior-staff positions. So, hell, even a woman in one of those positions would have made it appear more gender-equitable.

  13. freemage says

    Nathaniel Frein@4: Sure, there’s obviously sexism in the way women are made to lower their expectations, producing a greater number of women hires. But the flipside is that if none of the senior staffers are women, that suggests that they aren’t bringing people up from below, but doing outside corporate searches for senior staff. Furthermore, they apparently shelve (or at least, sufficiently dilute) the “expected salary cap” rule during those searches, thereby permitting men to demand their privilege.

    And yeah, that whole roster is whiter than fresh snowfall. There’s not even an effort at tokenism.

  14. Pieter B, FCD says

    Cellular Solutions respond

    The “meet the staff” page was designed for our clients to put a face to the name of the people they deal with here and now that page has been taken out of context we feel it is no longer appropriate.

    We are an equal opportunities employer and will remain so. We are proud of our team and remain committed to their individual development.

  16. Silentbob says

    @ 14 Pieter B

    … that page has been taken out of context…

    Ah, of course, the context! If only we understood the context there would have been nothing iffy at all!

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