Roles women play in order to succeed in business
It’s hard being a woman in a male-dominated business world where men are still dictating the rules and calling the shots. To survive, women adapt themselves to the needs of their environment and, often subconsciously, take on certain easily-digestible, archetypical roles that make it easier for men to accept them into the business “family”. Based on the roles women play in men’s personal lives, the business equivalents can sometimes be double-edged swords for the women involved but are nonetheless a useful survival mechanism often essential to their career development.
We own you
Well, well. After all this talk about younger men being the techies and spending all their time online, here come the result of a new research showing us all where it’s really at.
Yup. In the UK, at least, it looks like the heaviest Internet users are women (18-34). God knows what all the young men are doing. Has the Internet run out of porn so soon? Surely not.
Here’s to sad, lonely female nerds everywhere!
Yay us….. I think?
Starbucks mermaid gets her tits back
Burlesque-inspired activists manage to achieve what armies of marketeers have consistently failed to do: give Starbucks back their hippie edge!
Full story here.
Blogging, death threats and victim mentality
Before I go any further, I’d like to make it clear that up until today, I had no idea who Kathy Sierra was. I only found out she existed because a piece about her blog death threat thing made the Digg front page. The title made me think that she must have written some really provocative controversial stuff that pissed a lot of people off and made them want to kill her so I thought “hey, good on her”, but then I actually went and read the article and had a look at her blog and hey, I couldn’t see any controversial stuff at all. I also gather it wasn’t anything she’d written in particular that had made people pick on her. So to recap the story as I see it:
Woman has blog. Woman gets some offensive comments on blog from what seem to be a bunch of pimply 15 year olds trying to be “street” and “el33t”. Woman totally freaks out and in a fit of drama queen hysterics cancels public appearances and “suspends her blog in protest”. Other sad bloggers follow and one of them (who I’ve never heard of either, but then again, I only read very specific blogs and don’t really care about the “blogosphere” as a whole) has this to say about the matter (as quoted on the BBC website):
Robert Scoble, author of popular technology blog Scobleizer, condemned the campaign against her.
“It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in my stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man,” he said
Are scummy sales people chauvinistic as well as slimy?
Over the past 2 years, I’ve had the misfortune of having to deal with lots of sales people. I can count on one hand (and a bit) the amount of sales people I’ve dealt with I would consider to be pleasant, well-adjusted individuals. The majority of people who ring up to speak to me are pretty lizard-like. I really hate it when people use scummy sales techniques of pretending they know me to get our CRM team to pass me the call.
Some of them are also pertty rude to the person who takes the call and then all smiles when they get through to me. I’ve asked our CRM team to let me know if someone’s been particularly curt with them on the phone, because I am generally mistrustful of fake and greedy people who put down those they think are unimportant so they can make a quick buck. As far as I’m concerned, a company that employs such people to promote itself is not likely to be a dependable, ethical company and I would need a pretty good reason to deal with a company I don’t feel I can trust. Sadly, lots of companies use nice salespeople but are still pretty unethical, but hey, if you’re lucky enough to get an eyeful of nature’s warning signs (think black and yellow spiders), you may as well take a step back if you can.
The good life
Sometimes I do love my job. Although most of my work involves sitting in front of the computer answering emails and looking at reports, occasionally I get to do stuff that is far more spiritually rewarding. Like being bribed. Today, for example, one of our major advertisers took me out to lunch at Ping pong which is pretty damn cool by any standard. I’d never been there before but had heard a lot about it. It’s wicked. The food actually had that elusive bit of X-factor that most food in this country lacks. I had the special jasmine tea with the flower that opens up in the water. How cool is that? I had to help it along with a chopstick cause it didn’t want to turn over and sink to the bottom like it should, but that’s besides the point. It was still pretty special. One of the advertisers confessed to always getting a round of those for newbies like me for street-cred value. I can see why.
As an extra clever achievement, I brought along our head of dev for the free lunch, thus ensuring I’m in his good books without any actual effort on my part. Years of working in clubs taught me how to spot the people you need to keep sweet if you want an easy life. If you want an easy life at a club, you get pally with security. If you want an easy life doing online marketing, you get pally with the techies. Unless, of course, you want to do all your own technical dirty work, which I am not particularly inclined to do.