Misandry in the workplace

Funny how Microsoft Word recognises misogynistic and not misandry (or strictly speaking in this context, misandric). The same is true of the spell checker in Blogger. I looked this up on Wikipedia (nice to have you back, following the SOPA protests) and discovered the following quote:


"In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor".
—Warren Farrell, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say

This is a point made more eloquently by everything.explained.at/misandry:

"Christina Hoff Sommers notes what she considers a 'corrosive paradox' of feminism: "that no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men". She says "it is just not possible to incriminate men without implying that large numbers of women are fools or worse". To Hoff Sommers, women who respect men are seen (by what she has coined "gender feminists") as being in the camp of the enemy. Therefore, misandry becomes misogyny, perpetrated by feminists whom Hoff Sommers sees as a radical and unrepresentative minority of both feminists and women".

I have to declare I am very much for equality of opportunity for everyone in the workplace. However, given the word has not even  entered into common parlance (as shown by two cultural barometers of Blogger and Word) is the feminisation of the workforce hiding a new kind of cultural bias that is developing in the work place, which thus far has gone unreported?

Ex-Apple boss Sculley sets record straight on Jobs

An great interview with John Sculley:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16538745

Stephen Hawking tells Google ‘philosophy is dead’

This is the article I was referring to in the previous posting:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8520033/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html

Philosophy and science

I was struck recently by a remark from Stephen Hawking that philosophy had failed to keep up with science. Over the Christmas break I read Habermas "Knowledge and Human Interests" and I have to say his knowledge of science seems to be based on (what used to be called) third form physics (i.e. for 13-14 year old kids).

However the same is equally true of physicists for example Bohm and Popper. As biologists Dawkins and Gould seem to get closest, but even they have their limitations. Bohm for example talks about when humans evolved from chimps (!) Popper is not much better. In "All Life is Problem Solving" he states that one should never make predictions. Two chapters later he is making predictions!

Even our better informed scientists have their limitations. For example, the Blind Watchmaker Dawkins suggest (p.300)

"If parents could somehow transcribe the wisdom of a lifetime's experience into their genes, so that their offspring were born with a library of vicarious experience built in and ready to be drawn upon, those offspring could begin life one jump ahead. Evolutionary progress might indeed speed up, as learned skills and wisdom would automatically be incorporated into the genes" p.300

From a learning perspective this does not make any sense. If we had learned something we inherited, this might not suit the environment the off-spring inherited. One of the reasons homo sapiens are 'successful' is that each individual starts off as a tabula rasa, or blank slate.

The question is, why does make a difference in business in management? Well, mainly because research into work-based learning always has a philosophy that underpins it. For example, whether it is positivist or whether it is phenomenological. The majority of research is positivist, as in the tradition that underpins physics. Although an applied subject, 90% of management is sociology.

What are we to make of this? Scientists make lousy philosophers and philosophers make lousy scientists? I'll leave the final word to one of my favourite authors, Richard Dawkins (From the Selfish Gene):


"Publishers should correct the misapprehension that a scholar’s distinction in one field implies authority in another. And as long as that misapprehension exists, distinguished scholars should resist the temptation to abuse it". pp.277-8