Ladies, do you desire a career in business? But do you have self-esteem, or perhaps even intelligence issues that would get in the way of completing a rigorous program of education that would prepare you for success in the business environment?
Would you love to get that B.A. in Business Management or even an M.B.A, but find that all those facts and icky numbers thingies and other really hard stuff get in the way?
Don’t you worry your pretty little heads! The DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University has the business program just for you. Wanna know why, cupcake? Cause your special! Your “woman’s way of knowing” has more to bring to the modern world of business than any of those hard to remember facts and figures that silly male business people keep insisting are so important.
Seriously, I think that McMaster University should have something like that on their about page.
I don’t blame them for being conscious of the fact that men are falling out of education, and the subsequent reality that if they want to keep their programs solvent they need to appeal to women. Since they can’t, as a part of Western academe, actually make a push for male students by touting their ability to create informed, critical thinkers ready for the business world, they are forced to go for the vanity sell.
And they have done so in spades on their website, with an article transparently titled, “Women Make Better Decisions than Men,” which of course was backed up with long pink ribbons of touchy-feely feminist “scholarship” to support the elitist claim of the title.
I can just imagine the high caliber go-getter females they are targeting with that kind of rhetoric. And I am sure that their graduates will be highly competent and sought above all others for corporate recruitment in the years to come.
Oh my, I have become sarcastic again. Please accept my mea culpas. It is very difficult to keep a straight face while addressing an accredited university that uses blind sexism, appealing to emotional toddlers and insulting the intelligence of men and women everywhere just to indulge ideations of supremacy in their prospective students.
As to the “science” used for their citations, I had a choice here. I could write another 600 or so words taking it down, or I could just steal a comment made to their article that did just that for all of us.
It was a lazy article, so I chose the lazy way out, with thanks to the author of said comment.
From Scott Gustafson:
I am a professor at a major state university. The title intrigued me, being so blatantly sexist and intentionally inflammatory. As an educational institution, you should be ashamed of yourself for letting such a poorly titled, researched, and written article be publicly promulgated. A cursory examination of your sources (which were not completely cited, so one must dig in order to ferret out the data on which you based your rather spurious conclusions):
Joy, L., Carter, N. M., Wagner, H. M. & Narayanan, S. (2007): The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards. New York: Catalyst Inc.
NOT a peer reviewed paper – but a corporate position piece with no fidelity of data to support the authors’ claims.
Wilson, N and A Altanlar. 2009. “Director Characteristics, Gender Balance and InsolvencyRisk: an empirical study.
NOT a peer reviewed article, and the conclusion was that empirical inquiries lead to mixed results – the opposite conclusion of this article
Fondas, N. and S. Sassalos (2000), “A Different Voice in the Boardroom: How the Presence of Women Directors Affects Board Influence”
This article was based on archival survey data from 1991, and came to the conclusion that boards who included women at the time were more open to shareholder input and had a corporate culture of openness: NOT any specific qualities of the behavior of women. Again, poor research and sourcing.
It was at this point I stopped seeking the empirical sources for you article, because you had lost all credibility. If one of my graduate students had produced this sexist pile of poorly produced pugnaciousness, I would have a long and serious discussion with them about academic standards. I suggest you may want to consider the same, being that you embarrass yourself as an academic institution by this article’s inclusion in your public discourse.
You may want to stop by the McMaster thread and marvel also at how their marketing rep tries to backpedal and obfuscate about the article, even as it rests in its unaltered form, just a quick scroll up from the backpedaling and obfuscations.
I suppose to them it does not matter, as the idiots to which this article is designed to appeal likely won’t be swayed by its utter destruction in the comments that follow.
Sigh. We have much work to do in this world.
