Ed Werder doesn't like women helping women

again, please.

 

please what? Please do some work and get off your moralistic high horse? If I wanted to follow links down a rabbit hole, I'd unblock YankeeFan

 

jfc

 

Now there's a guy who would definitely help women and minorities get jobs. Ed Werder is not JC.

 

Ah I see, so three women threaded the needle and beat the system, the system is not the problem?

Again, let's go back to SI, since that is the original issue here.

Again, 30 senior writers.

Zero were women for much of that time. I believe between when Kelli Anderson left (or was nudged out) and between when Vrentas was granted status as senior writer at SI in addition to being a senior writer at MMQB (which King always insisted were separate, but whatever) they had zero. I might be mistaken and they might have had one.

Every time we have this discussion, people are like "Look at this small handful of examples of women who beat the system! That means it's not biased against them."

Of course it is.

 

Always good to see different viewpoints. I can only speak from my own experience. At a large daily in Texas back in the Mid-1990s, I was a sports freelancer at a large sports department for about six months, doing mainly enterprise/takeout stories. When a full-time position at the paper opened up, the Executive Sports Editor personally called me to apologize he couldn't hire me because the next hire needed to be a "young Hispanic female". I was floored he'd actually admit that, but appreciated the fact that he was at least honest. So, this argument goes both ways. Let's not pretend that some percentage of women haven't gotten their foot in the door simply to balance out the numbers.

 

Some of those number here:

www.womensmediacenter.com/reports/divided-2017

 

When I've spoken to university-level journalism classes over the last decade, say, they've been overwhelmingly female. The business as I've known it is heavily male. There is pretty clearly a bottleneck somewhere.

 

I was told something similar after I lost out for my full-time gig in sports in 1999, with the job going to a black female. Sports editor said the paper’s managing editor overruled him. I didn’t take my ball and go home. I kept plugging. People will tend to hire people who are similar to them if given the choice. I just worked for a corporate comms team in NYC for the last five years, headed by a black woman, and white men were the minority on our team. Again, that’s beneficial, the diversity of opinions. This sounds contradictory, but the most skilled person isn’t always the best hire. Maybe they’ll grow bored in the job, won’t work to learn new skills. Maybe their social skills are less than. It’s like admitting people to colleges. You want a balance of people’s strengths and backgrounds.

 

Maybe the women are just smarter and take a job in comms or PR, which uses the same skills and has more job security. I’m only half joking. Men who work in SPORTS or want to are much more pigheaded in my experience in staying in a shit job for shit pay. You can say that’s toughing it out or you can say it’s ignorance; maybe you need a mix of both to succeed.

 

I think we need to start understanding that a different perspective—being a woman or a minority—is also a skill. And it's a skill that, unlike grammar or time management, is impossible to teach.