Basia McDougall MPhil.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

A different worldA world exists, which is ruled by short people. Discrimination against tall people has beenfinally acknowledged and change is planned. Three options exist:a. Teach tall people to act short. For example, stooping, sitting in a hunched position.b. Celebrate differences. In short, encourage tall people to do jobs that short people finddifficult, for example: stack tall shelves.c. Make some changes, specifically offering fast track routes for those tall people negativelyaffected by the rules of the short people.Figure 3: Discrimination management metaphor from Meyerson and Fletcher, 2000.Meyerson and Fletcher (2000), suggest the third option leads to offering flexible workinghours; mentoring schemes and adding back time to women’s tenure on return from maternityleave. (These suggestions form the basis of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s report andreflect the Athena Swan standards, Wallace, 2012). The authors also argue that all this doesnot eradicate the rules created by the short people. Indeed, the literature review supports thenot wholly successful adoption of this third option, which from academic articles appearspopular at the present time.Option (a) is suggesting instead that men are taught to act more like women. This does nothappen anywhere in paid employment – no courses exist that are aimed at men to help themact more like women in their respective organisations. Only organisations set up by womenappear to promote non-masculine approaches to work for example, White Stuff and BodyShop. In the 1990’s training courses strove to teach women to be more dominant in theirpresence and use this stance in negotiations and discussion with male counterparts. Forexample, the Civil Service ran a course called: ‘Development for Women’ in the mid 1990’s.More recently, there are efforts encouraging women to play golf. For example, anorganisation, the ‘LPGA Golf Clinics for Women’ on its website makes explicit links to theneed to fast track to a man’s world:20