11.High pressure causes people to clam up and rarely exposes hidden issues – calm, relaxed, gentle, clever questions are far more revealing.
12.Probe the cv/resume/application form to clarify any unclear points.
13.If possible, and particularly for any position above first-line jobs, use some form of psychometric test, or graphology, and have the results available for the interview, so you can discuss them with the interviewee. Always give people the results of their tests. Position the test as a helpful discussion point, not the deciding factor. Take care when giving the test to explain and reassure. Ensure the test is done on your premises – not sent in the post.

Interesting how this advice for interviewers advises them to try and keep the interviewees calm and to reassure them, in one point however i another how it says to “Probe” them on their CV’s. There seems to be a balance when giving an interview firm but fair.

The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys by Siomn Blackburn

David Benatar’s book is a brave or even foolhardy attempt to redress the balance a little. Men, too, have plenty to complain about. Men are conscripted to fight in wars more than women. With the exception of sexual assault, and with spousal violence a surprising draw, men are more often victims of violence than women, whether through casual crime or politically inspired purges and genocides. More and more severe corporal punishment is inflicted on boys than on girls. In marital break-ups, women are more likely to gain custody of children than men. In many contexts it is harder for men to maintain bodily privacy than women. Men have to wait their turn to jump in the lifeboats, too.

Benatar knows that such examples are likely to meet snorts of disbelief or derision, but he is careful to back up his claims with empirical data, and as a philosopher he is especially careful both about the interpretation of evidence and the use of terms such as “discrimination”. He also recognises that there is a difference between a widely shared presumption that, for instance, war should be left to men, and a widely shared belief that women are simply not fitted for independent positions of privilege and wealth. The one has a certain natural basis in that if a population is threatened, male lives are more expendable than female lives, since as Dr Strangelove eagerly anticipated, a small proportion of surviving males can proceed to father a great many more children than if the ratios are reversed. The other has no basis at all outside cultural prejudice.

Benatar is certainly right that each sex has something to complain about. Each is pressurised by norms: girls are supposed to be girly and boys to be boyish, and those who will not or cannot conform may suffer as a result. A girl may be miserable at not looking like Angelina Jolie, but then a boy may mope at not looking or behaving like David Beckham. But arguing about which oppression is worse looks like a zero-sum game, and for stretches Benatar’s discussion may remind the reader of Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, with escalating exaggerations about who ‘ad it ‘ardest. “We ‘av to queue hours for ladies’ loo – and I cleaned ‘ouse and microwaved dinner!” “Luxury! I ‘ad four hours’ commute and six listening t’ boss talk about ‘is piles, then 67 emails to answer, and any’ow, childbirth’s a doddle.”

In making this comparison, I do not at all doubt that there is a case to be made for the recognition of a second sexism, nor that Benatar makes it well. And it is not as if he himself is taking sides in these invidious comparisons. He is not a participant in the sex wars but a peacemaker who wants them to wind down. All that he aims to show is that if it is all too often tough being a woman, it is also sometimes tough being a man, and that any failure to recognise this risks distorting what should be everyone’s goal, namely universal sympathy as well as social justice for all, regardless of gender.

During its history, the Nobel Foundation has honored 550 scientists with its prestigious award yet only 15 of those distinguished individuals have been women.
Differing career interests, a Matthew effect, or other barriers to the highest echelons of science could all contribute to reducing women’s representation among the hopefuls for the Nobel. In fact, a recent study by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and colleagues published in PNAS demonstrated that, even today, employers in academic science hold gender biases. Still, it is important to make a distinction between prejudice that keeps women from becoming a candidate for the Nobel and prejudice that prevents female candidates from being chosen for the prize. In other words, independent of what gender biases women have to overcome to reach the apex of science, are the women who succeed in getting there fairly evaluated by the Academy?

I think that this statistic is due to years of gender inequality within society, however also gender steriotypes within the science community and difficulty for womenn to be excepted into this hhighly competative field of work.

Couple raise child as ‘gender neutral’ to avoid stereotyping By Richard Alleyne

Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, decided not to reveal baby Sasha’s gender to the world so he would not be influenced by society’s prejudices and preconceptions.

They referred to their child as “The Infant” and only allowed him to play with “gender-neutral toys” in their television-free home.

For the first five years of his life Sasha alternated between girls’ and boys’ outfits, leaving friends, playmates and relatives guessing.

But the couple have finally revealed his sex after it became harder to conceal when Sasha started primary school.

Yesterday Miss Laxton, a web editor, said that she thought gender stereotyping was “fundamentally stupid”.

“I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” she said.

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?

“It’s like horoscopes: what could be stupider than thinking there are 12 types of personality that depend on when you were born? It’s so idiotic.

“Gender affects what children wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person they become.”

She admitted that their stance had led them to suffering some ostracisation and she had been branded a “loony” by other parents.

But she felt it was worth it.

“I discovered later that I’d been described as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’, she said.

“And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come around for coffee. They just thought I was mental.

“I don’t think I’d do it if I thought it was going to make him unhappy, but at the moment he’s not really bothered either way. We haven’t had any difficult scenarios yet.”

She said she early gender stereotyping was “harmful”.

“My mother’s very sporty and my dad was very emotional,” she said.

“We’d watch The Wizard of Oz and always start crying, whereas my mum would think we were really soppy.

“So it’s always seemed obvious to me that stereotypes didn’t fit the people I knew.”

The family, from in Sawston, Cambs., were so desperate not to prejudice Sasha’s life with gender they didn’t ask midwives his sex until 30 minutes after he was born.

Only a handful of immediate family members were told of the baby’s gender.

Finally the secret got too hard to keep and Beck and Kieran were forced to reveal Sasha’s sex when he started school.

Sasha wears a “ruched-sleeved” girl’s shirt as part of his school uniform, and has been banned from sporting combat trousers.

The youngster is also encouraged to wear flowery tops at weekends.

Miss Laxton said her son would think nothing of being given flowers – a gift which would embarrass many men.

“I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction. As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters does it?

“When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?” by Jeanne Maglaty

Why have young children’s clothing styles changed so dramatically?  How did we end up with two “teams”—boys in blue and girls in pink?

“It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing,” says Paoletti, who has explored the meaning of children’s clothing for 30 years.  For centuries, she says, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink.  So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

So the baby boomers were raised in gender-specific clothing. Boys dressed like their fathers, girls like their mothers. Girls had to wear dresses to school, though unadorned styles and tomboy play clothes were acceptable.

We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender-role attitudes and female participation in the workplace, politics and entrepreneurial activities. Our results hold looking across countries, across districts within countries, and across ethnicities within districts. To test for the importance of cultural persistence, we examine the children of immigrants living in Europe and the United States. We find that even among these individuals, all born and raised in the same country, those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today.

An intersting perception on how physical strenght has influenced gender over time, and how decendants even today hold some of these beliefs. However i think that in society today holds different values on status i feel now as a hold we are more focused on money, intellegence and status in contrast to old values.

Old advertisment for scales

This advert was published in the 40s, and features a mother and a daughter weighing themselves. The fact there are only women this advert shows that women should be image concerned, and the daughter in the picture highlights how this was pressured on to women from a young age.

Norman Vincent Peale“Change your thoughts, and you change your world.”

As products of divorce, the modern generation has few role models for lasting love. That alone is a problem. But young women have an added burden: they’ve been raised in a society that eschews marriage. They’ve been taught instead to honor sex, singlehood and female empowerment.

Consider this statement by Rebecca Traister in Marie Claire: “The world as we’ve known it for a very long time—one in which a woman’s value was tied to her role as a wife—is ending, right in front of us. It is now standard for a woman to spend years on her own, learning, working, earning, socializing, having sex, and yes, having babies in the manner she—and she alone—sees fit. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood.”

1. Women postpone marriage indefinitely and move in and out of intense romantic relationships, or even live with their boyfriends for years at a time. Eventually, their biological clocks start ticking and many decide they better hurry up and get married to provide a stable home for their yet-to-be-born children. Trouble is, their boyfriend’s not willing to commit.

2. Marriage becomes a competitive sport. The complementary nature of marriage—in which two people work together, as equals, toward the same goal but with an appreciation for the qualities each gender brings to the table—has been obliterated. Today, husbands and wives are locked in a battle about whom does more on the home front and how they’re going to get everything done. That’s not a marriage. That’s war.

Coates (2003:134) describes cases of ‘untypical’ stories in which women talk of ‘achievement’ and men’s stories involve ‘people and relationships’. These, she says, ‘illustrate the point that male and female speakers are not straight-jacketed by conventional expectations’.

It has been claimed (Thorne:1975:19) that ‘there are obvious constraints against [using the speech style associated with the opposite sex] – women who use forms associated with men may be put down as aggressive and unfeminine; men who ‘talk like women’ are called ‘effeminate’ and regarded with disdain’. Thorne (1975:19) goes on to say that ‘men who use female forms seem to be more stigmatised than women who use male forms’. This issue will be addressed and investigated in my own research, both in the focus group and in the questionnaire. This, I hope, will establish whether such a suggestion is true of language use in today’s society. Today sexuality itself is a much more open issue and therefore the same may well be true of the language used to describe it and the attitudes surrounding it.

I feel that both genders have a perceived discourse structure, and often these are used in stereotypes of both genders. However I find the discussion of how people who adopt features of the opposite genders language being discriminated against interesting, I feel that many more “unfeminine” women are view as less desirable due to pre conceived ideas of the female language. I also agree with the point that men who adopt female language are discriminated against due to stereotypes of male discourse but also sexuality related to this language.