Rational Philosophy

In the wake of the departure of E. Stanley O’Neal from Merrill Lynch and the possible departure of Richard D. Parsons (of Time Warner), the NY Times has compiled a piece about the opportunities for black executives at the heads of large corporations.  Interviewed for the piece, the chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said “we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable.”

Another Times story presents a collection of new data about sexual stereotypes in the workplace. One of the researchers, Professor Glick, found that a female job applicant in a revealing blouse and tight skirt is less likely to be considered appropriate for an executive job than a woman who is conservatively dressed. The story quotes Professor Glick as commenting: “Sexy men don’t have that disconnect. While they might lose respect for wearing tight pants and unbuttoned shirts to the office, the attributes considered most sexy in men — power, status, salary — are in keeping with an executive image at work.”

And in a speech to the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) today, George W. Bush declared: “We are at war. And we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.”

As I chomped down these three stories, I found something sticking in my gullet. In each one, what people have to say and the way that they say it seems to create a mask, or to continue to hold up a mask, that obscures the real questions at hand, or, perhaps, obscures whether there are really questions at hand.

Renatta McCann managed to string together an impressive array of buzzcepts in making her point about the relative dearth of black executives in corporate America. If we try to read through her words to find the meaning behind the ideas of “tipping point,” “organic regeneration,” “achieving momentum and velocity,” and “sustainable scale,” I think she’s saying that only by having more up and coming black executives will we end up with more black executives in the boardroom. This seems logical, but hardly profound. Surely the issue is much broader and much more complex than the actions or inactions of corporations. Corporations comprise people and exist within and in service of society. And executives come and go all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. That we’re talking about the race of the two departing executives seems to be a problem in itself.

The article about sexual stereotypes left me with a nagging feeling that all of this research was kind of screwy. If you ask people about stereotypes with stereotypes in mind, and devise a study to present those stereotypes, doesn’t that to some extent throw doubt on the results of the study? Glick’s presumption that a woman revealing cleavage is sexier than a woman conservatively dressed introduces bias into his analysis. He then compounds this bias with his assertion that the attributes considered most sexy in men are power, status and salary. But surely sexual stereotypes vary according to the context and according to the details? Inappropriateness, for instance, can be for some a very unsexy characteristic. What’s to say that the people in the study weren’t reacting to the inappropriateness of the sexy attire rather than the sexy attire itself?

The words of the piece express a logic and a rational set of conclusions that draws me in and I feel that I have to agree with them, but stepping back I reflect on my personal experience in the workforce and find that the logic weakens and begins to disintegrate. I’m left only with suspicion about the arguments presented rather than a newfound insight into the particular problems faced by women in the workforce.

And our old favorite George W. Bush, who uses words with such audacious disregard for their meaning that one almost feels awed by it, accomplishes several feats of extreme sophistry today for no other reason, one feels, than that he’s begun to have some fun now that he’s a lame duck. He scorns the democrats for not taking seriously a war that he once declared we’d won; he further lambasts them for holding up the nomination of Mukasey at a time when the country needs such high profile positions filled, when, as was reported recently, he himself has left unfilled many such top positions for weeks and months; and he criticizes them for attaching “wasteful Washington spending” to another multibillion dollar war spending bill. Hmmm.

Bush uses an athletic analogy as he closes his speech his most dazzling verbal salvo of all; “I’m looking forward to working with you for the next 14 months,” he says, “but you better put on your running shoes, because my spirits are high and my energy level is good and I’m sprinting to the finish line.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, or at least not consciously, but I’m relieved that he’s in such a hurry to get out of office.