Something else I reflected on, hopefully it doesn’t symbolize how important the award for Gründerin des Jahres really is… the trophy for the winner was so small and light weighted that it almost fell over when somebody happened to touch the table where it was standing… Trophies should be big and important… it should symbolise how the award winner should feel. Pretty, humble and surprisingly small is the wrong way to go.
Friday this week I attended the award ceremony for Gründerin des Jahres 2008 here in Styria, Austria. Gründerin des Jahres is an award for women who recently founded a successful company. Renate Willfort, the CEO of Dresscode21, the company where I work was nominated, hence my attendance.
During the ceremony some local politicians where interviewed about why this award is so important. They all repeated the mouldy mantra of how different men and women are and how important it is to have companies owned and run by women because they bring something different into business, something men aren’t capable of doing/thinking/bringing in. This is of course old stuff, which I hear a lot more often in Austria than in Sweden. (Even though the regional meeting for entrepreneurial women in Växjö, Sweden last Monday was embarrassingly close. Too much pink and self-pity is never particularly attractive or encouraging.)
No, what really made me react was something one of the local politicians said. She firmly believed that women have less pay because women have bad self-confidence. Saying this in front of any group of people is embarrassing. But saying this in front of a group of a hard working self-employed women waiting to accept an award is simply humiliating. I find it hard to believe that every one of the women in the room had worse self-confidence then the men sitting next to them. Saying this, the politician indirectly also implied that men have better pay because they all swell with self-confidence. I know this is not true.
The solution the politician offered for raising women’s salaries was an encouragement that we should quit the lowest paid ones and get other occupations. She meant we should stop being nurses, kindergarten teachers and taking care of elderly people. I don’t think she knew what she was saying. Will that ever happen? Or perhaps she’s encouraging revolution. When no women do this work – men has to do it. Interesting!
My point is: People are different. My experience is that two women, often turn out to be more different than a man and a women. There are so many layers of a person; ethnicity, class, experiences, memories, political and sexual preferences, movie taste etc. Stopping at the physical appearance and hormone level is plainly immature. What reproduces the pattern of men and women having different levels of pay is a glitch in the system. It’s a pattern from the 20th century, which we accept over and over again. It’s built on our belief that women and men are very different and therefore we should have different pay. This is not an individual problem, it’s a system problem, which is easy to solve by staying updated with reality and educated within gender equality issues. Having had up to 30 employees and lots of freelancers I know how easy it is to fall into patterns and give guys better pay then gals. Time to break the pattern! Make strategies and make them happen.
Today I heard something so stupid I almost thought I heard wrong. (I didn’t.) A woman I meet here in Graz is writing a thesis about viral marketing and social network analysis. She has had a great load of truble finding literature for her theses – because – listen to this: Her faculty doesn’t approve of too much Internet based literature. That means she has to read actual paper books to pass her preparation. She told me there was one (1!) book on her theses topic here in Graz, some more in other Austrian cities (which she would have had to wait about four-six weeks to get), this meant she had to go to a special library in Vienna to find a few more books.
This make me scared: Her university is crazy. What century do they live in? Are they denying that there is a lot of useful information out there or just trying to prevent their students from knowing to much about what is happening in the real world? Since I’m not an academic – maybe it looks like this everywhere. I’m amazed that the woman I meat didn’t go on strike when she received this information. How can she accept to be limited like this?
PS. What is the Austrian library system about? Four to six weeks to get a book? You don’t want to lend people your books? Speed it up my friends.