Why Not to Hire a Female Assistant

The other day my boyfriend was brow-deep in his client's portfolios, making sure every minute detail of every transaction was utterly error-free. As a financial planner, he has to make sure that all of the numbers and figures add up, which can be a very tedious and time-consuming endeavor. Frustrated and fatigued, he mumbled "I wish I had an assistant, so she could take care of all this data-entry [expletive]."

She, I thought, instantly arming myself with eons of pseudo-feministic musings, why is an "assistant" instantly assumed to connote a female worker? I asked him this, and he paused for a long time before saying, "Hmm... I don't really know." And the more and more I thought about it (because I tend to think for a very long time about things unknowable), the more it became clear to me that no one really knows why we make these assumptions. Chalk it up to good old stereotyping that comes with ages of white patriarchic leadership, I suppose.

Today I read an article on AC about eliminating 'genderisms' from language which serve to solidify such archaic notions. The author argues that the usage of everything "manmade" and for "mankind" congeals the idea that women are mere "offshoots" of mankind - that females are just as useless as Adam's spare rib.

As an English major, I use these phrases quite commonly in my writing, and have never felt any offense by them. In fact, I believe that pointing out these literary constraints, while fodder for an interesting debate, does nothing for the eradication of gender stereotyping. Bringing it up can in fact exaggerate the infinitesimally small differences between the sexes - much like pointing out a person's race only really serves to keep racism alive. Imagine, if you will, if we used these terminologies on racial, rather than sexual bases: instead of a black man being an actor, we'd call him a Blacktor, or if a white gent was a housecleaner, and we said he was a "WhiteKeeper". Pretty silly, isn't it?

And yet, I am glad to see certain words change, like "stewardess" to "flight attendant," because it implies that gender is absent from job titles, and thus the equality of possible career endeavors is clear. So why then, am I ruffled by my boyfriend's nonchalant slip into sexist ideologies of "the word"? Indeed, why do I see it as sexist at all?

Well, by making the assumption that a certain member of our species is delegated to a corresponding set of responsibilities, we are instantly stunting our expectations into a smaller and smaller box of automatic assumptions. This is exactly what happens when we express racism and bogotry. Because we sometimes find it hard to admit that we really dont know a whole lot, we find that putting everything we've seen into boxes is a heck of a lot easier than admitting to our human weakness of fallibility. A male is just as adept as a female to perform mundane tasks like data entry, dishwashing, or other dismal duties, and should be treated accordingly; a person should not be immediately considered as a better candidate because of her shapely anatomy, or because of his ability to grow facial hair. Think about it, if we really though that women were more useful as maids and mamas, we'd be living in the third-world reich of the Middle East, training our little men to be brave little freedom fighters for their virgin-sex filled afterlives.

So remember when you're hiring that assistant, if you are searching for someone on anatomical qualifications alone, not only are you propagating bigotry, but also you may very well miss out on that one really solid candidate out there. She might have more surgical precision, know more about fuel tanks, or be really good at bossing people around; he might be a faster typist, a more efficient house cleaner, or a better babysitter. The point is, as we should all know by now, you can never really judge a person's insides by their outsides.

If you don't believe me, ask my handy Whitekeeper.