UK: All-female company except for all-male management defends its hiring practices

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2013-11-18 10:23

Article here. Excerpt

'A company widely criticised for seeming to have an all female workforce - with the exception of an all male senior management team - has defended its hiring practices.

Cellular Solutions, who describe themselves as the "leading communications provider to south-east England", were at the centre of a gender row this week.

Some 31 employees illustrated on the 'Meet The Staff' page of their website were all young, seemingly attractive women - whereas their four strong senior management team were all men.'

---

Relatedly: UK threatens firms with gender quotas as women’s appointments fall

Like0 Dislike0

Comments

I've seen cell service cos. like these. They're basically a sales company. They have no product themselves; they don't own networks, transmission licences, physical equipment, etc. They're either selling defined packages from primary cell service providers and slapping their own "label" on it or acting as an "excess bandwidth" reseller, selling the unused bandwidth normally sold by primary service providers that is going unused, or some combination of this. For it, they get a commission from the primary provider as they pass the payments through to them. Not much different from temp/contractor agencies and piecework deals. Inglorious but it pays the bills.

Cellular is a very flat, fungible market. One radiowave is pretty much like any other. As long as you have towers and working equipment, it's all the same. So there's little to distinguish one provider of service from the next except price and customer service. And... the appeal of the sales staff.

This is where attractive/young/female comes in. Youth works on women's side in sales, but against men's. Age works on men's side in sales, and youth against them. This is the human lizard-brain in action. Not fair, but a real phenom.

Being a sr. exec. isn't abt being good at sales, at least not in the typical sense. Being a sr. exec. is abt knowing what works for your market. If they think they can outsell their competition by hiring nothing but attractive women to staff the company, they will-- fairness to would-be male staffers, be damned.

Funny though, the complaints are abt how there are no female sr. execs. There is no one suggesting anti-male discrimination in hiring for anything other than sr. mgt. positions, which constitute the vast majority of positions at this company, based on what I'm seeing on their web site. I have no doubt that if all the sr. execs. were female and the staff all male, the complaints would be abt how there weren't any women among the rank and file, but that all the sr. execs. being female was a "nice change".

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2013-11-19 03:38