Response Paper 3 - Feminist (Human Resource Development) Essay

Response Paper 3 - Feminist (Human Resource Development) - Essay Example Initially the feminist wave was that women can also work the way men do and become economically as productive as men are. However, the thought has now taken a new direction. Hughes mentions that most late-twentieth-century feminist are (rightly) resistant to the simplistic arguments, say of men with objectivist, distanced, positivistic, scientific methods and women with subjectivist, connected, interpretive, non-scientific methods. Few feminists would endorse a wholesale science-bashing that smacks more of ideological excess than of a genuine quest for knowledge. Nor would feminists unanimously opt for the essentialism that identifies quantitative methodologies as male, qualitative ones as female; and positivism as male, ‘interpretationism’ as female (Code, 1995 cited in Hughes, 2000, p. 51). Hughes supports the view of the new breed of feminists who have come way ahead of crude assumptions related to two genders and believe in understanding the minute similarities and d ifferences among men and women. Though it has not got much attention of the HR departments as yet, this study can benefit HR the most as there the two genders are supposed to be treated as equal. Also since it is the responsibility of the HR department to train the human resources for the organisational need, a better understanding of the process of learning of the two can facilitate their training process to a great extent. Hughes rightly defines her purpose as to begin to delineate the ways in which the field of human resource development would be enriched through the incorporation of feminist perspectives (Hughes, 2000, p. 63) Even as the number of women in the managerial spheres of organisations has increased, the learning styles and working styles of men is still taken as a norm. Female managers are forced to confirm to men’s style of learning and working. Else they are assumed to be inefficient. Though the women’s way of working in cooperation with other colleagu es can be extremely beneficial for the organisation, till date the independent working approach of men is considered to be a norm. The reason behind such an approach is that the top level management in most of the organisations is still dominated by men. Giving data from three developed countries, Fiona M. Wilson quotes that U.K. has only 18% of women in managerial positions, Germany has 25% while U.S. has only 5% of the senior managerial positions filled by women (Wilson, 2003, p. 17) Since several years, the society has groomed men and women in a way that they use two different modes of reasoning. Hughes rightly differentiates the two. She says that more men used the mastering, impersonal and individual modes and more women used the receiving, interpersonal and interindividual patterns of reasoning (Hughes, 2000, p. 55). Based on an interview study, Hughes quotes that the gendering pattern of mastering, impersonal and individual patterns was stronger than the receiving, interperso nal and interindividual patterns (Severeins et al., 1998 cited in Hughes, 2000, p. 56) Another strong belief was that men are more target-oriented than women and women are better in doing repetitive work. However, these generalizations do not always hold true. Women also look for more satisfying and challenging jobs as shown in a study on job satisfaction and employee attrition. Many women, like men, express the need for personally satisfying