Male Managers Pamper The Office Ladies example essay topic

Ogasawara's article takes an interesting approach in analyzing the behavior of office ladies. She starts out by saying that women are the ones that are working under the men and that they have to be subordinate. She also talks about how men have more power and room to grow in their careers while the office ladies are stuck in their positions as they are and aren't expected to try hard and do well since there is no room to be promoted. It seems as if the article is going in the direction of talking about the hardships of office ladies at this point. However, the article takes a sharp turn and starts talking about how the office ladies actually have an advantage.

Although they are at the bottom they actually have the most power over what goes on at the top. An office lady can choose to do the work for a manager if she likes him or decide that she is too busy that day and skip her assignment. This will affect the male's performance since his work may not get done on time. It is for this reason that the male managers pamper the office ladies and try to stay popular with them. They even have certain holidays such as Valentine's day that test the popularity of the managers by the amount of gifts that they receive. The manager's whole career depends on how well he manages his employees so he tends to try very hard to get as many gifts as he can from the office ladies.

The manager makes sure that he is liked. The end of the article talks about how this whole system is degrading to women because it justifies the fact that they are run by emotion instead of making business strictly business. I think that it is very interesting that things are run this way in Japan. If women have an opportunity to obtain this kind of power than more power to them.

Of course managers should treat their female employees with the utmost respect and this is a wonderful way for the office ladies to enforce that. The next article written by Shrine supports my opinion. With all the male dominance in Japan it is great that the ladies have a chance to run things. Her studies showed that the office ladies are, however, closely watched by their managers and their performance is closely looked at and evaluated. Shrine does mention that this control that office ladies obtain has to be kept at a reasonable level and not be taken advantage of. This would result in simply a bad worker.

At the end of the article Shrine talks about the fact that there is a shift in Japan of women switching from office lady jobs to more prestigious positions. A university education is also starting to be valuable. The article "Women and Work in Scandinavia" talks about the discrimination of women with regards to salary. Women in Scandinavia get only about 82% of what men earn. This gap has been present for a long time. This article goes on to talk about women and unpaid work.

By unpaid work the authors seem to mean talking care of the household and raising their family. I strongly disagree with the authors when they call these things "unpaid work". I think that household responsibilities are very far from employment and if a women does not want to do this she should not meet any men and get married. There is no reason that a woman should get paid for this type of work. The payment should be the love and satisfaction of the family. The end of the article talks about education and power.

Men have the highest position of power while although women have managerial positions they are still simply expected to do the work instead of run things. Also in higher education women tend to focus on social studies while men focus on technology. I'm not sure if the authors make this point to simply state a fact or to say that this isn't fair. I fail to see how it is not fair for a woman to choose her own major to be social studies and then feel oppressed about it.