Why Hire Me?
December 5, 2010
I WAS talking to a 23-year-old man today at a social gathering. He is someone who is very smart and good-looking, but suffers from the typical adolescent tendency to veer between self-glorification and self-disgust. He needs a job, desperately at this point, and I asked him how it was going. He said it was not going well. Even though he knows nothing about my own opinions here, he then expressed a Thinking Housewife truism.
“Why would anyone hire me when they can hire a pretty girl?” he said. “I mean, I would hire a pretty girl over me too. Everyone wants to work with a pretty girl.”
It’s true. It’s also true that a young pretty girl will most likely never be the sole or main support of a family. She does not need a job in the same way.
— Comments —
Walenty Lisek writes:
Male said: “Why would anyone hire me when they can hire a pretty girl?”
That’s easy to answer: men are typically more competent than women at anything a job requires. Men are especially more competent than the pretty young girls who have also been pampered all their lives.
Laura writes:
Men make better presidents too. But prettiness is very persuasive.
Fred Owens writes:
You wrote “prettiness is very persuasive.” It is indeed. Feminine beauty is quite a wonderful thing, but I have difficulty dealing with beauty — that is, not responding to it — in a work situation. My instinct and my upbringing tells me to give way and defer in the presence of beauty — but if you do that at work, these pretty ones will walk over you and give you a stomp while they’re at it. And there is the provocativeness of their attire — how am I supposed to react? If I can see it, then it must be all right to look at it, and if I look at it, should I say it looks nice?
But I think you’re supposed to pretend that you don’t see it, which, for me, is rather difficult. In other words, and in many respects, I feel that I am at a disadvantage when dealing with pretty young women at work.
If I had my way, I would tell them to go home and come back when they’re dressed, and if they did come back, I would then instruct them in modesty, which governs both appearance and attitude in a professional setting.
Laura writes:
Lawrence Auster talks about the emasculating effects of provocative women’s dress here.
Michael D. writes:
Pretty girls don’t always get hired for the job they want. I can recall two recent situations from the last couple of years when pretty girls were deliberately rejected due to their physical attractiveness.
Last year we needed a secretary to work in a project engineering office to assist us for about two months’ duration here in Australia. My boss interviewed four candidates for the position, all of whom were young women in their early 20s. One of them was absolutely stunning, intelligent, experienced in clerical work and confident. Although she outshone the others my boss summarily rejected her saying to the other staff members present, “I’ve seen this before – all the sub-contractors will hang around her like blow-flies and won’t do any work.” Everybody laughed, she was duly struck off the list and a more demure, austere girl was chosen instead.
There was yet another occasion a few years earlier while I was still a student working on a construction site. Civil construction isn’t just a male-dominated industry, it is entirely male. Perhaps for this reason, combined with the “you go girl” modern feminist attitude that would lead some young women to try their hands at construction. Every couple of weeks we would take on a few extra workers and one afternoon a manager from head office came around with three young women who were keen to join. These girls were smoking hot, take my word for it. One of them was only 19. My foreman flatly refused to have them on site, stating his concern about meeting the schedule if productivity on site fell. There had been an incident earlier in the year when some girls working on one of the company’s projects decided to show up at work wearing just a bra beneath their high visibility vests and discipline on site completely broke down, to the point where it became a safety issue. They didn’t really do any work except for chatting up the tradesmen. So the answer was, “Sorry, there will be no more girls on site.”
A male reader writes:
“Why hire me?” I said the exact same thing numerous times when I was searching for my “first job after college.”
Walenty Lisek wrote:
Men are typically more competent than women at anything a job requires. Men are especially more competent than the pretty young girls who have also been pampered all their lives.
This is of course obviously true. However, take a look around a human resources department (especially the lower level staff, i.e. the initial gatekeepers for job seekers). Human resources is a heavily woman-dominated field. How many young college educated urban-modern supposedly intelligent professional women these days accept the obvious truth Mr. Lisek wrote? Zero? Less?
Laura said:
Women obviously are very competent at many jobs. Some studies, discussed by Steve Moxon in his book The Woman Racket, show that women favor other women in hiring.
