Power Plays

Six ways the male corporate elite keeps women out…

This chapter focuses on the many different ways men not only dominant the corporate world but they also have their own ways of keeping women out. Since the very young age, men are thought to be power seekers, perceive the world as something to accomplish or something to have. Needless to say it is the same way as they get older in the business world. Men tend to measure their success by value. As children the meaning behind a merit badge from a Boy Scouts would be equivalent to men in the business world that are the CEOs’ in their corner office with the window, the reserved parking, the high priced cars and clothes, unlimited business account, and countless private memberships. Thus they use to measure success; to make it even more prestigious, they join a golf membership that money can’t buy and dominated by men. Making it twice as hard for any women to join, there are six different ways elite corporate keep women out.

The six different groups are: power re-creates itself in its own image, power elites enforce norms and systems that guarantee continued power, power creates a sense of entitlement, power creates invulnerability-leading to a flaunting of society’s standards, loyalty to power overshadows other loyalties- including gender and race, as well as group combined with power can trump good judgment and override individual normal codes.  These different sections emphasize on the psychological view of the situation. People like to hire people who are more like them both physically and in their ways of thinking. That is of course dominated by white male which women and minority men are misrepresented in many corporate. Power elites protect each other and enforce their norms and systems upon new comers. It is also noted that African American men gain more from being men that lose from being African American. In the same token women, after reaching a certain level of status, they are less likely to help another women progress.