We’ve still got a couple of gaps in the switchboard schedule and so on Friday mornings I grab my laptop and answer the main phone for the university. I usually work on my emails while I’m on the calls – they don’t take a lot of brain power usually and I can switch gears pretty easily.<\/p>\n
On one recent Friday, I answered the phone with my usual “Good Morning, University of Akron, how may I help you?”<\/p>\n
An older woman – I could hear it in her voice – responded with, “It’s nice to hear a man answering the phones,”<\/p>\n
She went on to ask for a department and I transferred her over.<\/p>\n
And… I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.<\/p>\n
I guess, yea for me in bucking traditional gender roles in the workplace?<\/p>\n
But, why does it matter?<\/p>\n
My female student operators would have done just as well answering the phones \u00a0– my only advantage over them is that I’m so freaking old that I know everything about the University. I’ve been told I have a pleasant voice and it kicks into a deeper range in the early morning. My female operators have ‘brighter’ voices, but either gets the job done.<\/p>\n
It seems so weird to me that there are gender traditional jobs – when gender is so irrelevant. Plant a tree, pilot a rocket, stock a shelf, design a building – gender doesn’t matter in the least. I’m happy being a guy and being able to pee standing up is pretty awesome – but there’s not much of a job market for that skill.<\/p>\n
For my part, I hired one female and one male operator to add to the schedule. He had experience and a pleasant voice – and that was good enough for me. As we have turn-over in the schedule, I’ll do my part to hire a better gender balance for that role. Maybe, in a small way, I can do a little bit to bring some gender equality to our workforce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’ve still got a couple of gaps in the switchboard schedule and so on Friday mornings I grab my laptop and answer the main phone for the university. I usually work on my emails while I’m on the calls – they don’t take a lot of brain power usually and I can switch gears pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1952,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions\/1952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}