Locations of Site Visitors László Szögeczki's CE blog: Strengths of Humanity

Monday 25 May 2009

Strengths of Humanity

People who are naturally strong in "strengths of humanity" are those who care for their relationships. You probably know people like this: folk who always send a thank you card, who call occasionally "just to check up", and who are kind and pleasant to be around. For these individuals, caring relationships are important, and their strengths play to developing and maintaining friendships, marriages, and workplace collegiality. In return we often feel a sense of loyalty to and appreciation for these types of people. We admire their empathy, sensitivity, and compassion. They are the people we commonly turn to when we have problems. It may have occurred to you that that many of the people we think of as paragons of these virtues are women. There is a stereotype that women are, on average, more focused on relationships and more kind and considerate than man. This might be true - on average. However, if I think of my professional past, present, I just can not totally confirm this in our community. Despite that the ladies who involved with conductive education are immaculately giving their caring love to children, clients, they can be real disastrous to each other. Why is that? I do not know any good reason, but maybe some good answers can be collected.

2 comments:

Andrew Sutton said...

Laszlo, I am so glad that you said this and not I!

What you state may of course be no more that a statistical artifact. I shall offer a simple explanation for this, for which I shall also make up an imaginary profession.

I am also making up the figures to make the arithmetic simple. I have no ides of what the underlying proportions might be in any real-life professions.

Let us imagine that 25% of my imagined profession are 'difficult' one to another. Let my imaginary profession consist of 1000 persons, of whom 80% are women, and 20% men.

Within this profession, even if the same proportion of women are 'difficult' as are men, you will therefore meet 200 difficult women, four times as many as the 50'difficult' men.

I think that I have this right! Even if not, my gist should be clear. It means that women are not 'more difficult'. There are just more of them, so it shows disproportionatelty when some are!

What is surprising is that all the people in my made-up example of a profession of 1000 people, of either sex, really do have to be very 'nice' to their clients as an essential part of their work, yet so many can be so awful to each other.

In such circumstances it might prove especially contrary to expectation to find this in women if you previously believed, for whatever reason, that women are the gentler sex.

Why might cause some people to be less surprised. All sorts of reasons come to mind, including experience of other other highly stressed, all-feemale institutions, in other contexts.

In other words, this is not just a feature of inter-conductor behaviour. Conductors might be 'saints' or 'angels' in some people's eyes but are no more so than, say a population of, say, nurses. They are just as human.

Looking back I recall a variety of people and and circumstances in which some conductors' behaviour towards their fellows has fallen far short of either saintly or angelic, all the way to being downright appalling by any standards. Most such awful behaviour came from female conductors, some came from male ones, but then the majority of conductors with whom I have had dealings one the years have been women, so this was not unexpected.

Taking my arithmetical model offered above (whatever the precise actual figures applicable to the conductor profession) then the majority of conductors, male or female are probably blameless, many indeed being potential victims of the sometimes monstrous behaviour of the minority amongst them.

What recent event or experience could possibly have triggered your cri-de-coeur?

Laszlo said...

Thank you for this long and valuable comment. It was interesting. No special recent event made me to express this. I wanted to write about this long ago (and now happened) because it is part of my professional life (past, present and probably future as well). Male conductors: they must have the most "strengths of humanity" if they have chosen this profession, went through of many years of strange training + strange treatment of strange women :) and working in this minority. You could say this. However, I do not think of myself of this but pritty often, as time passing by, yes, I wish to have more balanced co-workers.