With the Superbowl right around the corner, I found this article in today's New York Times especially interesting. Nate Taylor explores the hurdles associated with women as agents for NFL players in his article As Players' Agents, Women Face Extra Challenges.
An informal count estimates that there are just two dozen or so women in the business as compared with nearly 800 men. Kristen Kuliga, 44, was among the first women to represent an NFL player. Today, she represents 12 active players - but continues to face mixed reactions from her male counterparts.
During an all-star football game she recalled a male agent said to her "Where I come from, women would never be allowed to be agents; they would be in the kitchen."
Despite some criticism, Kuliga continues to carry out the work she loves.
"I've never looked at it as I'm a pioneer," she said. "I just did it. If someone says I couldn't do this, I found a way."
I think that this type of discrepancy is applicable to several other careers involving management and leadership roles. I used to be a restaurant manager. I was what you would call the store manager, but would have one or two other shift managers working the same shift under me.
ReplyDeleteOne time I had a customer with a complaint. I apologized for his unhappiness with our service and began to offer to take care of his meal, when he spots one of the male managers under me and starts pointing at him saying "I want to talk to that guy, the real manager." I was so frustrated, but told the other manager (Tim) he could come over an help this customer.
As the store manager, the shift managers would have to ask my permission and have me swipe my store ID in order to take a meal off someone's bill. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard Tim tell the customer that he would have to ask his "boss's" permission to void his meal and walked the customer back over to me.
The fact that the customer said he wanted "to talk to that guy" tells me that he assumed a male was in charge over a female and would somehow reach a better end addressing his concerns with a male. It continues to amaze me that some women feel they have reached equality with men in today's workforce. I agree that for the most part women are permitted to have the same type of careers as men, but society can still see the true inequality that arises when we look at people's surprise to women having certain career types or assumption that they must be lower on the totem pole than men.
I don't know that the issue isn't as much if women can be or are allowed to be NFL agents (the group of friends I gather with to watch the Sunday games would tell you I know as much about football as any of the guys and am a damn good negotiator too), but how much are owners, coaches, and players willing to deal with a female agent versus a male one.