Live a life beyond management, Greer advises women

By Johanna Leggatt
September 18, 2004

Feminist Germaine Greer's advice to female managers is a far cry from the usual corporate self-help slogans.

"Get ridiculous", "share misbehaviour" and "discharge the way men do", were some of the maxims the 65-year-old author of The Female Eunuch went to Brisbane to impart yesterday.

"You women have to start having these corporate weekends away that can't really be described in great detail," she told a women's business forum.

Greer was enlisted to give advice to women managers making their way up the corporate ladder, but in typical Greer fashion it was more a polemic against capitalist exploitation of women than a motivational talk.

"I have some fairly dark suspicions about management," she said. "The achievement of management is to do nothing. And women aren't good at it. We can't really do nothing, and that's a fundamental misfit between women and management.

"I might as well confess that I think management is the art of taking credit for other people's work."

Utterly wrong, she said, was the illusion held by women that if they just worked hard enough they would be rewarded.

"A lot of women will isolate themselves from other women and become more macho, more ruthless and more cruel to get ahead," she said. "Margaret Thatcher is an excellent example of this and probably the only male in her cabinet."

Greer said the feminist struggle she pioneered in the 1970s was far from over.

"I don't know much about management, but I do teach a lot of women and I am concerned for them," she said.

"Why is it that every boy has got ill-founded self-confidence and thinks he's fantastic while often he's no good at anything, while girls who are very good at everything think they are just about to be found out?

Germaine Greer has some dark suspicions about management.

"I say to my women students, 'You are working too hard'. The thing that interests me is that the boys know this. They know the teacher is a sucker... they know it's important to be a bit laid-back - don't write too much, don't get too earnest, give the marker credit for a sense of humour. And as a result they win over the girls.

"But what really bothers me is that young women lack self-confidence. They really think that the academic hoop which is being held up for them to jump through is an accurate assessment of their inner value."

Greer blamed mothers who fawn excessively over their male children to the point where "even the underwear on the bedroom floor is infused with a special glamour" while daughters have to struggle for their father's approbation.

She advocated women spend less time cramming useless information into their brains... and more time engaged in the world.

Greer warned managers against employing graduates who come first at university. "Because you know the first is probably a sociopathic perfectionist who never gets out, has no night-life, no sex and they're going to be an absolute bloody disaster in the staffroom."