“mediocre” men fail up | Hacker News Reader

“mediocre” men fail up

axios.com

19 pointselsewhen15 comments

From the study itself made by the organisation "Women In Banking in Finance":

"Women in Banking and Finance (“WIBF” or “we”) are indebted to 44 women in financial and professional services, who gave their time for the qualitative interviews and the 35 women, also in financial and professional services, who took part in the roundtables. "

So apparently they simply asked 44 women about what they about men? This doesn't sound like a very rigorous method and the name Women In Banking in Finance doesn't sound like a very unbiased organisation either.

Link to actual study

https://www.wibf.org.uk/images/uploads/documents/WIBF_ACT_Go...

there is an irony that the primary goal of this organization is to eliminate groupthink but 22 of the 30(?) or so women in the whole study use a term "mediocre men" that wasn't even prompted for. that's... oddly specific of a word choice, like you have to be in a group to converge on this particular term. Like, not incompetent but mediocre?

Women in Banking and Finance (“WIBF” or “we”) are indebted to 44 women in financial and professional services, who gave their time for the qualitative interviews and the 35 women, also in financial and professional services, who took part in the roundtables.

well, I hope this is enough information for the peer reviewed version to come out.

Ye it is strange. Maybe the interviewer systematically said something with mediocre and men in it?

It is funny how average and mediocre in corparate evalutation have come to mean something bad to avoid. I mean by definition most employees are going to be mediocre.

Average and mediocre arent really the same thing tbh

Ye 'average' is more neutral. 'Mediocre' implies it is not OK to be average.

Despite etymology "mediocre" doesn't mean average (and has not for centuries), but rather just barely "not bad." It would be unusual to describe actually average - mean or median - quality as mediocre.

In the managerial class, sure. I doubt there's anyone alive who hasn't seen that first hand. However it's rather funny that the question of equality nowadays revolves around reshuffling desk chairs for the top 10%. The reporters at Axios should spend some time in Appalachia, the poorest black neighbourhoods or a small East German town and report back how well 'mediocre' men are doing over there.

I don't really doubt that mediocre men often fail up - I've witnessed it myself. But this isn't a great title, the conclusion that mediocre men fail up is from the qualitative part of the survey in other words - women believe mediocre men fail up. Which then highlights the obvious point, maybe mediocre poeple fail up, and you only notice it because men are much more likely to go "up" at all. I've certainly also witnessed mediocre performing women in senior positions, but since there are such a tiny number of women in my field, I would be much less willing to draw that conclusion.

I think it might be quite clear why this happens. If you have a team of say sales persons, you would not want the top performers take on a role with more administration. So you promote the ones that won't leave a hole in the team output and are also somewhat competent, since the sales person will most likely be replaced by an average sales person.

I wish I worked at a place that thought that much about their efficiency, at least it kind of makes sense.

Instead it seems like no one thinks about the business, but about the social politics of the organisation.

Sure. I don't think that managers reason and comes to this conclusion in like a strategic plan, but rather "I need #1 Bob on the floor to grind my bonus" and this is what happens.

Surely it is just a theory that doesn't explain the whole concept.

Yeah and also when their methodology was simply asking 44 women. It is not as if they measured the performance of men and then compared that to whether they where promoted or not. No, they merely asked 44 women.

> Men in profit and loss roles who were "mediocre" were often reshuffled into positions where performance was less visible.

That’s being moved aside; in banking, that’s pretty much the opposite of failing up.

Depends if women in similar roles were instead fired in those circumstances. Moved sideways might still mean you are someone (more competent)‘s boss

I really don’t think this intentionally provocative and clickbait title (and content) is HN material.

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