We are looking at sexism raucously revived and largely unchallenged
I gave a market researcher short shrift on Friday and I’ve been feeling badly about it ever since. Partly because having to ring total strangers up to ask them questions about their preferences in soap or salt is an awful job in the first place, not least because of all the rejections the researchers must encounter.
But I also feel guilty because the poor bloke was from the company where my mother worked as a supervisor for several years. Her two daughters had the best time during those years. We had a free gaff after teatime, for starters, because that was when she headed out for her evening’s work. We sometimes got free samples when she was visiting consumers in their homes to see if they would agree to test and rate particular products. Plus, when she came back, the stories were great. Like when she was asking people to test carefully anonymised shampoos and encountered a middle-aged man with the most beautiful plentiful shining hair you could imagine. This he credited to never washing it. Hadn’t washed his hair in 30 years, he told my mother. “Nor his feet, either,” his wife muttered bitterly in the background.
