About Gender Discrimination In The Workplace

Identifying gender discrimination in the workplace is tricky business because so many factors contribute to this still-prevalent phenomenon. We would like to believe that, in the 21st century, modern places of business are sex-blind and race-blind and that great improvements have been made. Although society is light years ahead of where it was even 30 years ago in terms of attitudes toward gender, there are still problems.

First of all, gender discrimination is overwhelmingly a female issue. This should hardly be surprising, considering that western societies are still considered patriarchal by nature.

Women are relatively new in positions of high leadership in corporations, and going strictly by the numbers, management is still a male-run matter. Why, after all the advances that have been made in women's education and in breaking that corporate glass ceiling, is this still so? The answer is not simple: it's probably a combination of a lot of factors. Let's look at some.

-- Women are still not choosing to enter male-dominated fields in very large numbers. Although more women than ever are graduating from college, they are not receiving as many degrees in engineering, science, law, and other high paying fields. This puts them at an immediate disadvantage in the workplace. Even women with advanced degrees overwhelmingly choose lower paying, service oriented careers.

-- Getting to the top in any business requires a certain degree of Type-A personality driven workaholism. Many women do not choose to adopt this executive mindset, preferring to adopt a more balanced approach to life in general.

-- In many industries, the "norm" for both management and even their clients is a preference for dealing with men. This factor is a subtle one: because of legal constraints, the members of an HR department cannot admit that gender discrimination is taking place and they may not even realize it themselves.

For example, their careers are dependent on the kinds of choices they make when hiring employees. If HR thinks that their bosses would prefer a male and that the interviewer's own career track depends on making the bosses happy, the person in HR will lean towards choosing a male candidate.

-- Women are the ones who most often leave their careers at some point to bear and raise children. Employers are mindful of that, and may hesitate to advance young women into positions of leadership because of that possibility.

If a woman thinks she has been unfairly singled out or discriminated against in the workplace because of her gender, she should immediately seek legal redress. Although improvements for women in the workplace have been monumental in the past three decades, there is still a lot of unfairness out there. Only those who speak up will make a difference for herself and for those who will follow her for years to come.