Women In The Workplace

Despite increased publicity and discussions surrounding the inequalities women face in the workplace, there remains a tremendous amount of work to be done to close the gender gap. Women have it relatively harder than men in the workplace. According to McKinsey study on women in the workplace, research shows that “women are underrepresented at every level, and women of color are the most underrepresented group of all..”. Underrepresented women in executive roles is because of their gender, not because of the lack of education or attrition rates. Although women have more bachelor’s degrees than men, they have a less likely chance to be promoted to manager than men. The number of entry-level women being hired has lessened, which results in less qualified women to be promoted.

Women who feel undervalued at work will be tempted to leave their job and think about their priorities. Companies that want to benefit from gender diversity can change identified mechanisms that prevent women from choosing the same career as men, such as implicit bias and glass cliff effects. Implicit bias causes women to less likely choose the same career as men. The glass cliff effect makes the career path less attractive to women. When companies are unable to keep their organization attractive to their female employees or future female employees, they tend to lower their female population’s motivation. Losing their motivation, causes women to become more absent in the workplace and have more turnovers.

Implicit biases against women can appear very suddenly. For instance, men expect women to have soci-emotional skills. Implicit bias unintentionally influence people’s responses to other in the workplace. It may reflect a perceived unworthiness with required job demands, such as competitiveness. They can be hard to identify, but can be held by both men and women. Implicit bias causes a cycle of withdrawal and performance failure. Women at Work: How Organizational Features Impact Career Development — Naomi Ellemers, 2014 (sagepub.com) states that implicit bias perceptions may take form of positive expectations, appear among individual that treat employees equally, no matter the gender, and occur when the performance of men and women are the same.

Along with them not being seen, their pay rates are also unequal. The gender pay gap is the effect of ethnicity, education, country, and age. Women can make the same career choice as a man and earn less than he may for the same job. Women consistently earn less than men and the gap is wider for most women of color. Researchers can see effects of occupational segregation, or the different types of funneling of women and men into different types of occupational jobs based on their majority gender and expectations. Women’s jobs, the job that are majority female employees, tend to have a lower pay grade and less benefits than jobs that have a majority male population. Those jobs would include construction and building. Gender pay discrimination can increase significantly in work environments that do not discuss wages openly.

Employers may also discriminate in pay when they rely on their salary history from prior jobs which can allow pay decisions that could have been influenced by discrimination to follow women from each job that they have. Structural and societal sexism influences the job that women work in and those forces causes women to work the jobs that men usually would not take.

In 2015, one of the largest comprehensive studies were done of the state of women in corporate America was about women in the workplace. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org completed the study to gain knowledge about companies’ advancement diversity in the workplace. The study was completed between the years of 2015 to 2019. During these years, they had nearly six hundred companies to participate in the study, with surveys of more than a quarter of a million people telling about their experiences. During this season of COVID-19 Pandemic, it seems to be a challenge for women in Corporate America. This challenge has affected women and impacted mothers, races, and ethnicities. This study included the emotional aspects of women dealing with racial violence in America and how it impacts the employees. The last part of the survey concludes the charges that we have seen through representation during the six years and how COVID-19 could have a negative impact moving forward.

Most women during Covid-19 have had to make the decision of leaving their jobs in order to take care of their families. Some women have had to work from so that they could work and see about their family and have a steady income. Both decisions have affected women in an emotionally way.

Women will not be treated equally in the workplace until corporations take action towards gender equality. Unionization between employees can help narrow the gap between men and women in the work environment.

Company, McKinsey &, and Lean In. “Women in the Workplace 2020: A Crisis Is Looming in Corporate America.” LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, 2020, womenintheworkplace.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjw9r-DBhBxEiwA9qYUpeRzcsY6_ywm-akBqO8db33WZvEcKa4q9tPITjO9McDVzYVeZYVWkxoC3QEQAvD_BwE

Bleiweis, Robin. “Quick Facts About the Gender Wage Gap.” Center for American Progress, 24 Mar. 2020, www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/03/24/482141/quick-facts-gender-wage-gap/

Schooley, Skye. “The Workplace Gender Gap and How We Can Close It.” Business News Daily, 21 May 2019, www.businessnewsdaily.com/4178-gender-gap-workplace.html.

“Women in the Workplace 2020.” McKinsey & Company, McKinsey & Company, 18 Feb. 2021, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace#.

Ellemers, Naomi. “Women at Work: How Organizational Features Impact Career Development — Naomi Ellemers, 2014.” SAGE Journals, 1 Oct. 2014, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2372732214549327