Gender Discrimination in Workplace
Discrimination is the act of providing unequal benefits to people of different statuses in spite of identical merit and qualifications. Gender discrimination in employment involves special treatment of someone because of their sexual orientation. In most cases, women have been victims of discrimination based on gender. This is despite their efforts to prove that they can perform equally with the men. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on sex in the workplace. Even though the situation has improved, cases of gender discrimination in the workplace are still there.
For instance, the long-standing gap between compensation paid to men and that paid to women is something that has been there for long enough and is still witnessed today. Female workers still receive substantially less than their male counterparts. In the U.S for example, statistics show that women held only 11.7 percent of board director positions in 500 companies in 2000. Nine of those companies did not have any female worker (Gregory 2). Even though social and cultural factors may contribute to the second-class status of working women, gender discrimination remains a major barrier to women’s full equality in the workplace regardless of the level of employment or job category.
Older women, women of color, pregnant women and those with children are adversely affected by discriminatory workplace policies and practices. Women continue to face sexual harassment (Gregory 6). This paper will discuss the issue of gender-based discrimination in the workplace.
Gender inequality
Men and women persist to work in jobs that can be put in the categories male and female. The tendency to work in gender-specific jobs is known as occupational sex-typing and has adversely affected men’s and women’s economic well-being.Occupational sex-typing has been a major contributor to gender inequality in both power and status. Occupations with formal authority are likely to be male while those with little formal authority are most likely to be female. Men are offered high-level positions and real power while women are left with low-visibility positions which have little substantive income (Cohn 21).
• Gender discrimination will occur in the following forms:Ignoring to hire a woman because the employer thinks she cannot fit into the traditionally male-dominated workplace.
• Offering female workers low wages than the male workers for the same job
• Denying women workers promotion to senior positions with the assumption that the rest of the staff will not respect her authority
• Division of work tasks on the basis of whether the staff is male or female
• Requiring women to wear different clothing at work to men
• Ignoring women for particular roles in the workplace (Victorian Equal Opportunity &. Human Rights Commission, para 2).Women have been discriminated out of the perception that:
• They are unwilling to work
• They are less committed to their careers than …
