Monday 29 October 2012

Issues Paper: Women in the Workplace


Women are gaining ground in obtaining university degrees, employment, and reaching senior positions.  However, women are still severely underrepresented at the top corporate levels and on corporate boards, despite the fact that studies indicate that companies with more women in senior positions perform better than those without.  In the following issue paper, I will explore some of the social forces that work on marginalizing women in the workplace.


Studies have shown that promoting women to more senior positions can affect the company’s bottom line.  The 2005 Catalyst Census of Women Board of Directors of the Fortune 500 study found that American companies with more women in senior positions earned higher returns than those with few women at the top.  Experts suggest that this may be because mixed teams of men and women lead to stronger problem-solving, and that the addition of women leads to better communication within the group.  However, despite these findings, women are overwhelmingly underrepresented on boards.  A Catalyst poll from June, 2012, indicated that, as of January 2012, women comprised 35.4% of all management positions and 22.9% of all senior management positions.  Globally, only 7% of board placements are occupied by women (Catalyst).  It is also worthy to note that there are only 20 Fortune 500 companies with females as the head of the company.
People engage in the practice of gender policing on a regular basis.  Gender policing refers to the “mechanisms through which gender binaries are enforced and maintained; monitoring of the self and others to ensure gender conformity,” (Brock et al.: 356).  Gender policing works with the concept of normalizing power to produce ideas of what a “normal” occupation is for a certain gender.  People think it is odd when a man is a nurse, or when a woman is an engineer.  Women engineers repeatedly report that the common response to learning that a woman is an engineer is ‘Oh you must be very clever!’ – a response not encountered by males in the same profession (Gill et al: 223).
The concept of hegemonic femininity is an important concept to understand when discussing women in the workplace.  Hegemonic femininity is understood as the culturally normative ideal of female behaviour.  The key factors to understanding what the normative ideal of female behaviour is as follows:
- Accommodating to men
- Submissive
- Passive
- Sensitive
- Irrational
- Supportive
     The above characteristics are not what companies are looking for when it comes to leadership.  Companies look for hegemonic masculine characteristics such as assertiveness, rationality, powerful, and independent.  It will be very difficult for women to be successful in companies passed lower managerial positions when she has to prove to her superiors that she does not possess too many feminine features for the upper managerial and board positions.
Hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity ties into the idea of the glass ceiling. “The concept of a glass ceiling is generally viewed as a set of impediments and/or barriers to career advancement for women and people of color,” (Jackson & O’Callaghan: 460). Another important part of the glass ceiling is that people trapped under the ceiling can see the people above them, but they cannot attain that position because of the invisible barrier in place. How people conceive of males and females enforces the barrier that is the glass ceiling by means of perpetuating gender stereotypes. A male at the head of the company may promote another male over a female based solely on his misconception that women are hegemonically feminine. This idea is explored in the following quote from Jackson and O’Callaghan’s academic article What Do We Know About The Glass Ceiling Effect? “…while men and women may be present at similar organizational levels, women are not given the same amount of responsibility or supervisory tasks as males. The notion that a glass ceiling is a unique form of gender and racial bias against women and people of color, and that this bias is more severe at later stages of career development than at labor market entry was also affirmed,” (Jackson & O’Callaghan: 471).
        Another important aspect of inequalities of women in the workplace is that women can do one thing that men can’t: get pregnant. Companies may choose not to hire women merely because she might get pregnant and they will have to hire a temporary worker to replace her. This practice was much more evident in the mid-1900s, but the effects are still felt today. The ways in which potential employers discriminate against women on the possibility of them becoming pregnant are much less blatant now; employers find other causes for not hiring a woman, so that it does not appear that they are discriminating against them. Some suggestions for minimizing the glass ceiling effect and the marginalization of women in the workplace include supporting affirmative action programs and policies (policies that take factors including race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group in areas of employment, education, and business), making provisions for management training for women and supporting a critical mass of women at particular management levels to increase the likelihood of future promotions of women to those levels(Jackson & O’Callaghan: 471).
        Another suggestion that is specific to the issue of maternity leave is the allow equal opportunity for men and women to take the same amount of time off to care for the children in the first few months of life. This would mean that both men and women present the same financial component to a company when it comes to taking time off for child-rearing. It would also be very helpful if there were more funding put toward daycare programs, so they could be less expensive and become more easily accessible to parents.
       Women are more affected than men because men are accepted by society to be the ones running businesses. They have historically been the ones in power, so people generally don’t want to challenge the status quo.
        The implications of this issue for Canadian society are related to the Canadian identity. Canadians like to view themselves as accepting of everyone in society. If there continues to be a divide between the sexes in the workplace, it will negatively inform our view of Canada as a haven for equality. Another important implication for Canadian society is the wage gap that is evident in the salaries of men and women. In Canada, women earn substantially less than men, even when they are employed on a full-time basis. Women had average earnings of approximately 71% what their male counterparts made (Catalyst).
        The issue of women being underrepresented and marginalized in the workplace is a constantly evolving topic of discussion. Through hegemonic femininity and hegemonic masculinity, gender policing, and normalizing power, women find it difficult to achieve senior positions within a company. With each new generation of students and workers, we begin to see progress in the system. Women have made great strides in the fields of education, the workplace, and senior positions within the workplace, in the hopes that someday we will have equal representation of men and women in the workplace.

Sources

Brock, Deborah; R. Raby; M.P. Thomas. Power and Everyday Practices. Nelson Education: Toronto. 2012.
Catalyst. Statistical Overview of Women in the Workplace. Accessed: 10/13/2012 http://www.catalyst.org/file/672/qt_statistical_overview_of_women_in_the_workplace.pdf
Gill, Judith; Mills, Julia; Franzway, Suzanne; Sharp, Rhonda. ‘Oh you must be very clever!’ High-achieving women, professional power and the ongoing negotiation of workplace identity. Gender and Education, Vol. 20, No. 3, May 2008. http://web.ebscohost.com.library.smu.ca:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=6f8a326c-cc2b-4c5f-a798-bf21d5da5085%40sessionmgr4&vid=11&hid=11
Jackson, Jerlando & O’Callaghan, Elizabeth. What Do We Know About Glass Ceiling Effects? Research in Higher Education, 12, March, 2009. http://web.ebscohost.com.library.smu.ca:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=02276e86-6324-4a57-a053-5f49218624d1%40sessionmgr13&vid=4&hid=11

Useful Links

More women in the workplace is good for business http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/more-women-in-the-workplace-is-good-for-business/article1215920/ by Deborah Gillis


Women's glass ceiling remains http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/08/31/women-executive-conference-board.html

Yahoo's new CEO hailed for smashing glass ceiling http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/18/yahoos-new-ceo-hailed-for-smashing-glass-ceiling-by-starting-job-pregnant/ by Sarah Boesveld




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