“Gender Inequality Is Common At The Workplace”. To What Extent Do You Agree With The Above Statement?
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The gender inequality in the work place is one of the high rated issues that have been publicly ringing through society for years. With that statement above, definitely, I do agree with it. Gender inequality can be refers to the obvious or hidden disparities among individual based on gender performance. In this case, we will see the inequality towards the women in the work place. In order to identify this situation, we must try to get to the root of the problem and must understand the sociological factors that cause women to have a much more difficult time getting the same profits, wages, and job opportunities as their male complements. The society in which we live right now have been shaped historically by males for centuries.
Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in and near their homes, whether they were involved in farming or making clothes. But, this situation changed when modern industry appeared in the late 19th century, which saw a drastic separation between home and the workplace. Such separation has affected the roles of female in the modern society. While all men and women worked in the factories in the early industrialization, by the twentieth century men had to come dominate industrial production, particularly in the most technology advanced productive sectors, where the wages were highest (Huber and Spitze, 1988). This meant that the men were advantage economically relative to women. This too meant that the men brought home the larger share of the wages rather than the female.
In terms of employment as well as promotion in work and occupation, women often face greater handicap than men. A country like Japan and South Korea, may be quite democratic in matters of demography or basic facilities, and even, to a great extend, in higher education, and yet progress to elevated levels of employment and occupation seems to be much more problematic for women rather than for men. In many societies, the ownership of property can also be very unequal. Even basic assets such as homes and land may be very irregularly shared. On the contrary, in social agencies there appears to be less male influence. This is believed to be cause by the fact that most businesses are not the beneficiary, but citizens. That is why politicians distinguish businesses as more important than citizen because of the economic impact of tax revenues. Therefore, men feel they need men in areas of real power positions rather than picking a woman to be chosen in the positions. This shows a direct relationship between agency-clientele on gender-based employment patterns (Miller et al., 1999, p. 7).
Women whom are the minorities in the work place are traditional employed in lower status jobs and not allowed to enter the manager or the owner network. These jobs limit their access to powerful employees. That is why, it is hard to find the women selected as the boss or the manager in companies. The municipal study finds that females are underrepresented in the best paying or most powerful positions within city government. Jobs and wages are rank by the employers differently to their workers. Employers rank their workers based on their skills, experiences and commitment. Employees rank them too according to their popularity and rewards. One would think this process would be fair to everyone but, in many organisations there appears to be double standards to judge men and women. If we see in big companies, there is a big gap in salaries and positions between male and female. The men too are always ranked higher and getting higher wages than women. Women most often have to measure up to higher standards than men do to obtain the position (Hale, 1999, p. 8).
Another surprising finding within female dominated organisations is the fact that males still have the advantage in management. One would suspect that in a predominate female organisation, the female would have the advantage, but studies show this not to be the case. Males seem to bullet up the glass escalator. Glass escalator is like the male gender carrying with them gender immunity which make them be selected as leaders. Most of them too will be selected as chairman of the organizations. Many times the promotion occurs because the male employee will bond with the male manager who will in turn mentor him and prepare him for advancement (Maume, 1999, p.5). Often times the male is promoted in the predominant female agency to boost morale and to decrease tensions among the members which are the women. The tensions develop because females think that the males cannot do the job because they do not match the stereotype of nurturing and caring like them.
Today, occupational segregation even occurs in modern country such as United State of America. In this case, women are segregated into female jobs which a lot of people labeled as “womens work”. For example, we can see that a big number of women work as nurses, teachers and secretary in many part of the world. This type of segregation we call the horizontal gender segregation which is the tendency for men and women to separate qualitatively into different types of jobs. Another form of segregation is vertical segregation, which means that the women just concentrated at the lower level of the occupation and hierarki in terms of wages and salary, status and authority such as maid and waitress. These situations happen because men had become less attractive to these occupations and they are more keen in challenging occupations such as engineering, business and architecture.
In general,