My mom always told me, " It's man's world. They are a woman’s constituencies, they are destiny crafters." I didn't
believe. It has been since my childhood, I have been striving to prove this notion false.
Are they really the ones who directly or indirectly influence, oh sorry! navigate our lives, dictate the terms? Umhh! I still haven't got the answer. My research into real life situations are still going on in LIFE'S LABORATORY. DO ‘Men’ & ‘Women’ belong to different planets? Do they have hetrogenous competency? It's really engaging to know that their performance appraisals have different criterion. They say that gender bias doesn't exist but it does exist.
Well my posting is about gender bias at workplace. Do identical protocols really exist in Organizations? Do same employment rules work for men & women? Well i am sorry to say, NOT!
If some expecting mothers wanted flexibility at work & were allowed to do the same, poor careerists most of the time, had to face sneers from their colleagues, negative & mostly gender-sensitive comments. But hey! The award of ‘flexibility’ does come with ‘price tag’. She would have to agree upon procrastinated salary & benefits. Not only that, soon she discovers, to her horror that she no more languishes in ‘you-can-do-it’ profile set by Company. Mere motherhood expectancy curtails her efficiency coefficient. She is no more given plum assignments, important projects to handle. She’s no more at the driving seat now. (ha ha! Strange!)
Maternal curtain bias stems from assumptions that mothers are not as competent as others, are not as committed to their jobs, and belong at home because they can’t be both good mothers and good workers. Fathers may run up against a comparable set of assumptions when they take an active role in caring for their families.
mental blocks
These biases are borne out of our hidden ‘mental blocks’: psychological, social, physiological, perceptual etc. Hidden bias stems from our everyday sense of ‘the way things are,’ which informs our everyday workplace interactions. Bias affects what we notice about people, how we interpret their behavior and what we remember about them. We are most likely to remember what we like to remember about them, not what they may be communicating (strange it sounds na! ) .
Coming back to workplace! Men generally are assumed to be assertive, reliable, competent and committed to their careers. Women … not so much. These everyday assumptions that arise automatically accumulate and ultimately impact formal employment decisions. Even small judgments based on gender bias can have powerful cumulative effects on women’s careers. How she attires herself, what hairstyle she prefers & what ‘marital status’ (verrrrrrrrry important u know!) , she keeps are essential feedbacks to employer’s employment criterion.
If she maintains ‘individual status’ or is ‘single’, she may be presumably an aggressive employee & prospective threatening to ‘male domain’. She is generally looked upon as being ‘available’, sometimes even is the focal point of sarcastic & even vindictive comments from male employees.
Not only this, a woman in a traditionally masculine job may be called a ‘witch,’ ‘hard to work with’ or ‘too ambitious’ – for the same behavior that helps a man establish himself as ‘assertive’ and ‘having leadership potential.’ The unspoken view in such situations is that women should be helpful, warm, understanding, and kind. In some workplaces, women are seen either as ‘likable, dependent…traditional women’ who are nice but incompetent or as ‘dominant, nontraditional women’ who are competent, but are disliked for violating unspoken norms that women should be inclusive and nurturing.
Research has shown that men benefit more from their accomplishments than women, and even small imbalances accumulate over time and cause women to advance at a slower rate than men. Why Women need to provide more evidence of job-related skills than their male counterparts before they are viewed as competent? Why women are allowed fewer mistakes than men before they are judged incompetent.
Many jobs are awarded or employment decisions are made on biases, rather than ‘
performance potentiality’. Policies and procedures are framed in ways that lead to fewer hiring and promotion opportunities, lower compensation, poor performance evaluations, more frequent disciplinary actions, and greater termination rates among women. Decisions based on bias rather than legitimate job related reasons often will end up penalizing
talented workers and rewarding less talented ones. As a result, such decisions may well jeopardize productivity and negatively affect employee morale.
Lower employee morale translates into lower retention rates and higher attrition and recruiting costs. Employers’ ability to remain competitive in their industries depends on providing a high quality service or product at competitive prices. This is difficult to achieve when employers are losing well-trained, talented employees and spending more to replace and train new employees. Gender bias can have a negative impact on a company’s bottom line.
Hidden bias is to be castigated to create a culture of inclusiveness and audit relevant employment policies and procedures to ensure that the Organizations do not on their face or in application allow gender bias to creep into personnel decisions.