Does gender discrimination still exist?

Overview

1. Does gender discrimination still exist?

2. Women in business: advantages and disadvantages

3. The world`s most powerful woman in business

References

Does gender discrimination still exist?

Although the glass ceiling metaphor has been around for decades as a way to refer to the difficulty women have in reaching top positions in their careers, top names in the business field have been debating whether it's really still there. Data shows that women are gaining ground in several ways, including average salary, percent who hold management positions, and even women in high-profile jobs. So is there still a gender discrimination in business [7]?

As new studies show, gender discrimination remains pervasive and widespread. Women still haven't reached equality with men in their earnings or the percent of managers who are women. In this sense, the workplace does not demonstrate gender equality.

A poll by the Center for American Progress and Elle Magazine found that more than one in four women have experienced discrimination, and the higher they rank in the workplace hierarchy the more likely that they’ve been discriminated against. Gallup poll found that 15 percent of women said they were denied a promotion because of gender.

The Center for American Progress poll found, too, that men tend not to notice the non-economic consequences of sexual discrimination. Only about half of the men who were surveyed felt that women are held to higher standards in the workplace, and the majority believed that the “country has made most of the changes needed to give women equal rights as men.

” Two-thirds of the women polled, however, believe they are held to higher standards, and almost three-quarters believe that the government needs to do more to guarantee equal rights. When it comes to the economic effects of discrimination, though, men and women tend to be more in agreement about the problem: 31 percent of women think they’d be paid more if they were men, and 20 percent of men agree that they’d have less in their paycheck if they were women [8].

The wage gap between men and women still stands. Women earn about 77 cents for every dollar men earn.

But the element which is most brazen is how women are first up in layoffs. When it comes to layoffs, “ladies first”.

Generally speaking economic injustice for women is alive and well and one of the main ways this is achieved is occupational segregation. This is known as the glass ceiling. Yet if females manage to even get the job typically assumed to be a male domain as we see above, they are still being paid less.

On the other hand, as the statistics suggest that women have a harder time excelling in their careers than men do, that doesn't mean that you have to be held back by it. In fact, women often hold themselves back because they assume they won't be able to get to these positions and, therefore, are less likely to try for them. If you're serious about reaching high-level positions in your career and you push for them starting early in your career, you're much more likely to reach them [4].

You also need to be aware of how you can protect yourself as a woman. For example, interviewers should never be able to ask you whether you plan on having children and taking that into account as they make hiring or promotion decisions. Your personal life is just that -- personal -- and it is illegal for employers to let it affect their decisions. You are legally entitled to maternity leave in most positions, and firing you because you're having too many kids is illegal.

That said, you should also be aware that your roles at home may hold you back from your career. For example, many high-level managers are expected to work overtime or to travel. If you don't have provisions for childcare in place, that may make it impossible for you to take these sorts of jobs. Therefore, your personal goals may affect your career, and that's a choice you need to make early on so you can make plans that reflect what you really want.

The long and short of it is that gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal, and there's plenty you can do to point it out if you believe you are being discriminated against. If you truly want to excel in your career, there is no real glass ceiling holding you back. You can move up the corporate ladder, and you can have the successful career you always dreamed of [7].

The Economist (magazine) has created a “glass-ceiling index”, to show where women have the best chances of equal treatment at work. It combines data on higher education, labour-force participation, pay, child-care costs, maternity rights, business-school applications and representation in senior jobs. Each country’s score is a weighted average of its performance on nine indicators. So “glass-ceiling index” shows the countries where sex discrimination still exist and where women almost reached equality with men.

Table 1

The glass-ceiling index in different countries (100 = the best)

Country	Index
Norway	78.7
Sweden	78.1
Finland	77.1
Poland	71.5
New Zealand	69.4
France	67.7
Denmark	64.3
Hungary	62.1
Canada	61.8
Spain	61.0
United States	56.1
Great Britain	49.1
Japan	20.0

So, to no one’s surprise, Nordic countries come out well on educational attainment and labour-force participation. Norway (78.8), Finland (77.1) and Sweden (78.1) are „winners” in the glass-ceiling index rating. There are “hard” glass-ceiling gender discrimination in Japan (20.0), Switzerland (40.6), South Korea (15.5) act [5].

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31