Discrimination in Workforce Gender Discrimination at Work

Discrimination in Workforce

Gender discrimination at work place means the way to behave with the employees in such a way that is to prefer one employee to other due to gender biasness. All over the world, this disparity among the men and women is condemned but still present (Mooney, 2012). One of the research conducted at the U.S. shows that the women get lower compensation than the men do, for the same working hours per week. Women earn only 84.6% of what men earn for the same work and same working hours. This preferential treatment among the employees causes de-motivation to excel in the office environment. There are several ways of gender discrimination at work place (Fox & Lituchy, 2012).

According to the feminist theory, it can be a direct discrimination, in which men get more pay and women get lesser payment even though they both have same academic qualification, skills and experience. In indirect discrimination, the top-level management imposes certain rules in such a way that gives benefit to the male gender wholly. Harassment at work or disturbing the personal lives of the female working employees is also a common problem (Tilly & Charles, 1999).

This gender discrimination at workplace can cause many adverse effects in terms of low productivity. The biasness will discourage the female staff and as a result, their efforts for the company will decrease with the passage of time. Perhaps this biasness also lead them to feel that they have no worth and they start propagating awful and nasty rumors about that specific office environment.

Although Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has made many effective rules to avoid discrimination and harassment at work place but unfortunately their application is quite low in the practical world. According to this act, equal salaries, allowances and bonuses is the right of every employee.

This commission tries its best to prevent the discriminative cases but still the rate of these types of incidents is very high (Fox & Lituchy, 2012).

The major reason behind the breaching of EEO laws is due to the negligence of the top-level management who do not pay attention towards the problems of the female employees who suffer a lot due to this biasness. Besides, the employees themselves are so frightened to talk about these incidents or to make complaints about these incidents with their supervisors that boost up the confidence of the harasser to do such type of things more severely from next time.

The penalty on the breaching of EEO law is quite high that if the firm has to pay it once they will never do gender discrimination in rest of life but the point is will the employees ever be able to raise their voice on this major issue? Alternatively, they are made to suffer these discriminative and harassment problems forever. The answer to this question is concealed in the actions of the harassed employees that if they raise their voices against racism only then it will solve (Fox & Lituchy, 2012).

According to a research, 90% of women have suffered the problem of sexual harassment and racism at their work place and out of this, 10% of women have suffered the most severe form of sexual harassment in which they also get the offer of promotion or increased salaries if they are sexually cooperative wit their colleagues (Fredman & Sandra., 1997). The feminist theory has also proved that harassment creates a hostile environment in which it becomes very difficult for a woman to work with concentration and leads to negative professional outcomes in them. These sexual harassment acts include unwanted sexual-based jokes, inappropriate and unwanted touching or offensive comments on clothing (Willie & Vert, 1995).

The targeted employee of harassment must complaint about the harasser and it is the responsibility of managers and supervisors to take care of the cases of harassment with in the office environment and take prompt and serious actions against these issues to make sure that these issues will not happen again in future. If the manager or supervisor neglects the compliant or in cases in which the supervisor himself is the harasser then the victim can also directly contact with the EEOC or similar state agency that work against sexual harassment a work place.

Many federal and state laws protect the employees against sexual harassment. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act deals with the law of sexual harassment and protects the employees from the sexual assaults. This law is applicable to both private and public employees. Under these acts, the employee should ask in written to stop the harassment first and if the harassment does not stop, the employee has the right to file a lawsuit against the harasser and sue him for breaching the sexual harassment law (Tomaskovic-Devey & Donald., 1993).