Gender Discrimination in the Work Place

Gender and Career Success Herrback and Mignonac (2012) performed a study of 300 women employees to examine the relationship between career anchors, subjective views of career success, and perceptions of gender discrimination. Essentially, the study monitored whether or not women felt that their gender was getting in the way of their career goals. The researchers found that "perceived gender discrimination was negatively related to the subjective career success overall" (Herrback, Mignonac, 2012, p. 25). In other words, when women failed to achieve career goals they felt that gender inequality was the reason.

Moreover, the anchors (such as management or security and independence) made the perceptions less or sharper respectively. What this shows is that women in the workplace do not feel as though gender is an issue if they are given a comfortable degree of autonomy and job security. On the other hand, if they have ambitions that are not being met or if they feel that management puts pressure on them to perform, they sense that they are suffering from gender discrimination.

In short, when women get what they want in the workplace, they have no complaints. This paper will discuss the relationship of gender and career success and show how the two are related in terms of goal-orientation. If a woman's goal is to be a manager in the workplace and she is not permitted to achieve this goal, she is more likely to attribute it to gender discrimination than not (Herrbach, Mignonac, 2012). But there may be other reasons for that failure.

Gender role type can also be the cause of this blockage (Schneidhofer, Schiffinger, Michael et al., 2010). Gender role type is what happens when women are typecast in certain roles and cannot get out of them. It is like a Hollywood actor who plays a pirate for years on the screen and then one day decides he would like to play a professor. No one will hire him because he has been typecast.

The same happens in the workplace and it is another reason that women fail to break through the glass ceiling. Evers and Sieverding (2014) show that highly qualified women still earn less than men in the workplace as a result of men having higher human capital than women. The reason for this discrimination is rooted in something the researchers call "discontinuous work history" (Evers, Sieverding, 2014, p. 93), but it cannot account for all cases because not all women have such a history in the work place.

Still, it may serve as a potential threat looming in the wings for some managers who hire women, not knowing whether there will be a discontinuation at some point in the future. This white albatross type of fear simply plays into the gender discrimination paradigm however. Cox and Harquail (2015) also show that women who attain managerial positions do not experience fewer promotions or receive fewer incentives than male coworkers but that they do receive lower pay scales.

This is a clear sign of gender discrimination and obviously limits the extent to which women can have a legitimate and successful career as a result. In conclusion, where women are stuck in the workplace is that they are best left to an independent career where they can have autonomy because if they try to rise up through the ranks there is less hope of equality, as the research shows. If their goals are to rise up, they.