world has come a long way from sphering animals to texting people. However, there are still some societal, professional, and environmental issues that crimp our legitimate growth towards the future. Here we won’t be discussing the societal or environmental issues for now, although we will take the space to address the professional issues hobbling our workplace in generic. Aptly striding to the most common but most venomous concern, “Genderism at the workplace”.
As of now, we know how much development there has been in terms of women efficiently taking a stake at the professional table. Withal, with more entities growing large and vast in number, mostly the efforts coming from the other side are taken underwhelmingly resulting in a block for the female employment growth.
Let’s face the fact, there are about 48.5% of women workforce in the world as of 2018, which is decreased from 51.4% in 1991 (Source: Catalyst.org). Even with a huge increase in world population and women-dominated industries, women employee faces many blows when it comes to advancement professionally. There are many factors leading to this, one of which largely affects is the organizational lack of understanding about genderism at the workplace. Let’s discuss the facts further;
1.Subjacent women in the lead roles: There are very few women CEOs world’s leading entities. As per the 2018, fortune list, only 24 women (4.8%) are CEO in fortune 500 companies (source: Catalyst.org). And women account for less than a quarter (24%) of senior roles globally.
When it comes to comprehending the decrease from 1991 to 2018, it could be safely stated that it’s mostly due to the lack of women in leading job roles who can make the decision of hiring another woman. Female employees understand the social and the cultural barriers they face depicting their employment and can moreover help them overcome it, aiding with empowered ability.
Diagnosis: Taking altering steps to combat the issue can help with organizational growth. But how to know if any entity is practicing it? It could be by appointing external experts to analyze circling the industry-based, department employee ratios, grades, delegations, and administration is equally distributed and productive or not. If not then taking apt and much necessary strides towards encountering the issues.
2. The Pay Gap: There is a colossal gap between the remunerations of men and women and is widening with time as factually seen in 2017, the global average annual earnings were; $12,000 for women and $21,000 for men. This hugely impacts the organizations, legally, ethically, and productively. Not only the productivity of a company but the entire country is affected. Lets’ take Australia’s example. The studies of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ average weekly ordinary time earnings (AWOTE) data from 1986 to 2013 show that a 10% reduction in the gender income inequality increases, productivity by up to 3%. And if the gender pay gap is eliminated completely it would increase long-term productivity by 5.7%.
However, when taking any action to reduce this gap in an organization, it increases the immediate costs of the company resulting in the hesitation of the managers to emit the problem. Whereas, if calculated by the long term, this could increase the profits of the company intensely.
Diagnosis:Consciously we can even emit the immediate costs occurring with the action, by our circling method, where the first tier, complies emission solely upon the immediate KPIs fulfilled, second tier, the comparison of the increase in the performance in due course, third tier, wage bill, except the base salary the adding components adding up to the cost to the company and the final tier, determining the potential fitting for raise or occasional compensation.
3. Higher Performance Expectations: Even though the remuneration is low, the performance expected by women employees is higher compared to men. Also because, when women aid-up to ask for a raise their job responsibilities tend to increase due to the highlighted increase of added costs to the company. One more reason is, for more than 50% of women with, out-of-work family responsibilities are unable to compete with the extra work hours attained by men. Even though competent to accomplish targeted assignments within the work-hours gives an image of in-efficiency to the management and considered as a lack of dedication.
Whereas some countries like the Netherlands, France, Japan along with many large-scale corporations such as Amazon, are adopting the method of lesser working hours resulting in a more efficient, productive, and dedicated work-force. This is a crucial implication, for men and more vitally for women. Moreover, taking a deep assessment of the reasons raised for a promotion by a woman employee.
Diagnose: this one is fairly simple, in some countries by just following the law and examples from other companies or associating with an expert to derive the right-fitted policies for the company with a combination of flexible leaves, working hours, workdays, and/or work modes. Along with the timed, fixated, and automatically analyzing salary raises and compensations.
4. Lesser Women Participating in Labor Force: Since there are lesser women in the work-force the ones who are, experience a silent need to prove themselves in every assignment with lesser compensation. This is a consequence of cultural bounds and societal views. Which both positively and negatively affect the company. The positive is that the company have efficient employee but the negative is, they stay for a lesser period of time due to the dissatisfaction in the job role.
This is seen time-in and time-on happening in most of the companies around the world. The share of the labor work-force in Canada is 47%, in India 24.5%, in Japan 43.7%, and in US 46.9% (source: Catalyst.org).
Diagnosis: It can be easily avoided by applying expert methods in the hiring process of equal opportunity and creating an adaptable working environment after. By having an expert on-board the issues can be emitted from appearing.
5. Women’s chances of promotions increase with women leadership: It’s both a solution and a problem, as women need female leaders to advance in their career, and given the lesser number of women leaders these opportunities run thin. Also, this professional evil is also emerging due to the backlash women employees face for being ambitious by their male bosses. As work is misinterpreted as a career for men (54%) and just a job for most women (47%), most of the male bosses fail to see professional potential in women employees than males (Source: careerbuilder.com).
The work culture needs to change and the interpretation of the dedication needs to completely vanish. New start-ups are applying these factors from the beginning itself and taking apt actions to make their company a healthy and productive place to work.
Diagnose: By having an expert opinion to determine the presence of these concerns and if found, creating awareness, bringing change in the policies, implementing flexible methods, and training the company members to adapt to the new happenings.
