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Gender and Power in the Workplace
This essay is an analysis of contemporary issues associated with gender and power in the workplace; which will specifically include a discussion of gender relations, stereotyping, women’s identity, the structuring of formal and informal power, sources of inequality, and sexual harassment.
The concept of gender in relation to the division of labor in the workplace, and in relation to issues of power and control is an unfortunate, groundless stereotype. Suzanne Tallichet notes that the gendered division of workplace labor is rooted in flawed ideology of innate sex differences in traits and abilities, and operates through various control mechanisms. (Tallichet 1995: 698) These control mechanisms are primarily exercised by men over women and serve to exaggerate differences between the sexes, especially surrounding women’s presumed incapability for doing male identified work.
Tallichet notes that most forms of workplace control take the form of harassment, sexual bribery, gender based jokes and comments, and profanity which passively but concisely makes gender differences an aspect of work relations. (Tallichet 1995: 698-699) Jan Grant and Paige Porter (1994: 150) add the ideology of ‘the gendered logic of accumulation” to the discussion of gender in the workplace, which notes that men in Western societies have traditionally acquired and maintained the bulk of wealth in society.
These traditional roles and consequently women’s identities have been formed and maintained by the workplace, therefore understanding any gender differences in labor requires an examination in this light. Grant and Porter remind the researcher that the concepts of male and female are not independent relationships of the workplace, but have been strongly influenced and determined by the relationships of male and female in society at large.
Unfortunately the gendered division of labor has maintained its origins in the home, while copying its structure in the workplace. This can be seen inside families through the sharp distinctions between paid work and non work, paid and unpaid productivity, and even the separation of the private and public spheres where women are perceived as attached to the private and men to the public domains. (Grant & Porter 1994: 153) This is an important issue because while home and work may be physically separate...
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Grant, Jan; Porter, Paige. 1994. “Women Managers: The Construction of Gender in the
Workplace.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology. Vol. 30, 2:
149-164.
Loe, Meika. 1996. “Working for Men - At the Intersection of Power, Gender, and
Sexuality.” Sociological Inquiry. Vol. 66, 4: 399-421.
Pringle, Rosemary. 1993. “Rethinking Gender and Work.” Gender and History. Vol. 5,
2: 295-301.
Roos, Patricia A. 1992. “Women in Engineering: Gender, Power and Workplace
Culture.” Contemporary Sociology - A Journal of Reviews. Vol. 21, 5: 573-576.
Rospenda, Kathleen M; Richman, Judith A; Nawyn, Stephanie J. 1998. “Doing Power:
The Confluence of Gender, Race, and Class in Contrapower Sexual Harassment.
Gender and Society. Vol. 12, 1: 40-60.
Smith, Deborah. 1995. “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: The Silent Oppression.”
The Social Worker. Vol. 63, 2: 85-88.
Tallichet, Suzanne E. 1995. “Gendered Relations in the Mines and the Division of
Labour Underground.” Gender and Society. Vol. 9, 6: 697-711.
Whalley, Peter. 1992. “Women in Engineering: Gender, Power and Workplace Culture.”
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In the second year of business at Golf Challenge Corporation the company is struggling. The cost of their inventory is rising, and they are in grave danger of losing their bank loan (their prime source of financing) due to not meeting the required financial ratios agreed and set forth by the bank at the time the loan was given. The owner comes up with a solution, and figures that instead of using Last in-First out (LIFO) the company can use First in-First Out inventory cost system (FIFO) and meet their required financial ratios set forth by the bank. Ultimately, Golf Challenge Corporation should not submit documents to the bank using FIFO as opposed to their previous system LIFO in order to meet the bank requirements
In their article, “Workplace Gender Bias: Not Just Between Strangers”, authors Nadler and Stockdale discuss the forms of gender bias that still exist in the workplace for women who have jobs in male-dominated fields. They suggest that “gender role stereotypes” and “subtle forms of gender bias” give women a harder time in these fields and may result in “reduced pay, harsher…standards in performance evaluation, and a reduced likelihood to advance” (282-84). Women that do not conform to societal e...
In the article “Sex Segregation at Work: Persistence and Change” by Anastasia Prokos explores ideas around the challenges and reasons of sex segregation in the work place. She argues that even though the United States has made several steps in the right direction throughout our history, there is still “… women and men in the contemporary United States continue to be concentrated in different occupations, jobs, and industries” (Prokos 564). She is presenting this as a social problem that leads to stereotypes, discrimination, and unequal pay.
"I don't want to talk about whether or not racial profiling is legal. Racial profiling is not an effective law enforcement tool." -- Eric Holder, 82nd Attorney General of the United States
Iversen, Torben and Frances Rosenbluth. Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Kindle E-Book.
Bravo, Santa Anna and Meric discuss the ways in which women are disadvantaged in the workplace which directly ties back to gender roles, in "An Overview of Women and Work." Crawley, Foley and Shehan
Blacks suffer from the use of racial profiling, and police brutality. However, racial profiling has no real effect on whites. Your skin color should not be used to decide whether you are guilty or not. Being black is not by choice, but rather by destiny. Black children should not feel that they are less important based on their skin colour. Skin color has become evidence of the property to commit crime and police this evidence against social groups. Being black in America is more dangerous than being a terrorist. Black people are always on the lookout, because they don’t know when they are going to be kiledl only because they are black. White lives matter more than Black
Conflict theory plays a major role when looking at racial profiling due to the fact of a patriarical society it looks at the power struggle and one of the reasons behind racial profiling is to keep society in “order” and the way it currently is , which is a society dominated by white males. For them to keep this power their needs to be a obvious distintion in majorities and minorities. Racial minorities are seen as a threat to the ruling class. Conflict theory states that the ruling class will crime control as a way to limit the minority threatening them , which is partially what racial profiling is about. “ Organizations will minimize strains on themselves by processing those who are politically weak and powerless, while refraining from processing those who are politically powerful.”(Chambliss and Seidman (1971, p. 269) (Petrocelli et al., 2002) Conflict theory looks for the problem to result in positive change. . Racial profiling would have never been a ground to appeal your sentence 50 years agao but today it is. Thus showing a positve change has already been
Parcheta, N., Kaifi, B., & Khanfar, N. (2013). Gender Inequality in the Workforce: A Human Resource Management Quandary. Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 4(3), 240-248.
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York. He was the fourth of five children born to Frederick C. and Mary MacLeod Trump. Donald’s father, Frederick was a builder and real estate developer who specialized in constructing and operating middle-income apartments in Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. Trump followed his
Acker (2012)’ s phrase of “Manage it like a man” tends to place constant pressures and altered gender identities in those jobs men are supposedly better in. Although many would be surprised that those positions of “masculinity” women are seen to be growing and succeeding in. A scene in the movie “Dead pool”, a violent struggle the main persona quotes “This is so confusing … is it sexist to hit you or is it more sexist to not hit you? This made me question that the gender gap may be evident in corporate organisations but it can also be deemed as a societal norm. Meaning there could possibly always be that gendered segregation and division in many diverse organisations despite the role/ position they play in. Interactions on the job (Acker,2012) often produce and reproduce gendered substructures between those of different levels in the organisation hierarchy, mainly where issues arise. Women are often belittled in interactions with colleagues, particularly groups that are male dominated, sexuality issues that are exploitive, harassing or just joking around are simply all clear examples of gender differences within interactions. Gender analysis has been mentioned as incomplete as it ignores the whole process of
Since men and women work closely in the workplace today, there are many complaints addressing the differences in the genders. Simma Lieberman addresses these differences in her article, “Better Communication Between Men and Women in the Workplace: Some Useful Tips”. Men tend to think that women take things too seriously, are slow in getting down to business, and try to be “one of the boys”. A complaint that women give about men is that they are being labeled names such as: “girls”, “honey”, and “darlin”. Other complaints are that men make women into objects, making decisions about work with other men and not including the women, and using expressions that only use sports, violence or sexual connotations s...
Men are traditionally seen as being in the "supervisor" position in the home. They are the heads of the household, the breadwinners, and the women are behind the scenes, like the threads that hold everything together. The same can be said about the workplace. Men tend to hold administrative positions, while women usually have the positions that support the administrator. They are the secretaries and assistants that do the work for their male bosses and prepare things for them that later on only the administrator may receive credit for. " ‘Where,' asks the Englishman who is prominent in social welfare, 'are you're men? We see their names on the letter-heads of organizations, but when we go to international conferences, we meet almost entirely women.' 'Our men-oh, they are the chairmen of boards, they determine the financial policy of our agencies, but they leave the practice to women. They are too busy to go to conferences.'" (Mead 304).
The roles women typically play in the family may not always be consistent with success in the occupational arena. Staying home to care for a sick child may conflict with an important meeting (Broman 1991:511). Sometimes there has to be a change of plans when it comes to the family. Most people believe that family comes first no matter what. Men 's engagement in paid work fulfills prescriptions of hegemonic masculinity by facilitating their ability to gain status in the public sphere. A man can judge his worth by the size of a paycheck (Thebaud 2010:335). Most research shows that women are more likely to be effected by the household and men are more likely to be effected by their job. Some people feel that the goal is to reach higher on the occupational
It can be concluded that women are treated in terms of stereotyped impressions of being the lowest class and greater evidence can be found that there are large disparities between the women and the men 's class. It can be seen that women are more likely to play casual roles as they are most likely to take seasonal and part time work so that they can work according to their needs. They are hampered from progressing upward into the organizations as they face problems like lack of health insurance, sexual harassments, lower wage rates, gender biases and attitudes of negative behavior. However, this wouldn’t have hampered the participation of the women in the work force and they continue to increase their efforts which is highly evident in the occupational and job ratios of females in the industry.