WORKPLACE BIAS 1 Workplace Bias Champlain College Online WORKPLACE BIAS 2 For this weeks news story I found a most interesting article on Forbes.com about women in the workplace titled, Not Very Likeable: Here Is How Bias Is Affecting Women Leaders written by Dr. Pragya Agarwal. Woman currently make up a large part of the labor force but still a large gap remains between men and women in the jobs they apply for and in equal pay (Burke, 2018). Woman struggle to actualize career and financial success and are being held back from reaching their full potential. This is where gender stereotypes come in to play. Gender stereotypes is how we judge and misunderstand women in the workplace (Agarwal, 2018). Because of unconscious bias and gender stereotypes there are less women in leadership and management roles, which means less mentors for other women to see the opportunity to move up. Dr. Agarwal describes a double-bind bias, a gender bias of descriptive and prescriptive. What women are like and how they should behave, meaning that a woman could not have the qualities of a leader and the qualities of woman at the same time. This stems from historical male/female gender roles that we as a society can not seem to shake. For example, women are soft, they are mothers who should stay home and cook; and men are hard, they do mens work like farm or are bankers. Women are either labeled too soft to sit at the boardroom table with all the men, or they are labeled overbearing for having pushed ahead in the workplace just her male counterpart. Intentional or not, the man gets the promotion, and the gap between men and women gets bigger and women are consistently being held back. WORKPLACE BIAS Managers today need to create a safe and open dialogue in their offices. All businesses should have unconscious bias trainings and follow ups to those trainings to continue raising awareness. Managers are accountable for their staff. They should be promoting a positive and safe environment to work in. Managers are also responsible for hiring a diverse workforce. Diversity does not mean just equal parts women to men but race, age and ethnicity for example. A business that encompasses a wide variety of people will benefit greatly. That team of employees can learn from each other and provide different viewpoints. Your employees may be more inclined to stay with your company longer if they see you hire a wide range of people. Managers can not allow employees to be discriminated against. Any type of negative stereotype, whether it be of race, gender or culture is unacceptable. Managers have a big responsibility here. Not just in keeping their eyes and ears open for staff possibly discriminating but managers themselves being the offenders. Which brings me to this weeks lecture notes. A shocking one that would stand out to a manager is a study done by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan: Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. It concluded that resumes with white names received 50 percent more callbacks for job interviews than those with black sounding names (Bertrand, Mullainathan 2003). It is important to note that the study was published in 2003, which was fifteen years ago. But regardless, when recruiting a manager must not make any judgment to names or even a persons home address. 3 WORKPLACE BIAS 4 I work in healthcare, I work alongside medical assistants, LPN’s and RN’s. We are all women. My boss is a woman. Even the doctors are mostly women, the men are few in my office. Which is not the norm. But what is the norm, is that the women are catty and unkind and untrusting of one another. Women need to stick up for each other, work is demanding enough as it is. This is where the fundamental attribution error might help at my office. It is a very unfriendly and negative place right now. We are so quick to jump at each other for doing something wrong but there are few who offer to help others out. I am going to attempt to share at our next nurse’s meeting what I learned here: that most people are good and deserve our sympathy, they deserve a break. We do not know what someone else is going through. Let’s be more positive and kind and we might be happier at work. References WORKPLACE BIAS Agarwal, D. P. (2018, October 24). Not Very Likeable: Here Is How Bias Is Affecting Women Leaders. Retrieved November 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/10/23/not-very-likeable-here-is-howbias-is-affecting-women-leaders/amp/ Burke, A. (2018, March 08). 10 facts about American women in the workforce. Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/12/05/10-factsabout-american-women-in-the-workforce/ Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2003). Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. doi:10.3386/w9873 Business, McCombs School of. “Concepts Unwrapped | Fundamental Attribution Error.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Aug. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDhiyPAD6NQ&feature=youtu.be. 5
