Gender Discrimination in the Workplace
What is meant by the word discrimination?
Discrimination is the unfair treatment of people based
on their sex, class, age, or disability. While
discrimination is predominant in all of the mentioned
categories, discrimination is arguably most commonly
present in the workplace, based on your gender.
Women have been discriminated against in the
workplace for as long as they have started working,
which is not as long as you would think. For centuries it
was believed that a woman’s duty was to get married
and provide for her family. In some places, women are
still controlled by their families/husbands and are not
allowed to do what they want to do. Despite all of that
women have fought against all odds to have a right to
do what they want to do and choose who they want to
be. Even after fighting and protesting for centuries and
decades, their fight is far from over. For the past few
decades, women have built up the courage to stand up
for themselves and educate themselves well enough to
allow them to pursue their choice of profession. As time
passes big corporations such as Apple and Microsoft
are beginning to promote gender diversity globally.
Gender diversity is being able to have the same
opportunities and pay regardless of your gender. Most
of the big organizations in the world present a gender-
diversified front which is far from the truth. 10 years
back the situation was much worse but recently many
corporates have made guidelines to ensure gender
discrimination does not take place. While this may
contribute towards putting an end to discrimination
between genders in a workplace it does not eliminate
it. What we should be working towards is not making
gender discrimination illegal it is making sure that
every organization should have flexible working hours,
longer maternity leaves, the option to work from home,
programs to train people that have taken a break, etc.
This will help women have the flexibility they need
because in most cases women choose to leave their
jobs to take care of their families and are not able to
devote 100% of their time and energy to work, unlike
men who don’t have the responsibility to take care of
the house. With times changing these rules and
regulations are coming into place and men are also
sharing the responsibilities of taking care of the house.
Still, we haven’t yet achieved total gender diversity
which I think is something we all should work towards
achieving.