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Since the mid 1800s, women have been trying to make their way of equality into the society. Women have come a long way into being accepted as an equal in which it has been a steady progression. Women have fought their way through voting, equal rights, hold office, and even work. It was not until the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964 that discrimination was illegal in the workplace (excluding age).
Specifically, it was made to prevent the “fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges or employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. ” Gender discrimination “involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person’s sex.
It also can involve treating someone less favorably because of his or her connection with an organization or group that is generally associated with people of a certain sex. ” Women are still not being heard as they should and although they are no longer living in a “man’s world,” the discrimination is still there. When women decided to work and it was becoming more accepted, there were not many careers for women to choose from. Gender discrimination is not only discriminating women but men as well.
Examples of gender discrimination against women include: “1) an employee who alleges that his or her manager only promotes male employees and keeps females in entry-level positions; 2) an employee who alleges that a manager or other person in power tells jokes or makes statements that are demeaning, insulting, or offensive to women; 3) a manager who makes it clear, either through his actions or words, that he wants to have sexual relations with a female employee; 4) a manager who asks inappropriate and unnecessary questions about a female employee’s sex life; and 5) a manager who touches his female employees in inappropriate ways without consent. ” These five examples can lead to termination of employment along with trouble with the law. The fourth and fifth example is known to be sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment is known to be a growing concern in many businesses and it still a problem that is not addressed properly. Since it is a problem that is continuing over the years, there seems like there is no right way to go about it. Failure or neglect to address this problem can result in “not only in costly lawsuits, but also in a loss of employee morale, decline in productivity, and an erosion of a company’s public image”. This means that if management decides to not handle this problem this can be loss of ethics in the workplace, expensive lawsuits against them, no desire for employees to work or perform as well as they should be which can slow down business or production, and can completely destroy a company’s image.
In 2008, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission”received 13,867 charges of sexual harassment. 15. 9% of those charges were filed by males. EEOC resolved 11,731 sexual harassment charges in FY 2008 and recovered $47. 4 million in monetary benefits for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals (not including monetary benefits obtained through litigation). ” While in 2010, the EEOC brought in “11,717 charges — 83. 6 percent from women — yielding $48. 4 million in monetary benefits (not including monetary benefits obtained through litigation) for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals. ” Although it is getting better then three years ago, it is still a prime issue.
People do not handle sexual harassment because of the costs. Millions of dollars can be lost each year in sexual harassment so they rather leave the problem unsolved or untouched in fears of making any careless mistakes. Women have to deal with many hardships including of those stereotypes that have been put on them over the years. Women are portrayed as a certain way from men, media, and the American society. Bob Enyart (a Christian radio talk show host) once said, “Women were not made to run things. Men were made to run things. When women try to run things and usurp the authority from men they mess things up. ” This is another example on how people follow these old-fashioned views.
An example of media is a sitcom called “My Wife and Kids”. The husband was an entrepreneur while the wife was a stay-at-home mother. There was one episode in which the wife proposed the idea on opening her own restaurant, and the husband attempting to reject the idea of her working. This show is just one of the many examples in which the media portrays men working while women have this role as a “housewife”. In the past and presently there are shows aimed at targeting women as such. However, recently plots have started to change such as in shows like “Modern Family,” and “Whitney”. In American society, women deal with the hardships due to the fact that men found this country.
Women adapted to the fact that it is a “man’s world,” and women will always be on a lesser level. It is the small factors and aspects that lead Americans to believe that women will never be accepted the way men are. Realistically, this needs to change because of the economy. If there was a family of four and only one parent working making a salary of $100,000 that is hardly enough to live comfortably. With the rise in prices of nearly everything, more money is needed to “make ends meet. “America has adapted to the fact that women could work yet simply will not earn as much as men, which leads into the “glass ceiling effect”. There has been a barrier of salary equality between man and woman. This is known to be the “glass ceiling effect”.
Specifically, it is “the unseen, yet unbreachable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements. ” Although the role of women has increased in society, this effect is still very much in use. In the last two decades women have made up of almost half of law school graduates yet “in law firms, women make up 45 percent of associates but only 15 percent of equity partners and 6 percent of equity partners at the 200 largest firms. ” Women may find work in law firms yet they are at a high disadvantage for being a female that there are very few of them are partners. Pay for female lawyers is generally less ??? the median income is 74 percent of what men earn ??? with the gap widening as they move higher. Another study has found that some 90 percent of female lawyers report having encountered sex discrimination in the profession, a percentage that has not decreased since the 1970s”. Proskauer Rose has been charged with a $10 million gender discrimination lawsuit by its former CFO, Elly Rosenthal. She filed this suit against them because the firm “marginalized her and eventually fired her after she took leave for breast cancer treatment”. This means that after her medical leave she was demoted and denied pay increases and eventually getting replaced by a man who was less qualified than her (15 years of excellent performance on her behalf).
She agreed to a pay cut due to the fact she went back working four days instead of five days a week after her treatment but was never pay in full after returning to five days a week. She also initiated ideas or ways that the firm can save money in which she was ignored or another man would take credit for it. In this particular firm, women make up only less of 15% of its partners and none on its top administrative positions. In the government, there are only “three women on the Supreme Court, as of last year women made up only 22 percent of the federal judiciary and 26 percent of state judges. No state has equal representation of women on the bench. ” This is the example America leads by their government not having equal representation of both men and women.
Women are not asking to be superior to men but just at equality in “the land of the free,” where their families and ancestors migrated to for equality and opportunities. Although, women have made a spot for themselves in society but they still do not feel equal in the workplace. Are they equal with men in salary, superiority, and overall respect? Men continue to be a clear majority in the government, prominent positions in businesses, and other public places of power. It has been proven that if a woman has received the proper education along with credentials, they are still not always considered for the same job as a man with the same credentials or even less. This generally created a bigger gap in the income wage gap.
There was the Equal Pay Act of 1963 that was meant to solve this problem of differences in salary between man and woman, but it still occurs today. Although it did not end the unequal pays, it did improve. “The only exemptions to the law were for seniority, established merit systems that paid all employees based on job performance, systems that paid wages based on the quantity or quality of the work produced, and wage differences that were based on some factor other than sex. ” A 1999 study showed that “women still earn only 72 cents for every dollar that male workers earn for similar work. Employers even go so far as to change job titles or employment requirements just to find a way to make jobs seem different enough to justify paying women less than men. Courts are now trying to improve the system by comparing the job descriptions too see if it is at equality. In a study, it was shown that education does not matter for women in comparison to a man. It seems as the higher the education the bigger the gap is between man and woman on salary. For instance, a woman and a man who has completed less than 9th grade, the woman is making 76% of what the man makes. For a woman and a man with a professional degree, she is making only 60% of the man’s salary. Here is the chart with the related information as of 2001: There is confusion on when gender discrimination can occur. It occurs in the workplace even before the worker gets hired. A company can be liable if pre-employment screening or testing is determined to be discriminatory, if applications ask unacceptable questions designed to screen for sex. ” An example of this is if a man without a college degree gets an administrative position over a woman who has their master’s degree. In the early years of the new millennium, Rent-A-Center was notoriously known for multiple accounts of discrimination in their company. In 2002, Rent-A-Center was charged with sexual discrimination in which women were demoted out of their top positions and replaced by men, along with throwing out women job applications. J. Ernest Talley, a senior executive at that time stated, “Women should be home taking care of their husbands and children. When he went into the company at 1998, he was known to be an individual of anti-feminism. After he went under management, the proportion of women in the work force went from 21. 8% to 9. 8% within a year. To better support this statement, in 2000 there was a newsletter of all 66 male store managers (not one was female). This goes with the fact that men like Talley believe in a more traditional lifestyle in which “men rule the world. ” Old-fashioned or traditional people more or less do not believe in women working or do not believe that women have the credentials to have a job or career. This makes society believe that women only belong in the house and raising the children.
This leads to many gender disputes and even supporting feminists’ views. Unfortunately, although America is supposed to be known as the “land of the free,” things like this still occur. Outside of America, there are many cultures where women will never be equal to men and the men have control and power over women. Talley not only discriminated against women but there were claims that he sexually assaulted women as well. This was not the only case that Rent-A-Center faced. They had to pay $47 million dollars to women due to the discrimination and termination of women for no logical or apparent reason. In more recent news, Wal-Mart has been charged in the state of California with gender bias against women.
It was once a nation’s lawsuit but in October 2011, they changed it to the state of California. One worker in California claimed that a manager said she needs to “doll up” to be promotable. Another woman claimed an assistant manager said “This is why we will are concerned about promoting women with children”. This first complaint against Wal-Mart has started in 1998, and has been getting bigger ever since. “At least 95,000 current and former female Wal-Mart workers may be covered by the new complaint, said Brad Seligman, an attorney for the employees. ” In 2004, district managers were told that women were better at information processing while men were better at focus.
The “key to success was a single focus to get the job done. ” Wal-Mart has since made proposals to help spend more money on products from women-based businesses. The company also claimed they would support training of women farms and factories, donates $100 million to supporting women economic development, and to ask its vendors and services firms to increase gender and minority representation on their accounts. Wal-Mart claims they are not doing this in result of the class action case but because a majority of their customers and employees are female. A company will never admit to being bias against women yet deny the claims and try to fix it in other ways without harming its reputation.
Although this may seem as women are always the victims of discrimination that is not the case to many men. In many instances, some men feel that feminists are the ones stirring up the attention of equality. Men feel why women should go around demanding equal rights when they have it easier than men in the workplace. For instance, why should a woman bricklayer get paid equal to or greater than a man who was in the field ten more years and did twice the work? Just because they both have the same job title does not mean that other aspects should not be looked at thoroughly. Works Cited Clifford, Stephanie, and Stephanie Strom, eds. “Wal-Mart to Announce Women-Friendly Plans. ” Editorial. New York Times 14 Sept. 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. lt;http://www. nytimes. com/2011/09/14/business/wal-mart-to-announce-women-friendly-plans. html? _r=2>. “EEOC OPPOSES SETTLEMENT OF RENT-A-CENTER LAWSUIT. ” US EEOC Home Page. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www. eeoc. gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/12-13-01. cfm>. “Equality Between Men and Women Is Not Achievable. ” Men’s Movement and Men’s Rights – Fathers For Justice. Web. 21 Nov. 2011. <http://angryharry. com/esEqualityNotAchievable. htm>. Fisk, Margaret Cronin, and Karen Gullo. “Wal-Mart Workers Limit Gender Bias Suit to California Stores – Bloomberg. ” Bloomberg – Business & Financial News, Breaking News Headlines. 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 1 Nov. 2011. <http://www. bloomberg. com/news/2011-10-27/wal-mart-women-limit-gender-bias-claims-to-california-workers-in-lawsuit. html#>. “Gender Discrimination (Encyclopedia of Small Business) – ENotes. com. ” ENotes – Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www. enotes. com/gender-discrimination-reference/gender-discrimination-178517>. “Gender Discrimination (Encyclopedia of Small Business) – ENotes. com. ” ENotes – Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More. Web. 18 Nov. 2011. <http://www. enotes. com/gender-discrimination-reference/gender-discrimination-178517>. “The Glass Ceiling. New York Times 08 October 2011, n. pag. 0. ;http://www. nytimes. com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/the-glass-ceiling. html;. Lips, Hilary M. “Gender Wage Gap — Male-Female Pay Difference. ” Welcome to WomensMedia. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. ;http://www. womensmedia. com/new/Lips-Hilary-gender-wage-gap. shtml;. Mahabeer, Pamela. “Sexual Harassment Still Pervasive in the Workplace – Careers Articles. ” Jobs, Careers, and Job Listings – AOL Jobs. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. ;http://jobs. aol. com/articles/2011/01/28/sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace/;. Pierson, Brendan. “Ex-Proskauer CFO Sues Firm for Gender Bias. ” New York Journal (2011). New York Journal.
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