Sunday, 21 October 2018

Benefits of Gender Diversity in the Workplace


There are many ways workplaces can benefit by including gender diversity in their workforce. Gender diversity offers a workforce unique skills, encourages effective teamwork, develops innovative ideas and helps to develop new problem-solving strategies. Because men and women are generally raised differently and come from different life experiences, this, in turn, produces a team of diverse employee perspectives.

If only like-minded people worked together, employees would hardly be encouraged to think outside the box, and many policies or strategies would never progress effectively.




https://www.ccl.org/articles/white-papers/7-reasons-want-women-workplace/
7 Reasons You Want Women in the Workplace










While researching the benefits of gender diversity in the workplace, most studies and articles claim to find that workplaces with a greater gender diversity tend to have higher overall satisfaction rates when compared with only male-dominated teams. They found also that when women were in management, there also tended to be a better sense of team and belonging in their company.




https://chinagorman.com/category/gender-diversity/
Women are stereotypically portrayed to be more empathetic and have nurturing qualities. This could be the reason these surveys have found women to provide an effective change in work environments. Women also tend to encourage more open lines of communication and are more comfortable with displaying emotions. Honesty and transparency are important when building a team that has the chemistry important to develop workplace efficiency and success.


5 Benefits of Implementing Gender Diversity in the Workplace
Since women have come into the workforce there has also been an increase in ethics policies enforced that benefit everyone in the workplace. Perhaps men just thought unfair workplace practices were just something they had to deal with, but when women joined the workforce they saw that harassment, greed, overly-competitive attitudes only slowed down the business. Many women take pride in standing up for what they believe is right, so they continue to take a stand to work towards better work environments for everyone.


*Watch Gender Diversity: A Competitive Advantage for Companies 




Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ew6pGkKSAY
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Saturday, 20 October 2018

The Gender-Wage Gap

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/agencies-rush-meet-gender-pay-gap-deadline/1461051
A largely debated issue in terms of gender inequality in the workplace has been the wage gap. It’s important to note when we refer to “the wage gap” we are not talking about misconceptions that it is only based on average salaries across the country, and neither are we referring to how many males are employed in higher ranked positions than women; the wage gap refers to women, in the same positions, performing the same duties, being paid significantly less than men. Not only is this practice not fair, but it signifies to women that they are still below men, not as valued in the workplace, or not “worth” as much.

Although it was not always an accepted concept, most Canadians are now noting that they know there is a wage gap and believe something should be done about it. For those that are still skeptical, in the Global News article below, journalist Marillisa Racco "debunks" these common myths on the gender gap.


"These two operations specialists both worked for a tech startup in Toronto. They were on the same team and had the same amount of experience: one year. She was promoted to a supervisor role but left soon after for another job in tech with fairer compensation. (Photographs by Micah Bond and Marta Iwanek; Caption story by Catherine McIntrye, MacLean's, 2018)"


Unfortunately, the wage gap has an even greater impact on women of racialized minorities, including Canada’s Indigenous women. In a country that promotes and takes pride in multiculturalism and diversity, we need to be showing these women that they are valued in our workplaces.

The wage gap isn’t just about making money. We know that lower income builds a greater divide on social statuses of our Canadian minorities, and increases issues of racialized poverty. In Canada, our populations of racialized women in poverty* outnumber men, and on average have higher education levels compared non-racialized poverty populations. This points to an even larger issue our country needs to address.
Facts and Image presented by Marilisa Racco, (Global News, 2018.)

(*Canada excludes Aboriginal people from their statistics on racialized poverty populations)
Government of Canada: Snapshot on Racialized Poverty







Fortunately, in terms of regulations, our country has been moving in the right direction. Canada signed the International Labour Organization’s Convention 100, the Equal Remuneration Convention, which the Government of Canada set to try to ensure equal compensation for work of equal value regardless of gender and reminds employers that pay equity is protected in the Canadian Human Rights Act. The government of Ontario also implemented an equal pay law in the Employment Standards Act this year, which protects those working in businesses of 25 or more employees.






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Thursday, 18 October 2018

Gendered Career Stereotypes



Most Canadians are familiar with typical workplace stereotypes, and we often participate in them ourselves without even thinking. The way we have been raised has largely influenced how we view suitable professions as being gender specific. Common examples include: men as doctors, women as nurses; men as lawyers, women as the office law clerk; CEO’s are men, secretaries are women, or even just the titles: policemen, firemen, etc.


https://blog.dol.gov/2017/03/01/12-stats-about-working-women
Counter to the common stereotype, the gap between male and female doctors has changed drastically. According to the Canadian Medical Association female physicians now account for 60% of medical practitioners in Canada under 35 years of age, and 53% aged 35-44.














Unfortunately, these stereotypes are often used during some companies hiring processes, giving an unfair advantage to men to get hired more easily. This still occurs in cases when a woman has equal or greater experience and education than their male competitors.






The image and website "Science for Work" explain how even in female-dominated or integrated positions, there is no particular preference for hiring a female over a male.



The #BanBossy campaign created to encourage girls and women to take leadership and initiative talks about how females are often labelled with negative terms when taking a leadership stance. We often tend to hear words like “bossy” or “controlling” stereotyped onto women with leading attitudes or even women who are the boss. In contrast, men would tend to be viewed as more powerful or assertive in nature for displaying the same characteristics.



In my opinion, since women have entered the workforce, business values have increased to benefit more people. Human rights, diversity and stronger ethics have been implemented into more workplaces creating a better atmosphere for Canada’s growing diverse population. While we still have a long way to go to create completely fair and equitable business environments and opportunities, women have only just started their momentum in working towards this. Many men will feel the same way as women and want equality, as they see their mothers, sisters, friends, wives and daughters all working just as hard in their positions as they are. Diversity in leadership is important for providing new ideas, innovations and technology to help businesses and workplaces thrive.

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Tuesday, 16 October 2018

Female Entrepreneurship

Usually, when we think of entrepreneurship, we can list at least a few famous founders of successful businesses. When you think of great entrepreneurs, what are some well-known names that come to mind? Perhaps names like Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) or even Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) sound familiar? Regardless of whether we know any famous entrepreneurs, when we think about business owners or CEOs, a certain picture tends to come to our minds: typically males in fancy suits putting in long hours to gain their success.  


This is because the representation of successful business creators in media and movies are men. Since women have joined the workforce, there has been very little representation of female entrepreneurship. Often opinions are thrown around that women don’t work as hard for the success of their business, but it comes down to women having to work a lot harder to gain respect and be taken seriously.


In an interview with a star from the popular entrepreneurial TV series Dragon’s Den, Jenny Campbell explains that there are many issues with the perceptions of women in business that run all the way to the top people in the industry. Campbell is a very successful businesswoman who sold her business for the Canadian dollar equivalent of $85.4 million, but she claims in many business meeting around the world, she is still often assumed to just be the wife of whichever businessman standing next to her. You can check out her full interview with The Telegraph in the link below.



Unfortunately, even successful female names with international companies don’t get as much recognition. Most people know Oprah Winfrey as a celebrity because of her widely marketed daytime talk show. Her net worth is over $3 billion USD. But what about Jin Sook Chang, the founder of the international clothing store Forever 21, with a net worth of 3.1 billion USD? We hear of Steve Jobs, but what about Wang Laichun (net worth $1.5 billion USD), the chairholder of Luxshare, the electronics manufacturing company that supplies Apple with most of the parts for their products?


We need a wider representation of female entrepreneurship and recognition of their success to defeat stereotypes that negatively affect women in business. There are many successful business women in this world, and due to the nature of the industry, they have probably worked even harder than men to get to their respected positions. Women can bring unique perspectives to businesses to create even more innovation and technology to many markets and industries.  


In the Dragon’s Den episode below, Alicia Woods successfully presents her market of women’s coveralls for women who work in mining and other trades that require protective work equipment. Woods displays a great example of how women can bring expertise to large business markets that men simply cannot.  



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Sunday, 14 October 2018

Women and Education


https://ubisafe.org/explore/educating-clipart-quality-education/

Over the last couple of decades, women have managed to bridge the gap in education that existed between genders. Much like working, women were not always allowed to attend post-secondary education, and many did not even finish high school but stayed home to help the family. Since this time, women have surpassed the number of men that enrol in post-secondary education and also exceeded the number of men that graduate from programs with diplomas or degrees.




Statistics Canada: Rise in Women's Education






Yet somehow, women are still at a biased disadvantage when being hired for a company. As discussed in earlier posts, even women with the same or greater levels of education are also paid significantly less when they do get hired. They are also more likely to graduate from post-secondary programs only to be hired at less prestigious or lower paying jobs. As a result, later in life women still continue to carry a higher amount of student debt than men. With student debt being a lingering burden, this can hold women back in other areas of progression in their personal life (ie. purchasing a car, a home, starting a family, supporting older parents, etc.)



http://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-three-es-to-reach-equality.html
Economists have observed that higher education rates have contributed to declining birth rates, and this could also arguably be due to the extra financial strain that comes with it. If a woman is working a full-time job getting paid less than a man and unable to pay off her debt even by later years of her life, having a child is even a harder decision. Women need to take maternity leave when planning to start a family, which amounts to even less financial support and more bills to pay. While economists debate whether declining birth rates have a positive or negative effect on the economy, the financial hardships of trying to start a family are definitely having an impact on work-life balance and overall quality of life. While it is not in every woman’s plans to have a family, the majority of the population will plan to settle down to create a home life for themselves.



Education is meant to improve our quality of life. More women are working hard to be educated to gain better careers, but then they are having to work harder to pay off student debt because we are paid less than men. Or it is simply just harder to get hired even with more education and experience because biases against female employees still exist. This is why gendered stereotypes in the workplace are negatively impacting women still. We are allowed to get an education, we can have careers and work our way up, but somehow there is always something giving us a disadvantage against men. Companies, business owners and CEOs need to realize the benefits gender diversity brings into the workplace so we can continue to work towards equality for everyone in the Canadian workforce.



Resources:

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