Women are not advancing in the workplace at an appropriate rate.
Sharon Webster is angry. She has been an employee at Merrill Lynch for the past 18 years immediately after graduating from college. It’s a nice job with above the board benefits and perks and an excellent health care plan. So what could be the source of her indignation? Recently, she had applied for a vacant position but was betered by a male counterpart who is less qualified and has fewer years of experience. Sounds familiar? Studies have shown that there is still widespread discrimination of women in the workplace on various levels. Globally, the work world remains generally intractable and indifferent to the socio-economic ambitions of women. The corporate creature keeps them at arm’s-length, barring them from a ‘circle of fellowship’, whose price for admission is usually a cocktail of testosterone and connections. Society usually gives us the general impression that women are rapidly climbing the ladder of commercial success. But is this really true? The United Nations Chartered Council shows that in the workplace 73.2% of supervisors are men while a meagre 26.8% are women. Think about that for minute-that’s a gigantic gap. And what would you say if I told that in most countries- while women make up a significant portion of the work force- they are paid significantly less than men and are subjected to sub-level positions, would this surprise you? But it is true. Women in the work place are bearing the scars inflicted by the monster of gender discrimination which are as deep as the well of tears that has also marked their struggle. This discrimination manifests itself in various ways: while they are very much present in the workplace, they are hardly securing executive and managerial positions while being highly qualified; they are often not being paid at the same level as males for the same positions. Also, due to these gender biased blows and society’s entrenched gender gap they often times develop low self-esteem.
With respect to work relations, John Stuart Mill remarks, “Millions of women are enduring the brunt of gender bias in the workplace” (67). But this quote still leaves us with an abstracted sense of what is really going on; let us take a closer look at the underbelly of gender discrimination, particularly, the snubbing of scores of women for promotion even when they are more qualified than their male counterparts.
1. Finn, Lisa. "Female Discrimination in the Workplace." Editorial. Global Post-America's World News Site. N.p., 2005. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. .
Advancement from Enlightenment As the 1900's rolled around, many changes were to come. New leaders, government styles, and new ideas were just the start. The main focus of the Enlightenment era was based on reason, rationalism, and the idea of "Inevitable Progress. " Enlightenment was pushed forward by great people such as Kant, Bulgaria, Thomas Jefferson, Isaac Newton, Francois-Marie Ardouet de Voltaire, Thomas Hobbes, to name a few.
Mini-Q Essay A time period known as The Age of Reason or The Enlightenment was when philosophy, politics, science and social communications changed drastically. It helped shape the ideas of capitalism and democracy, which is the world we live in today. People joined together to discuss areas of high intellect and creative thoughts. The Enlightenment was a time period in which people discussed new ideas, and educated people, known as philosophers, all had a central idea of freedom of choice and the natural right of individuals. These philosophers include John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Unfortunately, even today, women are still trying to prove themselves equal to men in many ways. The “glass ceiling” is perhaps one of the most familiar and evocative metaphors to surface from the 20th century. This expression has been used widely in the popular media as well as in official government reports. The image suggest that although it may be the case now that women are able to get through the front door professional hierarchies, at some point they hit an invisible barrier that blocks any further upward movement. “Below this barrier, women are able to get promoted; beyond this barrier, they are not”. Such a situation can be considered a limiting case for a more general phenomenon: situations in which the disadvantages women face relative to men strengthen as they move up executive hierarches. “Traditional approaches to recruitment, organization and job design, performance management and promotions are often designed in ways that are more suited to men than to women. This is what creates the glass ceiling”. Beyond the limit of job titles, the glass ceiling also creates a pay difference between men and women performing the same work requirements.
In February 2015, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm, for gender discrimination went on trial. Pao alleged that she had been treated unfairly by her ex-bosses and passed on numerous times for promotion in favor of her male counterparts. While Pao did not win her lawsuit, the trial brought back to light the problem of gender discrimination and of the glass ceiling in corporate America. Since women started to enter the workforce, there always have been barriers and obstacles that prevented them from reaching the higher ranks on the corporate ladder. Public recognition that there was indeed a problem of discrimination helped giving women assurance
The Enlightenment is a unique time in European history characterized by revolutions in science, philosophy, society, and politics. These revolutions put Europe in a transition from the medieval world-view to the modern western world. The traditional hierarchical political and social orders from the French monarchy and Catholic Church were destroyed and replaced by a political and social order from the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality(Bristow, 1). Many historians, such as Henry Steele Commager, Peter Gay, have studied the Enlightenment over the years and created their own views and opinions.
The Enlightenment was a period in European culture and thought characterized as the “Age of Reason” and marked by very significant revolutions in the fields of philosophy, science, politics, and society (Bristow; The Age of Enlightenment). Roughly covering the mid 17th century throughout the 18th century, the period was actually fueled by an intellectual movement of the same name to which many thinkers subscribed to during the 1700s and 1800s. The Enlightenment's influences on Western society, as reflected in the arts, were in accordance with its major themes of rationalism, empiricism, natural rights and natural law or their implications of freedom and social justice.
The Enlightenment was a period of intellectual and social growth which took place in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . It was a huge and dramatic change throughout the world. It changed the way people looked at the world. During this period, Declaration of the rights of men and citizens were passed by the government. People started to search the world around them and started to create new ideas and inventions. The enlightenment was a period of success because it focused on the use of reason and logic, developments in science and art and political philosophers rethought the role of government.
The Enlightenment was a major part of our history. The philosophers like Adam Smith, John Locke, Voltaire, and Mary Wollstonecraft all believed in equality of individuals and the right to an education.
The term enlightenment means ‘the action of enlightening or the state of being enlightened.’ The Enlightenment or the Age of reason was a movement in the 17th and 18th centuries which began in France. This time was mostly influenced by philosophers. People were starting to use reasoning to understand and explain their surroundings.
The Enlightenment was an age of reason in the 18th century that brought about many changes in intellectual life. Philosophers of the Enlightenment had a commitment to spread the use of reason from nature to human society by creating concepts of human rights, progress, and tolerance. Many great historians have attempted to recover knowledge to give their perspectives on the era and to establish elaborate descriptions of past events. While some mostly focused on the rise and history of the ideas, others were more concerned with the social and cultural context of these ideas. Some Enlightenment historians consist of Peter Gay, Dena Goodman, and Fredrick Artz. Each individual has taken a different approach on the Enlightenment with the intentions of educating their readers about such a great intellectual era.
The institutionalized discrimination of women in the work place is nothing new or unheard of. The brunt of it has happened fairly recently as women began to enter the labor market in force less than a century ago. The affect of this discrimination has had long lasting, generation spanning affects, but as time has passed and feminism spread, the gender-gap has slowly begun to shrink.
The Enlightenment is a name given by historians to an intellectual movement that was predominant in the Western world during the 18th century. Strongly influenced by the rise of modern science and by the aftermath of the long religious conflict that followed the Reformation, the thinkers of the Enlightenment (called philosophes in France) were committed to secular views based on reason or human understanding only, which they hoped would provide a basis for beneficial changes affecting every area of life and thought.
For many decades, women have faced inequalities in the workforce. At one point, they were not allowed to work at all. Although women's rights have improved and are now able to work alongside men, they are still treated unfairly. According to the 2012 U.S. Census, women’s earnings were “76.5 percent of men’s” (1). In 2012, men, on average, earned $47,398 and women earned only $35,791. This is when comparing employees where both gender spend the same amount of time working. Not only do women encounter unfairness in work pay, they also face a “glass ceiling” on a promotional basis. This glass ceiling is a “promotion barrier that prevents woman’s upward ability” (2). For example, if a woman is able to enter a job traditionally for men, she will still not receive the same pay or experience the same increase in occupational ability. Gender typing plays a huge role in the workplace. It is the idea that women tend to hold jobs that are low paid with low status. Women are not highly considered in leadership positions because of social construction of gender. Society has given women the role of “caretakers” and sensitive individuals. Therefore, women are not depicted as authoritative figures, which is apparent with the absence of women in leadership roles in companies. Furthermore, sex segregation leads to occupations with either the emphasis of women in a certain job or men in a certain job. In 2009, occupations with the highest proportion of women included “secretary, child care worker, hair dresser, cashier, bookkeeper, etc.” (3). Male workers typically held job positions as construction workers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc. (3). Sex segregation represents inequality because the gender composition for these jobs depends on what ...
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.