GENDER INEQUALITY : CAREER

Expository Essay: Gender inequality in career

In examining this trend of modernity, discrimination against women in work is certainly not

foreign in an organization.Many organizations have policies or programs to encourage female

employees in their careers but there is still a problem of discrimination against women in

society (Andrade,2022).The question is, what are the factors that cause this phenomenon to

continue to be prevalent nowadays? Discrimination problems often occur due to gender

differences that lead to various other forms of discrimination such as discrimination in the

distribution of wages, division of jobs and promotion.

The first factor that causes discrimination against women in employment is the distribution

of wages. Wage discrimination occurs due to the attitude of employers that differentiate the

quality of work between female workers and male workers.They think that men deserve higher

wages than women because male workers do more heavy work even though they work in the

same position.This phenomenon leads to discrimination against women which further causes

women to hold low-status jobs.According Elson and Pearson (2011),women are considered

to have lower productivity than men because they are attributed to their secondary status in

the labour market,which is seen as a natural consequence of their capasity to bear children.

Moreover, the division of labor is one of the causes of discrimination against women in the

workplace. Male employees are often given priority to occupy high and highly-paid positions

in organizations. For instance, operators, architects, and technicians.This is because

employers believe that men have the skills for the job and that they have stronger and more

durable bodies compared to female workers. At the same time, they think that women tend to

hold positions in the service sector where the work tasks are easier and suitable with women’s

more gentle characteristics.

Discrimination against women occurs in their jobs because women are often seen as

laborers that can be hired and fired.This is because womens are considered “permanent

employees” who are the backbone of the family.For example,recently female doctors’ break

in their career because of pregnancy and childcare has been recognized as a social problem

from the standpoint of shortage of doctors in Japan (Nomura et al., 2010).Society thinks that

women’s lives are still taken care of by men, either husbands, fathers, or other male relatives

if they lose their jobs.These things are factors why many women are laid off from work.

To sum up, discrimination against women is indeed a familiar issue in the work world,

affecting women’s involvement in work. Women’s involvement in work forces them to compete

with men who dominate the employment sector on average. As for women, if they find that

they are being discriminated against at work, they should have the courage to report to the

Human Resources Department to prevent this from continuing.