Your Gendered Lives textbook discusses a number of informal organizational practices that contribute to discriminatory practices in organizations today. Define and discuss two of these practices that you believe are most damaging and explain why you believe this. Finally, pick one of the methods to redress gendered inequity and explain how this solution would help address the discriminatory practices discussed in your essay. What are the benefits and limitations of this method?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Unwelcoming environments for women—environments where language and behaviors emphasizing men’s experiences are normative (e.g., those in which sports, military, or sex metaphors are used to describe business practices or women experience resistance to entering a male-dominated field.)

Informal networks—also known as the “old boy network” since informal networks are predominately male. Organizational members often use informal communication to make hiring, promotion, and buying decisions, so they are vital to professional success. However, women and minorities tend to be less involved in informal networks since they feel different or outnumbered.
Mentoring relationships—occur when a senior colleague helps a junior employee build a career. Minorities and women have a harder time finding other minorities and women to mentor them, since fewer occupy senior positions. Men may also feel uncomfortable mentoring younger women for fear of gossip or sexual tension. These elements perpetuate patterns where white men receive more help in career advancement.
Glass ceilings and walls—Glass ceilings consist of subtle discrimination that acts as barriers to limit career advancement of women and minorities. The subtle discrimination may take form of the gendered stereotypes (see answer to question 1). The term glass walls is a metaphor referencing sex segregation in the workplace. Women tend to be placed in positions that require traditional feminine skills, which often do not include career advancement.

Students should provide an explanation of why they feel the two informal practices they have selected are the most damaging and then pick one of the following means to redressed gendered inequity and address a strength and weakness of this method. The answer should clearly indicate how this method will address the informal practices they have addressed in their response; this element of the answer may vary.

Equal Opportunity Laws—These are laws that prohibit discrimination against individuals who are members of groups who have historically faced discrimination. The focus is to extend equal opportunity to all within an organization. These laws would be unlikely to address the subtle, informal discriminatory practices addressed in this question.
Affirmative action—These policies aim to increase the representation of women and minorities in education and the workplace with qualified, although not necessarily the best qualified, candidates. These policies are based upon the ideas that in order to redress historical discrimination to groups of people, there should be preferential treatment for qualified members of these groups. The effectiveness of these policies is judged by results, not intent. Benefits of this method include addressing a legacy of bias against certain groups, while still maintaining qualification standards and gaining the benefits of diverse organizational membership at all levels of the organization. Disadvantages may include difficult implementation due to a limited availability of qualified people from historically underrepresented groups.
Quotas—Using a results-oriented focus like affirmative action, quotas aim to require a certain number or percentage of minorities and women to be admitted, hired, or promoted within an organization. A benefit of this method is women and/or minorities would be guaranteed to comprise a certain percentage of the organization. A disadvantage is that they may not be qualified and minority or female organizational members overall may be stigmatized as having only received a position because of belonging to a disadvantaged group.
Goals—Similar to quotas, but represents only an organization’s stated intention of achieving a certain percentage of women and/or minorities. Goals have the same advantages and disadvantages of quotas, with one additional disadvantage in that goals are not mandated. Therefore, failure to achieve a goal may have no consequences.
Diversity training—aims to increase awareness of and respect for difference. These programs have an underlying assumption that organizational members are unaware of subtle biases and introduce them to new ways of behaving and interpreting others. An advantage of the program is that participants may learn to avoid unconscious discrimination. A disadvantage is that participants must be motivated to learn and make changes for the program to be effective.