I recently received an email from the Undergraduate Women in Business club here at OSU that brought up the fact of inequality between genders in the workplace. I have always learned about things such as the gender wage gap and discrimination towards women at work, but it is becoming more of a reality for me as I am getting jobs and deciding what I want to do in the future. Some examples of the mistreatment that women receive in their workplace are being held to different standards than men, not being given a promotion or new opportunity, being talked down upon, and even being rejected because of a pregnancy. This is all completely unfair and unwarranted. Women are just as eligible as men are at completing the same task. These unfair treatments can be frustrating and make women feel helpless. Discrimination against women in the workplace is a systemic injustice because it has been happening since women began to work. Women are always being looked down upon and are seen as “not as qualified” or “incapable” compared to men. The fact that women are not hired, forced to go on leave, or purposefully given less tasks to do while they are pregnant is bizarre. Just because the woman’s body is capable of carrying a fetus for nine months, does not make her any less able to work. One thing that can be done to help change these occurrences is to have stricter laws regulating all the worker’s salaries at a business to make sure there are no wages discriminating against any gender or person of color. Another thing that can happen in a workplace are meetings that teach employees about the biases, conscious or unconscious, that a person can have against someone who is unlike them.
The unfair treatment of women in the workplace relates to the idea of Othering that we have been talking about in this class. Men are seen as the One group. They hold a lot of the power and this leads to women not being able to have the same advantages from the beginning.
This link shares women’s stories about the discrimination they went through after becoming pregnant: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/10/8563273/elizabeth-warren-pregnancy-discrimination-stories