A systematic injustice that is very prevalent and constricting in our modern world is women in the workplace. My roommate is a chemical engineer major and I witness her struggles daily. Today, she was finishing a group project that she had worked very hard on while the men in the group conversed about their activities of the day. She is a very quick worker and extremely intelligent, so she ended up taking a leadership role on the majority of the assignment. Although she completed the assignment single-handedly, the group of men decided the only “fair” way of assigning a top contributor was to play a game of rock-paper-scissors. Following this match, she was placed below a guy in her group. In a second instance she could not find a bathroom in an engineer building. There were men’s bathrooms on every floor, but there were only two women’s bathrooms in the whole building. While this is not a major inconvenience it represents a larger issue in the professional world: there are significantly less women than men in STEM and business fields.
Although these are small examples, they represent the gender disparity in professional settings. In one of my business classes this semester, I learned that the national average for STEM fields is 27% females. Additionally, when looking at C-suite level executives only 20% are women. These statistics are baffling to me as most of my female peers are business or STEM majors. Why are we so under represented in the professional field? We all take the same classes in college, have virtually the same intelligence and social skills, so what makes a company so much more likely to hire and promote men? This question can only be answered on a systemic level. Women are constantly ignored, talked over, corrected, and made to feel inferior by their male counterparts. Even when they do excel, their efforts are discredited and overlooked. Girls grow up being taught boys are better at math, it is no wonder that there are significantly less women engineers in college than men. This translates to a low percentage of women in the workforce, and women feeling unable to speak up when they are mistreated in a professional setting.
In relation to our content this semester, the gender gap demonstrates De Beauvoir’s one/other theory. Although women may be equally as competent in the workplace they will always be the ‘other’ because the system always looks to serve a patriarchal narrative. In this way, meaningful change has to occur at an institutional level. Big name organizations, companies, and firms also need to take ethical responsibil for this issue.
http://hbr.org/2013/09/women-in-the-workplace-a-research-roundup
http://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/7-reasons-want-women-workplace/
https://www.asyousow.org/blog/gender-equality-workplace-issues
This is a very powerful showcase! I actually started out my first year in the business school thinking I was meant for the business world, but I thought wrong as I felt inferior in the business classes and much less powerful when it came to having room to talk over men. For STEM majors, it is something so little to look at, but it really is such an overarching problem for women who have a true passion and desire to succeed in these specific fields who are later looked down upon when it comes to finding jobs and even manager positions. Great post!
I personally feel so moved by this showcase and also motivated/empowered and also enraged and upset at the same time. I too have felt belittled by men in the STEM classes and I’m sure many other women have as well. It is such an overlooked issue that no one seems to pay attention too unless they have it happen to them or someone they know. The comparison to this topic to the concept from class is also spot on! This is a great post, thank you for sharing!
This is a great systematic injustice that you bring up in this journey entry and is definitely apart of a large scale of actions that need changed. I am so sorry for your roommate, but I have in fact seen and heard of circumstances similar to that of your roommate’s. Especially as STEM fields continue to grow, women and men need to have an equal playing field in the professional realm. I feel this will only be beneficial to both sides as more can get done and more voices (especially those of women) can be heard in the professional setting. Women have prepared the same (if not more in some cases in men) and deserve to have their fair share in what they worked hard to get to.
This was a very well written post and brought a lot to the showcase, I definitely relate to your roommate and how she is always being compared to a man while also not getting enough credit where credit is due. I am going to school to be a lawyer and that is a dominant male field as well, while I know that I will have issues with being compared to a man, I believe that we will slowly turn the tide for women all over the world.