SDG#5 How attitudes towards gender affect women's experience in the workplace
How attitudes towards gender affect women's experience in the workplace and What Can Businesses Do?
06 February 2023
The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the month for February is SDG 5: ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’. Globally, it is harder for women to find employment than men, and often women's employment is more likely to be low paid or to be exposed to vulnerable working conditions. One of the reasons to blame for this is gender roles across the world, which often affect women due to expectations to undertake unpaid labour in the home such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing instead of having a paid job. Moreover, in some cultures, paid work is frowned upon for women, with global statistics showing that 20% of men and 14% of women believe that it is unacceptable for women to undertake paid work outside of the home. In many countries, including the UK, gender expectations surrounding paid work are less prominent. But despite significant strides towards gender equality, attitudes towards gender continue to affect women negatively in the workplace.
Gender bias at work means that masculine qualities are often rewarded such as being self-oriented, independent, assertive, competitive and risk taking. Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher even took elocution lessons in order for her voice to sound more masculine and authoritative. However, there is now a movement to embrace feminine traits in the workplace such as being nurturing, a good listener and having empathy. Some businesses require new staff to take unconscious bias training because people may not be aware that they are prioritising masculine traits.
Following from this, women with other inequalities can experience heightened discrimination in the workplace. Kimberlé Crenshaw is a researcher who focuses on intersectional inequalities, which is the concept that when people are exposed to numerous inequalities they can multiply each other. For example, when studying women in shelters in the United States, she finds that factors such as race, class and gender interact to worsen the overall effect of inequality. This is another aspect that companies should be aware of when considering unconscious bias.
Additionally, attitudes around gender roles mean that women are unequally burdened with unpaid labour in the home, which can carry through to their work lives. Data from 2022 in the UK shows that employed women with dependent children spent significantly more time on childcare and household work than employed men with dependent children. This can lead to women having a 'double burden' because they are undertaking both unpaid care work and paid work for their job. This double burden is linked to higher levels of sick leave, job dissatisfaction, burnout and health problems. Since the pandemic, workplaces have incorporated more hybrid, work from home and flexible working arrangements, which is advantageous for many women who undertake childcare duties.
Moreover, attitudes in the workplace regarding childcare needs also seem to be shifting. An example of this is Jacinda Arden, prime minister of New Zealand, who made headlines as the first world leader to bring her baby to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Her baby was still at the stage of breast-feeding so needed to travel with Arden. This has been viewed as a ground-breaking event because it normalises childcare needs for working mothers and provides an example of progressive feminist leadership. As attitudes around childcare needs in the workplace become more parent-friendly, it will further reduce inequalities that women face at work by providing them with the flexibility that they need.
Representation in male dominated industries or in leadership positions is another issue for women in the workplace and it can lead to a gender pay gap due to more men in senior positions or in higher earning sectors such as technology or engineering. Representation is important because when we see people that we resonate with in professional positions, it inspires us to strive for similar goals. Additionally, a range of diverse perspectives is important because it means that more peoples' needs will be catered to. Women in policy making positions within an organisation are more likely to consider women's needs such as having menopause policies and breastfeeding in the workplace policies (check out ESGmark®'s menopause guide here and breastfeeding in the workplace policy here).
The different careers that men and women choose can be attributed to gender socialisation theory. This is the concept that gender roles shape the way that boys and girls develop because of the expectations that society places on them to act in certain ways. Over the long term this may change as we become more aware, as a society, of the different ways in which we bring up boys and girls. However, there is no way of knowing if, or how quickly, this could affect different career choices between genders. Therefore, a quicker solution that some businesses choose in order to address representation issues is to apply gender quotas. This has the advantage of guaranteeing women's positions in leadership but it is controversial because of the idea that jobs should be awarded based on meritocracy (check out our blog on gender quotas here for more about this).
In conclusion, we can see that even in higher income countries there are still obstacles for women in the workplace based on attitudes towards gender. Your organisation can help to address these by embracing feminine traits in the workplace, recognising that some women experience intersectional inequalities, allowing flexible working conditions, and working on representation for women. Perhaps as women and parent-friendly attitudes in the workplace become more normalised, bringing a baby to a world leaders' conference will no longer make headlines!