#workplace inequality

[gothcroissant]

Now that it’s cool to celebrate failure, it’s time we talk about how that reinforces inequality and structures of power.

If we’re going to learn from our mistakes let’s really learn from our mistakes.

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[sociologyquotes]

Men dominate 75% of conversation during conference meetings

“The conference table is meant to be a place where all opinions can be shared and disseminated in an equal setting.

Whether this works in practice is up for debate, but a study shows that - at a mixed table - men will dominate the conversation, taking up 75 per cent of the conversation, and leaving just 25 per cent of the talking to women.

[...]  In most groups that the scientists studied, the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation - amounting to less than 75 percent of the time that men spoke.

[...] The exception to this rule of gender participation, is that the time inequality disappeared when researchers instructed participants to decide by a unanimous vote instead of majority rule.

Results showed that the consensus-building approach was particularly empowering for women who were outnumbered by men in their group.”

---from the article The great gender debate: Men will dominate 75% of the conversation during conference meetings, study suggests by Eddie Wrenn

[worklabournewsresearch]

To Empower Black Employees, Corporate Leaders Need to Understand Black Families

“Reuters recently reported a surge in companies pledging to hire more Black employees. It’s a start. But corporations that are serious about increasing diversity numbers also need to encourage employees of color to ‘bring their whole selves to work,’ as culture experts like to say. ... Being Black in a mostly white workforce is stressful. We manage our emotions differently. We push back . . . a little. We express negative emotions strategically and only with colleagues with whom we’ve built trust. We’re overly deferential to avoid being labeled angry or difficult to work with. We don’t open up about ourselves for fear of becoming more unrelatable.”

“Here’s an example: Networking events are common in business. These are challenging for me because of the small talk. A topic that comes up a lot is college planning: 529 funds, the application process, tuition cost. I am surprised by how many of my peers are stressed out about paying for it. I think about my children and college, too, but as a Black mother, I’m more anxious about my Black son getting through a routine traffic violation without injury. This is what keeps me awake at night. How do I bring this up at a work event? Bridging the inclusion gap is more than adding color to your workforce. Leaders must get to know their Black employees and their experiences. Socialize with us. Meet us in our communities, read our stories, ask us about our challenges.”

“What are the right programs? Here are three: 

Close the racial pay gap

Give paid family leave 

Reduce college debt”

Fast Company, February 17, 2021: “To empower Black employees, corporate leaders need to understand Black families,” by Deanna Ransom

Photo Source: (2021). To empower Black employees, corporate leaders need to understand Black families [Illustration]. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90605214/to-empower-black-employees-corporate-leaders-need-to-understand-black-families

[worklabournewsresearch]

Barriers for Women Persist in Changing Economic Landscape

“Along with technology and sustainability, inequality is one of the three dimensions that shape the economic landscape of the 21st century. Persistent inequality leads to marginalization, exclusion from growing economic sectors and erosion of the capacity for economic and social development.”

“Studies on the economic impact of gender gaps assume men and women are likely to be born with the same potential, but disparities in access to education, health care, finances and technology, along with legal rights and social and cultural factors, prevent women from realizing this potential. The direct result is reduced productivity and lower economic growth. ... Where there is equality, growth is stronger and more sustainable—the correlation is undisputable. Action is needed to alleviate gender barriers: Good intentions are no longer enough.”

“Key Takeaways 

The economic burden of COVID-19 weighs heavier on women. Women in dual-earning households have been more likely to lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic and less likely to recover them in early stimulus and re-hiring initiatives.

Women’s lack of economic empowerment costs the economy anywhere from 10 percent of GDP in advanced economies to over 30 percent in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa

Higher education notwithstanding, Canada continues to have one of the highest gender wage gaps among Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries. Other issues also persist, like the under-representation of women (1) in STEM (2) and management positions and (3) women’s slow access to entrepreneurship and business ownership.”

Public Policy Forum, September 25, 2020: Economic Equality in a Changing World: Removing Barriers to Employment for Women, by Julie Cafley, Katie Davey, Tania Saba, Simon Blanchette, Ruby Latif, and Valentina Sitnik, (53 pages, PDF)

[philososquid]

How Black Women Describe Navigating Race and Gender in the Workplace

Interviews with ten professional women of color.

Everyone deserves support in their workplace and career. But for women of color, who already face prejudice and discrimination in the hiring process, that support is far less available to help them advance their careers. 

This article describes the experiences some black women have faced in the workplace. It’s important to understand their experiences to find ways where we can support them in our own lives. 

Challenge yourself. Notice yours and others bias. Call it out. Change it. 

[airborneranger63]

Conservatives: there are more male CEO’s than female CEO’s. This is proof, that women are dumber than men :)

Also Conservatives: boys are getting worse grades than girls at school, and men are dropping out of colleges at alarming rates??! Clearly, the Opressive Forces of Feminism are to blame for this disgusting inequality.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Of the top 20 global employers in 2017, five are outsourcing and “workforce solutions” companies, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence. In 2000, only one employer in the top 20—International Business Machines Corp., which offers outsourced IT services among its many businesses—fell into that bucket.

Outsourcing companies are vacuuming up the world’s workers as traditional employers are handing over more of their tasks to nonemployees, a shift that has transformed the way corporations do business and had profound effects on workers’ prospects and pay.

The past two decades have been boom times for the outsourcing sector, with the annual value of contracts growing to $37 billion in 2016 from $12.5 billion in 2000, according to research and advisory firm Information Services Group Inc. III +0.00% The market is expected to rise again in 2017 and 2018, thanks partly to double-digit growth in big technology projects as more companies transfer massive volumes of data to the cloud.

For employers, dispatching work to outside companies saves money and lets them access skills they need without adding to their headcount. Workers in jobs that have gone to outsourcers, though, can feel moved around like chess pieces, either displaced entirely or re-badged as employees of a service provider, sometimes with fewer benefits and lower pay. A growing body of economic research suggests that outsourcing is a significant factor fueling the rise of income inequality in the past decade.

“If all the engineers are in one firm and the cleaners are in another, you get less diversity within firms and more inequality across firms,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University. ... The breadth of services on offer from outsourcing firms is staggering. Compass Group was founded in 1941 to run factory cafeterias in wartime England, eventually branching out into corporate catering. It now employs more than 550,000 and counts among its subsidiaries firms like Eurest Services, which staffs and manages mailrooms for clients, provides them with full-time receptionists, sets up their conference rooms for meetings and operates their warehouses. Eurest’s clients include Google, SAP and Pfizer Inc. With so much work done outside the company, businesses employ fewer kinds of workers than they used to, a change that economists say has fueled income inequality.Outsourcing leads to workers being clustered in companies according to their skills, which affects pay and benefits. A bank used to employ janitors and security guards, in addition to traders and salespeople. For the sake of morale and a sense of fairness, management had an incentive to limit the disparities in employees’ compensation. That had the effect of boosting the pay of lower-skilled staff.

Now, those janitors might just as often work for an outside firm like Denmark’s ISS AS, one of the largest facility services companies in the world, while the high-skilled workers remain employed by the bank—a trend economists call occupational sorting. Pay for outside workers tends to be lower because outsourcing firms need to keep costs low to compete for contracts and because the workers don’t reap rewards from the financial successes of the bank.

Companies that provide security guards or IT help-desk workers have to show they can do the job more cheaply than the client can, keeping a tight lid on wages for those workers, says David Weil, a Labor Department official in the Obama administration and an expert on contract labor.

Outsourcing firms’ workforces, though, may shrink as algorithms take on more tasks, says Steve Hall, a partner at ISG.

“The large outsourcers are using a combination of analytics and automation to significantly reduce the need for labor,” he says. - Lauren Weber, “Some of the World’s Largest Employers No Longer Sell Things, They Rent Workers.” The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2017.

[missheardmedia]

Women’s Issues: Workplace Inequality by Tracy Yu

In 1963, a woman was paid 59 cents for every dollar that a man earned. The Equal Pay Act was passed as an effort to reduce that wage gap by making it an illegal act to pay men and women unequal wages for doing the same job. The act has gradually reduced the gap over time, but not nearly enough. The wage gap persists in the workforce with white women earning 20% less than men in 2015– and women of color making even less. Tracy talks workplace inequality: http://www.missheardmedia.com/workplace-inequality-by-tracyyu/