Women in Labryinth

WOMEN IN LABYRINTH

Bharati Shaw

Camosun College

It is only a question of time when there will be double digit of growth in the countries when women will work at the top executive level. This time is not yet, but soon.

I feel this because women make up 40% of the global workforce. Women are surpassing men in earning advanced professional programs and lag men from the beginning of their post studies. I agree with Alice Eagly in her article that Social change does not proceed without struggle and conflict. There has been a notable change in the workplace and this is reflected in numbers too. But there are people who resist to the change and believe that traditionally, men should continue to hold the leadership positions. To support the women’s access to leadership we should start educating men and women about second-gender generation bias and increase awareness of gender corporate imbalance.

Glass Ceiling

Glass ceiling is an odd metaphor used to describe the practices of discriminating against women. Glass ceiling means an invisible barrier experienced by minority racial group. It will be wrong to say that glass ceiling exists because the barriers are not unseen anymore and women realize the hurdles they have to face. It is more of a labyrinth where the goals are attainable but not without overcoming the barriers.

It would be unfair to blame the corporations solely for this because there are many who promote women friendly policies. As Alice H. Eagly said in her video that women are progressively dropping out because of many reasons. But there is a fundamental reason that is whether they should choose career or family, and this is a difficult choice which is not faced by men. The women who choose to have a family have to opt out of their work to raise a family and even if they choose to stay at work, they have to make sacrifices at other areas of life. The other barriers include sexual harassment at workplace, pay inequality, resistance to women leadership and prejudices against women.

This issue can be solved by understanding how women can overcome the obstacles, making people aware of second- gender generation gap and promoting more women to senior leadership roles.

Pay Equity in British Columbia

British Columbia has pay equity policy framework but having no actual law does not compel the employers to have pay equity in their compensation system. Discrimination still persists in the province and B.C. has complaints based system. Having no pay equity law affects the women and is impacting their present and future.

Pay equity reduces the gender pay gap where women earn 67 cents of every dollar.  British Columbia should have a pay equity legislation based on Ontario Pay Equity Act which has proactive laws that cover both public and private sector and has succeeded in reducing gender wage gap (Long & Singh, 2017, p 256).

 Pay equity law is only a part of the solution. Universal childcare, living wages and tax reforms ad other measures are needed to end the gender earning gap. (Canadian Union of Public Employees, 2017)