Why Aren’t We Making More Progress Towards Gender Equity?
Organizations have worked towards achieving gender equality for decades. They’ve invested resources into developing women’s careers. They’ve implemented bias awareness training. Those at the top, including many CEOs, have made public commitments to make their workplaces more fair and equitable. And, still, despite all of this, progress towards gender equality has been limited. In fact, many managers struggle to recognize gender inequalities in daily workplace interactions.
My research has shown that one of the reasons for this gap between awareness and action is what I call “gender fatigue.” This is the phenomenon of simultaneously acknowledging that gender inequality exists in general while denying that it exists in one’s immediate work environment. I’ve observed this in numerous studies I’ve conducted over the last two decades, including ethnographic studies and interviews with 150 individuals from professional services managers to public sector broadcasters, from MBA students to CEOs.
In my interviews, I identified four ways in which people made sense of this mismatch between their support for gender equality and the denial that it exists in their immediate work environment. The first rationalization is that gender inequality exists elsewhere, perhaps at another organization such as a competitor or in a different country. The second is based on a historical perspective: gender inequality existed in the past, say 20 years ago, but not today. The third is the claim that gender inequality can’t exist anymore because women are now given advantages in organizations. All of the efforts to fix unequal opportunities, the logic goes, have made it far easier for women to succeed. The final way that people reconciled these contradictory beliefs was to strategically ignore gender inequality. When presented with incidents of discrimination they would say that it had nothing to do with gender.
Here are some examples of how this plays out.
I spoke to several people who were part of an incident surrounding Carolyn*, an esteemed professional and expert in her field. In a meeting with a client, the client asked her to take meeting notes and bring coffee for everyone else, even though Carolyn holds a senior position. Requests like these have been shown to hold back women’s careers and are a form of sexism. But when reflecting on the incident, Carolyn herself described it as long in the past and explained that it was all resolved without issues. Carolyn’s line manager, eager to retain the client, removed Carolyn from the project swiftly. Her manager described the situation as a lack of “chemistry” with the client and felt it had nothing to do with gender.
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Read more Source: https://hbr.org/2020/12/why-arent-we-making-more-progress-towards-gender-equity