The Roots of Modern Workplace Gender Bias
As the triumphs and shortcomings of the Me Too movement have shown us, shining a spotlight on abuse and misogyny in the workplace is one thing; truly changing our corporate culture is another entirely.
After all, for every Weinstein brought low by his (or her! Thanks, Lizzo) own vile behavior, there are countless, subtle, quotidian obstacles women face just trying to get our jobs done. These workplace biases may not physically harm us–some of them we even perpetuate ourselves–but they injure women nonetheless by preventing us from pursuing our true potential. From double standards to pay inequality to mansplaining, a menagerie of microaggressions exists, to the point that that an exhaustive list would require writing a book, not a blog.
Many women may not even bother putting a name to these many faces of gender bias, likely not wanting to squander precious mental energy on the unsavory elements they must shoulder through day in and day out to make ends meet. Yet solving the problem of workplace gender bias requires us to first have a realistic understanding of what it is and where it comes from.
To give the textbook definition, gender bias represents systematic preference, prejudice, or discrimination against individuals based on their gender. While this more legalistic explanation sadly still applies today, it also brings to mind egregious actions and attitudes rarely seen in (most) contemporary businesses and industries, evoking casual misogyny and rampant sexual harassment on a scale that would have any modern HR department experiencing a fullblown meltdown. To be clear, we have no doubt that some entities and workers out there still evince this decidedly 1940s worldview, and they deserve to go the way of Weinstein–but what of the more common, less overt cases?
To understand these mundane occurrences of gender bias, we think it’s helpful to switch from a legalistic understanding to a sociological one. In this framework, workplace biases begin as implicit or structural biases imported into the workplace from society at large. Whether conscious or unconscious, these beliefs–about the capabilities of women, their proper role in society, and the extra labor we expect of them as caregivers and fonts of emotional support–form the basis of the issues that we see in women’s experience of work today. What’s more, these beliefs persist precisely because women are underrepresented in the workplace versus society at large.
If you’re starting to notice a chicken versus egg conundrum, you’re not wrong; gender bias and the underrepresentation of women in the workplace reinforce themselves in a vicious cycle, one from which we’re still trying to break free even sixty years after the advent of Second Wave Feminism.
The cycle goes something like this: because a decent number of people still harbor subconscious beliefs that women are inferior in certain areas, like STEM or physically demanding labor, in addition to the notion that women are better suited to caregiving than men and thus need to focus on child- or eldercare, fewer women enter the workplace; because fewer women enter the workforce, there are less women who have worked their way into leadership positions; because there are fewer women in leadership positions, there are less women available to encourage the hiring of other women and to mentor them along the way; and because of this lack of female influence, the culture of many workplaces overall is slower to change, allowing implicit biases to go unchallenged, and, in the worst cases, to boil over into outright misogyny. Thus we end up right at the beginning, with fewer women in the workforce out of a desire to avoid pursuing careers in businesses or sectors aligned against them.
Ipso facto, the subtle biases we continue to allow as a society perpetuate the workplace demographics we see today, and the workplace demographics we observe today cause the entrenchment of gender biases in our society. This explains why glass ceilings are not as fragile as one might think, and why cultural change is a generational endeavor, not an overnight sprint.
Despite the multitude of horrific cultural developments after the last decade, we’re finally starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Much of our reason for hope stems from educational attainment; in recent years, more women than men have achieved undergraduate and graduate degrees, and the demographics of white collar work is accordingly beginning to shift. As women gain more and more financial power and corporate influence, we expect to see an inverse to the vicious cycle described above. More women will enter the workforce and occupy higher positions of authority, pulling other women behind them, until true gender parity is reached and gender bias begins to recede.
Even with the educational achievements of women propelling them to career success, undoing millenia of bias will be a slow burn rather than a wildfire. In the meantime, the only other way we know to break the cycle of gender bias is also the entire reason why we launched this brand in the first place: empower other women. By acting as mentors and advisors (and friends) to the women in our lives, we have an opportunity to contribute to more than just the success of one woman; you contribute toward dismantling gender bias and making our society better for all. A process that began with suffragettes and continued with subsequent waves of feminism carries on in the choices made by each of us to support one another now, until one day we have the world we deserve.
