The underrepresentation of not only women in the workplace, but of racial and ethnic minorities as well, has long been an issue in the United States.
Gender equality is defined as men and women being treated as equals, while gender equity occurs when men and women are provided the same resources to succeed.
Both concepts come hand-in-hand and are strategies to produce fairness, and one way to have a fair workplace is by creating a diverse environment.
The technology sector is a field that has prominently seen the problem of gender inequality among its ranks.
Elizabeth Nyamayaro, head of UN’s HeForShe campaign, elaborated on the need to innovate strategies to achieve equality in this field during a tech conference in late November.
“A lot of tech companies aren’t hiring women; there’s always this sort of misconception that women aren’t good at tech,” she said.
Nyamayaro’s main argument lies in the fact that to solve inequality, diversity should begin in the workplace and in opportunities available for everyone.
“There’s this idea that women are helpless; they are not,” she said during the conference. “In fact, there’s nothing wrong with women. We try to fix women – we should fix the institutions that were built by men for men.”
44 percent of women in the tech field say that discrimination is a major problem in the workplace. In another report by the Senate Joint Economic Committee, women earn on average 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. In Louisiana and Wyoming, the gender pay gap ranges between 31 and 35 percent. Furthermore, these statistics don’t even begin to cover the pay gaps between white men and women of color. Black women, for instance, earn roughly seven dollars less than white men per hour, and Hispanic women earn roughly nine dollars less, which also brings an important reminder to the forefront of feminism: intersectionality is vital, and all women’s pay gaps must be remedied to equal statuses.
Equal policies and pay are just two of the problems women face in a field that’s dominated by males.
Nyamayaro states that the road to gender equality is a work in progress, but that innovators are needed to find better solutions to the problems at hand.
“As long as the struggle for gender equality is seen as a struggle between men and women, nobody’s going to win, because we all lose.”
However, overall, various fields are seeing an increase in women in the workplace. In the U.S., women make up roughly 46.8 percent of the workforce – an increase from the 29.6 percent in the 1950s. While there are more women in the workplace, Catalyst announced that there are only 26 women who hold CEO positions at S&P 500 companies.
Women have come a long way from the 1960s, a time when it wasn’t common to be career-focused, but they still have a long way to go to achieve the ultimate goal of a level playing field.
Featured Image by Christin Hume on Unsplash
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Marko Milosavljevic
December 19, 2017 at 3:03 pm
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