Gender Inequality in the Workplace

Apr 26

Women in Management • Work-Family Balance • Training Programs • Gender Representation in the Arts

From creative industries to white-collar offices to factory production lines, the world of work has many strides to make before it will achieve gender equality. This is true for women across the world, and at every level of organizational hierarchy. Consequently, I have studied the experiences of women both as workers and as managers in an effort to document the disparity between men’s and women’s experiences and to identify avenues that may be taken to reach gender parity. Specifically, organizations have immense power to make policies that will ameliorate or exacerbate this inequality. For example, I have found that providing childcare that specifically benefits marginalized women goes a long way to equalizing gender outcomes. My work has also shown that allowing women to work independently may help them to voice their creativity and that training first-time women workers in work-readiness skills as well as job-specific skills increases retention. Regarding women managers, my research demonstrates that women supervisors who voluntarily perform scut work increase subordinate women’s productivity.