Problems regarding gender lens includes wage gaps, governmental roles, and traditional roles of women in society. Through our discussions in class and the presentations by the speakers, I thought up of few solutions that regard these issues. In specific, I focused on female’s role in the government and business because I felt that they were the most prominent issue regarding gender lens. In addition, after reading other people’s posts, I realized that sexual harassment within work places should be mentioned as well.
For governmental role problems, there is a lack of females in higher position of governmental body. Not only are there a lack of females in the government, but as well as in businesses and enterprises. According to Forbes, female leaders run less than 3% of largest companies. Also, according to Harvard Business Review, out of 2,000 world’s top performing companies, 29 of the companies’ CEOs were female. Forbes stated that one reason why there is such difference in the ratio of men and women is because women have more personal and social pressure than men. I believe this is true because society views women in different lens compared to men. Traditional roles of women in the past still haunt women today. To solve this problem of limitation in women’s role in businesses and government, more programs should be created to inspire females to achieve higher. I was truly inspired by Arielle Kandel of New Women New York, because her organization focused in helping female immigrants find job and learn skills to provide service for the community. These kind of programs should be developed because females make up a large part of the population and it is important to inspire them to become the CEOs of large companies or representative of government. Also, if there were a policy that forced companies to hire specific ratio of women and men, there would be more equal opportunities for women.
Furthermore, although I did not focus on this problem in my previous post, I believe sexual harassment is a problem of gender and economic growth. According to the AWARE, (Association of Women for Action and Research), 79% of the respondents who reported having experienced sexual harassment in workplace were women. However, sexual harassment is not only an issue regarding women but also regarding men. Although some men are victims of sexual harassment, the overwhelming amount of females who are victimized shows how problematic this is. To solve this problem, people should be educated on their rights within the workplace. They should feel safe to report harassers and know how to report them. Also, because people might be scared of reporting the harasser in fear of losing their job, there should be a way for people to make anonymous report within their workplace. Moreover, sexual harassment policy should be clearly taught when one enters a workplace. Conclusively, all these issues should be publicized and solved for more gender-neutral society.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/10/31/why-most-women-will-never-become-ceo/
http://www.aware.org.sg/ati/wsh-site/14-statistics/
https://hbr.org/2009/12/women-ceo-why-so-few/
I agree that personal and social pressures do contribute to women not being able to advance in the work place. However I do not think that a program to encourage women to aspire to greater professional goals will be very effective. I do not think a lack of motivation is a significant issue. There are plenty of women who want to succeed but do not have the means to do it. Women have greater personal and social pressure from family responsibilities. Time magazine states “In 2011, 83% of women and 65% of men “spent some time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care or financial and other household management..”
I agree that people should be more comfortable with reporting sexual harassment. What kind of repercussions would their be to sexual harassment claims reported anonymously? How would one be able to prove these claims?