Gender Stereotypes In The Workplace

Within the last century, there has been a phenomenal rise in the percentage of women that make up the American workforce. The relentless battle women faced as they fought their way into a patriarchal work force has subdued since the start of the 21st century, but – is the battle over? Are women now able to enter any field they wish just based on their abilities and skills or are they still inhibited by the previous century’s perceptions of women? Many women argue that this struggle still continues; they feel even in the most professional of working environments, they are constantly stereotyped and possibly discriminated against based on their gender. These discriminations can appear in many different forms and in multiple facets of the workplace.
People use the word all the time, but rarely is the word given boundaries for each scenario. In its broadest definition, it is “an often unfair and untrue belief that many people have about all people or things with a particular characteristic” (“Stereotype”). One of the most common examples of gender stereotyping in the workplace is the management assigning tasks requiring a forceful approach to men and tasks needing a gentle, more personable touch to women. Other common gender stereotypes include but are not limited to differentiating pay between men and women, promoting employees based on gender, and selecting men over women in the hiring process based on the likelihood of maternity leave. Edgar Vinacke, a former psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and author for Encyclopædia Britannica, defines stereotypes as an “obstacle to effective thinking” (Vinacke) . Therefore, it is logical to say that if stereotypes are present in the working environment, then performance and employee welfare will be greatly reduced. He also states many people develop stereotypes during their childhood years from the influences in their environment and it becomes very difficult to change that way of thinking later in life (Vinacke). This means that any stereotype a person has is most likely rooted from something completely separate from what they are stereotyping in the present. For the purposes of this argument, stereotypes, no
In her study, she tested the hypothesis that women will evaluate themselves less favorably regarding their leadership and management skills than men when first asked to answer the question of what gender they are (Flanagan). The responses to two inquiries were specifically analyzed in this study: “[How do you] rate your leadership skills [?]” and “How would OTHERS rate your leadership skills?” (Flanagan). The trend the study found with women is that they were generally confident in their own leadership abilities, but, by being reminded of the stereotype prior to the answering of these questions, were less confident about what others perceived their skills to be (Flanagan). Results like these indicate that there is a strong relation between how women believe they are perceived and how their performance levels reflect those judgments. Another point to emphasize is that the study concluded that women, not men, were more likely to lower their evaluations of themselves when reminded of their gender (Flanagan). This means that the conclusion drawn from Heilman’s evidence of limiting the natural abilities of both genders by forcing them into prescriptive stereotypes is likely to have a greater influence on women than men. So even though prescriptive stereotyping applies to both