Gender Bias in Management and Its Outcomes on Quality of Work

Gender bias has been an issue for several centuries now. Evolution supposedly changes the world and the humans. But the society never seems to have changed as much as it appears. It is known that throughout the years men have favored way more than women. Sure, there are several legendary stories of women fighting for their rights throughout the history, but are women being treated equal to men these days or are they still subordinate to men? Well, there has been a lot of research that proves that women are still subordinate to men. This proves that gender bias is an actual issue regardless of the time period.

Gender bias gets its start from the way everyone is raised. The way each person approaches the concept of gender inequality depends on the parents. Children usually choose the path their parents encourage them in. parental attitudes toward the issue of gender bias influences the way the individual sees the world. This study performed in Bangladesh poses an interesting study toward parent al attitudes. The culture in Bangladesh could often be a bridge to gender segregation and discrimination. This applies in United states as well because immigrants with similar European and Asian cultures still follow their cultures and carry their believes they were taught in their country. The results of the experiment performed in Bangladesh stated that there was a boy bias in most of the families, especially in the joint families. But, in the individual families, it is kind of tough to judge between the more biased gender, but it is slightly more men than women.

Many occupations have uneven proportions of men and women. For example, nursing has more women than men and computer science has more men than women. This causes the jobs to be offered in an unfair way to both the genders strengthening the concept of gender bias. It is most often that the women are not offered jobs because it is a presumption by most members in the society that the women are the main take carers of the family. This makes them busy and less focused at work which is why women are less inclined to be hired than men. Research suggests that women who choose a male dominant career tend to be criticized and face a dilemma on whether to stay and do something they’re passionate about or do something more “suitable” for them. It is also said that women more agentic and dominant are less liked and accepted by the society because they are violating the traditional gender expectations. A particular study says that men seem to be particularly sensitive when it comes to something challenging their masculinity but for women, who have gone through a lot criticism on the feminism before, are stronger. One of the experiments conducted lets the women and men change their expected personality to see how it effects their hiring decisions. These men and women have been set through several evaluations and experiments with the personality that is usually not expected stereotypically by men and women. These experiments are supposed to draw some clear conclusions on how men and women are judged for being hired and explain the gender bias attitude given out by the hiring professionals.

The first experiment was designed to see if powerless men would face more discrimination than women who are dominant. This experiment also tests the hypothesis that women are considered less deserving of the job when they are placed as a superior. As discussed, men are expected to be more dominant when it comes to superior job and women are expected to be nicer and helping. For this experiment, men were assigned as a subordinate under random male and female superiors. They worked together for a while. At the end, everyone was asked to fill out a form about the recommendations and “hireability”. Two people with most voted were selected as the most hirable people. They were also asked to recommend a salary range for the selected people. The salary range was $30,000 to $40,000. The results supported the hypothesis that the ones assigned with the low power went through more discrimination and faced more difficulty with hiring process. Men hired as a subordinate rated their female superior as a less hirable and more demanding/dominant character. They also recommended a low salary for her whereas the situation is completely opposite for men who were assigned as a superior.

This experiment clearly explains that the men are expected to be a certain way even when their personality does not necessarily match. In order to fit in to the society, to be more accepted, men can sometime force themselves to be more dominant and agentic and women sometimes might try hard to fit into the society by being less demanding. These societies standards effect one’s career and hiring decisions. Just because a woman is more agentic and demanding, she is less inclined to be hired despite the amount of talent and determination she would show toward the job. After several centuries, one would expect societal standards to change, but it is fascinating how they always stayed the same. it is obviously hard to change the expectations everyone has in a day but, it should be more acceptable for women to be who they are and the gender bias toward the hiring decisions should stop solely based on the expected versus the real personality of a person.

Women are expected to be more communal and sensitive whereas men are expected to be more agentic and stronger. This idea of this experiment is to switch up the expected personalities of men and women and see how it effects their career. Research suggest that women are seen as dominant and powerful is they were to behave agentic like men but are less inclined to be hired since they do not show a friendly personality. But it is shown that men are considered more hirable when they show an agentic personality. According to Hoover, men tend to score higher on hostile sexism and enhance the social hierarchy of social occupations. Males are also presumed to be more competitive and intelligent when it comes to problem solving than women. Even though there is no evidence supporting or against it, the gender bias has certainly been improving throughout the years.

Gender bias is phenomenon that has been going around for a while now. It is a well-known fact that gender bias has a far more effective influence on women than on men because they get favored a lot more. gender bias might not be as affective and influential now, but it still is a phenomenon that influences women for their hiring decisions. Women have been fighting for a place and position I the work industry. It is usually pretended that the men would be a better choice than women because men might work on things harder than women do. But this is just a pretention. There is still no proof that one gender is better at work than the other. The workplace is often a common place for gender bias, discrimination and unfair decisions.

There are two types of gender bias in the workplace: the first-generation gender bias and the second-generation gender bias. While the first-generation bias is more about excluding women from the workplace, the second-generation focuses neither on excluding women nor produce direct harm on women in society. In this study by Batara, it will focus on the issue where employed women are treated unfair compared to men in subtle, unnoticed ways. This is most often an example of a second-generation gender bias. This study was conducted among mid-level managers and was focused on two specific types of bias: cognitive bias and bias underlying unjust treatment. Cognitive bias could be one of the main reasons for women lacking in the workforce and fighting for their place as an economic agent. This study is supposed to focus on how the women focus on their work and how they handle the second-generational gender bias at a workplace.

The common causes for women to discriminated are that women are most often predicted to eb cognitively slow and unable to handle a stressful situation. This experiment done by Batara tests how far this phenomenon is taken by men at a workplace. This experiment required women to be interviewed about the stories at companies or workplaces they have been at for a long time. These stories were approached in several ways. one was sociodemographic and work-related, the other was nature of work and the next one is the limitations to goals and aspirations. The results were very expected and not so intriguing, it was an awaited result to be declared.

The results showed that even though these women have been a part of these companies, they have been treated in a way that men would not be treated. The results showed that there were several types of second-generation gender bias. The stereotyping, lack of female representation in high rankings and multiple burdens. Stereotyping is considering that women are more capable of nurturing and caring more than any other task given to them. Also, the thought that women are more capable of multi-tasking and giving something a good, slow thought than men, who take quick and immediate decisions lead to women getting certain jobs like human resource departments, etc. but sometimes this could mean that women might not be as fit for the job and hiring men would be much easier.

Multiple burdens is another reason. Women tend to have a hard time getting a job because of their responsibilities at home. Women, usually married, have the responsibility of taking care if the children, taking care of their spouse, so the preferred candidate for the job is usually men or unmarried women rather than married women. But these all tend to be the traditional expectations. Women are not he only ones taking care of their spouse and children, men do the same thing as well. Even though it is well known that this practice doesn’t happen anymore, men get hired more than women. Therefore, gender bias is an issue in society today.

Another type of second generational gender bias is lack of representation of females for high ranking positions. According to the research by Batara, in certain companies where women started working at the same time men did, the women were remained in a lower position with not a lot of power, whereas men were promoted to higher positions without even at an age they were yet to retire. These three are the clear representations of gender bias. Without a strong motive to exclude women, they’re not being allowed to many opportunities regardless of the talents and skills they have within them. Gender alone should not be a dominant reason to decide one’s career.

Aside from the causes and types of gender bias, there are effects of gender bias we, in our society do not notice taking place. The effects of stereotyping women can be benefiting sometimes because women are expected to me more patient, multitasking and are able to work under high pressure. This could get women more jobs and could affect economy more positively than negatively. But another possibility is that women could be harassed and assaulted way more than men. This could be a negative effect on women and prevent them from taking any jobs with a lot of interaction.

It is observed that female managers are usually affected by the amount of burdens they have a personally and professionally. Participants reportedly said that they could not handle the stress at work as well as at home. They not only were stressed at work; they have personal issues to take care of at home that they couldn’t walk past form. But this does not correlate with the reality. Since the women have vague job descriptions, they end up having a lot of workload. This leads to women not being able to spend quality time with their family, and they tend to work on weekends as well. This ultimately led to women focusing on quantity of the work rather than the quality and not having any positive outcomes on either positive or the negative side.

Another effect of is not representing women in higher ranking positions. Women were not being placed in higher positions compared to men because they reportedly don’t have the qualities men have when they get the job. even when women were working for several years in the same company, they were denied taking a higher position. This led them to respond to such biased and unfair decisions. The responses most often are taking action, acceptance, and denial.