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Women Equality in The Workplace

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

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The New York Times

Magazine | the reckoning: women and power in the workplace, the reckoning: women and power in the workplace.

DEC. 13, 2017

Essays and art from Jenna Wortham, Ruth Franklin, Vivian Gornick, Parul Sehgal, Heidi Julavits, Paula Scher, Olivia Locher, Amber Vittoria and more.

The Reckoning Women and Power in the Workplace

By THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE DEC. 15, 2017

As revelations of sexual harassment break, women have been discussing the fallout and how to move forward. Here, women from across the working world take on this complicated conversation.

We Were Left Out

By Jenna Wortham

“Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine,” the critical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote in their 2013 essay “The Undercommons,” about the need to radically upend hierarchical institutions. I thought of their prophecy in October, when a private document listing allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by dozens of men in publishing and media surfaced online.

The list — a Google spreadsheet initially shared exclusively among women, who could anonymously add to it — was created in the immediate aftermath of reports about sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein. The atmosphere among female journalists was thick with the tension of watching the press expose the moral wrongs of Hollywood while neglecting to interrogate our own. The existence of the list suggested that things were worse than we even imagined, given all that it revealed. It was horrifying to see the names of colleagues and friends — people you had mingled with at parties and accepted drinks from — accused of heinous acts.

A few days after the list appeared, I was in a van with a half dozen other women of color, riding through the desert on our way to a writing retreat. All of us worked in media; most of us had not realized the extent to which harassment polluted our industry. Whisper networks, in which women share secret warnings via word of mouth, require women to tell others whom to avoid and whom to ignore. They are based on trust, and any social hierarchy is rife with the privilege of deciding who gets access to information. Perhaps we were perceived as outsiders, or maybe we weren’t seen as vulnerable. We hadn’t been invited to the happy hours or chats or email threads where such information is presumably shared. The list was F.T.B.T. — for them, by them — meaning, by white women about their experiences with the white men who made up a majority of the names on it. Despite my working in New York media for 10 years, it was my first “whisper” of any kind, a realization that felt almost as hurtful as reading the acts described on the list itself.

As a young business reporter, no one told me about the New York investor known for luring women out to meals under the guise of work. I found out the hard way. I realized he was a habitual boundary-crosser only after The New York Observer reported on him in 2010. Most recently, after I complained in a media chat room about a man who harassed a friend at a birthday party, everyone chimed in to say that he was a known creep. I was infuriated. That information never made its way to me, and worse, it was taken as a given. Was keeping that secret hidden worth the trauma it caused my friend?

The list’s flaws were immediately apparent. It felt too public, volatile and vulnerable to manipulation. But its recklessness was born out of desperation. It detonated the power and labor dynamics that whisper networks reinforce. Information, once privileged to a select few, became decentralized and accessible to all. And the problem of sexual harassment no longer belonged solely to women to filter and share.

Once the list leaked beyond its initial audience and men became aware of it, it was effectively shut down. But who knows what would have happened if it lasted longer? Maybe a better mechanism for warning and reporting harassment could have been finessed; it’s clear we still need one. Even now, amid the torrent of reports of sexual misconduct, women of color are conspicuously absent. It’s still not safe enough for many of us to name our abusers in public.

But during the initial hours after the list’s publication, when it still felt secret, for women only, I moved through the world differently. The energy in the air felt charged, like after the siren goes off in the “Purge” movies. A friend compared the feeling to the final scenes of “V for Vendetta.” She liked seeing women as digital vigilantes, knowing that men were scared. I did, too. I wanted every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because women were talking. Maybe, within that, we glimpsed the possibility of a new world order, like the one Moten and Harney gestured at. The list was not long for this world, but it might have lived long enough to prove its point.

Just Like the Movies

By Ruth Franklin

“My natural tendency is to observe, not to ask questions,” I wrote in my journal during the spring of my senior year of high school. I had just started a six-week internship at a local newspaper, and it wasn’t going well. At 16, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and journalism seemed the obvious route. But my natural shyness held me back.

One day at the diner where all the reporters hung out, my supervisor introduced me to a colleague. “This is a famous man,” she said with more than a touch of sarcasm. Thirty-two years old and stocky as a bantam rooster, he had shaggy black hair and intense eyes. I recognized his byline — he had just published an article about an elderly eccentric that detoured through his own obsessions, from the bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta to the traces of his childhood.

We talked about ghosts and the poetry of Octavio Paz. He gave me one of his own short stories to read and seemed to care what I thought. Soon I was accompanying him around town in his cluttered hatchback on the hunt for local characters. I thought I had finally found a model to emulate. “Maybe I have reporter potential after all,” I wrote.

On those car rides, we talked about writing but also about our personal lives. I was an alienated teenager, feverish to graduate and leave my family behind. He was divorced with young kids and working hard to support them. Sometimes when we were sitting next to each other, he pressed his arm against mine. On a picnic in a city park where more than a few passers-by recognized him, he confessed that he was infatuated with me. All that restrained him, he said, was my age. His sexual energy was palpable and a little bit terrifying. I wasn’t attracted to him physically, and I told him so. But I was entranced by his independent-mindedness, his nostalgic longing for an earlier age, even his affectations. More than that, he seemed to believe in my potential as a writer.

He often recommended books and movies, but one in particular sticks with me: “Manhattan,” perhaps the most notorious depiction of one of Woody Allen’s favorite paradigms, the pairing of an older man and a much younger woman. The parallels between our situation and this fable of romance between a divorced writer (Isaac) and a high school student (Tracy) couldn’t have been more obvious. But I was struck by the movie’s falseness. The script requires Tracy to be the ardent one, continually pressing Isaac for a commitment he won’t offer. (Indeed, midway through the film he dumps her, to his later regret, for a journalist closer to his age.) Yet Mariel Hemingway portrays Tracy as perfectly blank, her moonlike face virtually without expression, even in the most emotional scenes. The film is only about Isaac: his needs and desires. If Tracy is entertaining questions or doubts beneath the surface, we’re not privy to them.

At the time, I would have sworn that what was happening between me and this reporter was consensual. Now, more than 25 years later, I understand more clearly how incompletely the idea of consent conveys the complexity of such a dynamic. Yes, I flirted with him and enjoyed the power of knowing that he desired me. But in the end I needed him more than he needed me, because he offered something I wasn’t finding elsewhere. For a brief period, he gave me confidence. As his behavior became more aggressive — putting his hand on my leg, asking to kiss me — I started to pull away. He reacted with anger and petulance, and things between us curdled. A few years later, he depicted me in a story published in a popular anthology as a spoiled, haughty Jewish-American princess who is the subject of crude sexual fantasies.

The stories we tell ourselves aren’t just entertainment; books and movies — still more often by men — work to establish archetypes for romantic relationships. They constitute our personal and cultural mythology and are essential to the way we understand our world. A man whose interest is piqued by a 16-year-old girl has a ready-made formula for how that relationship might proceed. The very fact that such a model exists offers tacit permission for him to treat his wants as valid. For the girl who tries to enter the story on her own terms, there are two models: the receptive vessel or the Lolita-like temptress. Ambivalence and fear simply don’t enter into it.

I’m now more than 10 years older than this man was when we met. I’ve worked in journalism for close to two decades. But I spent the early years of my career anxious, questioning, in search of a validation that I couldn’t define. That wasn’t only his fault — I was primed to respond to him the way I did by things that happened long before he came around. Still, the power imbalance in our relationship led me, however unconsciously, to continue seeking legitimation in a man’s eyes. I don’t regret those afternoons driving around town, listening to him ask questions, watching him take notes: They’re part of my story as a writer. But I wish that he, as the adult in the room, had looked past his emotions to consider what would have been best for me, an impressionable teenager who admired him and craved his instruction and his approval, if not his affections. And I wish that my intellectual formation hadn’t had to be so inextricably entwined with a man’s assessment of my value.

When the Fog Lifts

By Meghan O’Rourke

When I became sick with a mysterious illness nearly a decade ago, doctors kept telling me nothing was wrong. I lived for years in a fog not only of pain but also of self-doubt, questioning my own perceptions. It is difficult to articulate how distorting this fundamental distrust of your own subjectivity is, how distorting it was to accommodate myself to a hobbled, painful reality. When my illness was finally named by a physician, my world changed: It could be addressed. And just as important, I no longer felt that my grasp on reality was tenuous.

The conversations I’ve had with my female friends in the weeks since widespread allegations of sexual abuse and harassment have come out — by text messages, over drinks, while minding young children toddling in and out of the kitchen — have circled around a contradiction: We knew, and yet we didn’t know; we were sure, and yet we doubted ourselves. For years, we lived in a climate of uncertainty created by the routine institutional denial that harassment was taking place, actions that went unnamed and dismissed, the scores of “open secrets” in plain sight yet not seen. Then, overnight, it seemed, a shift in our accounting took place. We’d been returned to a shared reality.

We think of our perceptions as being uniquely our own — the very stuff that makes us distinctive individuals. But perception is more dependent on a fine social web of recognition than we like to think. And when it came to sexual harassment, we were, in a sense, all guilty of participating in what social psychologists call the bystander effect, in which people are less likely to offer help to someone in distress if there are other people present, especially if the others are passive. In one striking 1968 study, subjects filled out a questionnaire in a room slowly filling with smoke. When alone, 75 percent of subjects reported smelling smoke. But when “two passive confederates” of the experimenters were planted in the room and behaved as if nothing were wrong, only 10 percent of the subjects reported smelling the smoke or left the room. (Shockingly, nine of 10 subjects “kept working on the questionnaire they were given, rubbed their eyes and waved smoke out of their faces,” the Socially Psyched website recounts.)

In groups, we watch to see what others do and follow suit. By its nature, sexual harassment depends on a social agreement about where we draw lines and how we interpret injury. It wasn’t until the 1980s that “unwelcome sexual advances” and the creation of a “hostile or offensive work environment” came to be considered illegal under the federal protections that derive from Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which legislates against discrimination on the basis of sex, race and religion. “Unwelcome,” “hostile”: These adjectives are by definition descriptive — dependent on a consensus of shared reality, evaluated legally on a case-by-case basis. And a shared reality is, sadly, just what so many of us know that we don’t have, even now. In an encounter between two people, the shadows of subjectivity always determine how the light looks: bright and revealing, or dark and eerie. And when it comes to encounters in the workplace, there are genuine questions of scale, lines in the sand to draw — what is just a clumsy pass? What is actual harassment?

This moment of reckoning has helped women who have been victimized — even in subtle ways — name what had been happening to them; at the same time, it has made the most culpable bystanders feel less certain — a productive redistribution of uncertainty, possibly. Many people, especially men, are asking themselves if they are complicit in what has been taking place and examining their own past behavior to see whether they have ever made a woman uncomfortable. There are, after all, two kinds of uncertainty: the self-doubt created by withheld truths and the self-doubt created by a genuine need to re-evaluate. It may not be such a bad thing if more men walk through the world feeling that they don’t have all the answers.

‘Nobody wants to be a Rat’

As told to Kathy Dobie by a Police Detective

In the 20-plus years I’ve been on the job, our department has truly changed. When I first came on the job, it was awful. In the ’80s and early ’90s, the male police force really did not want women there; women were “ruining the L.A.P.D.” That sentiment was very strong. And if I had made a formal complaint, I would have been called your typical woman, you can’t trust her, she’s gonna roll on you, and then nobody wants to work with you, and it’s just the kiss of death.

There’s definitely a cultural shift that makes the men hired today who are in their 20s quite different. At the patrol level, I think guys and gals get along just fine. The biggest issue we have in terms of sexual harassment is that even though there are procedures for reporting, nobody really wants to do anything. Supervisors, the ombuds office, everyone just wants it to go away. “Well, you know, he didn’t mean anything by it; let’s just move on.” So things fester and then blow up. I’ve seen it over and over again. If you look at the lawsuits against the L.A.P.D., I think half the complaints are internal, not some outside person who got roughed up by the police. So they’ve been trying to teach us to report anything we see. The problem is nobody wants to be a rat.

I actually think the higher you rise among the ranks, the more likely you are to encounter harassment, because coveted positions are at play. If you look at our top-cop management, it’s still very male, and those guys have been around for a couple of decades. They came on in the ’70s or early ’80s, so they’re still carrying those attitudes. I’ll give you an example: There was a captain who got a woman promoted from Detective II to Detective III — a very coveted position. It was discovered through an internal-affairs investigation that she had performed sexual acts on him. That, to me, smells a lot like Hollywood: Hey, if you really want this part, you do certain things to me, and I can make it happen. Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Roy Moore or a captain at the L.A.P.D. — what do they all have in common? They have the ability to make or break lives. They hold the key to things that other people want, so I think that’s the common denominator; the psychology of that man is the same.

Know Your Power

By Zoe Heller

I’m disappointed that the story has remained focused so squarely on the villainous doings of the metropolitan elites. I was never under any illusion that this was the beginning of the end of the patriarchy, but I had hopes that there would be more of a ripple effect, that we would begin hearing about sexual harassment and abuse in the farm industry, in fast food, in retail, in hotel housekeeping. It’s delightful that the chickens are coming home to roost for powerful old guys in the entertainment industry, and yet for large sections of the country, I suspect, the toppling of Harvey Weinstein and others has played less as a “Matrix moment” — a sudden unmasking of the country’s sexist power structures — than as an old-fashioned morality tale about debauched big-city snoots finally getting their comeuppance.

Instead of moving outward, much of the conversation among women on social media has been taken up with identifying and decrying lesser forms of male misconduct — dirty jokes, unsolicited shoulder massages, compliments on physical appearance. It is inevitable that in the great outpouring of female wrath, minor grievances, as well as major ones, should have emerged. And hostile work environments aren’t built on violent sexual assault alone. Nevertheless, we seem to have wound up spending an inordinate amount of time parsing the injurious effects of low-level lechery on relatively advantaged women. Part of the problem with these conversations is that the injuries sustained by a creepy comment or a lewd remark are largely subjective. It’s fine to demand that men stop being brutes, but it helps if there is some consensus on what qualifies as brutishness. As it turns out, my unexceptionable office banter is your horrifying insult, and your innocuous flirtation is another’s undermining insinuation. (I remember thinking guiltily during the Anita Hill hearings that a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can didn’t sound that awful to me.) It seems neither likely nor desirable that we will succeed in banishing all sexual frisson from the workplace. And we know that many happy romances and marriages have originated on factory lines and in conference rooms. Given that the burden of making the first move traditionally lies with men, and given that it’s not always possible to gauge whether an advance is unwanted until someone makes it, there is good reason to question whether everything that is now being deemed misconduct has come from the same well of dastardly male entitlement.

An argument that has kept cropping up in recent weeks, one that will be familiar to those who have followed the debates about campus rape, is that even in the absence of force or explicit threat, the suggestive comments or sexual advances of a male colleague are implicitly coercive. A woman’s ability to register her opprobrium, or to say “No, thank you,” is always compromised by her fear of repercussions, or by her youth, or simply by her female impulse to placate. The danger with this a priori assumption of women’s diminished agency is that it ends up exaggerating female vulnerability. It casts women as fundamentally fragile beings, whose sexual assent, like that of minors, cannot be trusted to indicate true consent. It presents female passivity as natural. There’s no doubt that women, particularly younger ones, have a tendency to go along with things they don’t want to — to say yes when they really mean no — but that propitiatory tendency is not some incorrigible feature of the female character, any more than predation is the incorrigible inclination of men. And we do women a disservice by treating it as if it is. This is not about blaming the victim; it’s about pointing out to the potential victim that she has more power than she knows.

Several times in recent weeks, I’ve read and heard people asserting that older women like me, women who came of age before the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, are generally more accepting of sexual harassment and less sympathetic to women who complain about it. (This, it’s claimed, is because we grew up with lower expectations of male behavior and feel that the young should endure as stoically as we did.) I would characterize the generational divide differently. I think older women are, by and large, more reluctant to squander women’s hard-won right to sexual autonomy by characterizing themselves as helpless and in need of special protection. I think they are more likely to see “power dynamics” between individuals as complicated, fluid and not necessarily reducible to age and status differentials. I think they are also — although this is less a generational difference than a function of age — much better at telling men where to get off.

Reawakened Rage

By Vivian Gornick

What is never properly understood by those who do not experience it is how deep the rage over inequality goes once it is made conscious, how far-reaching it can be and yes, how unforgiving. At the moment, the hated imbalance between women and men, the one that all men, everywhere, have exploited for centuries, is in the dock, and women in the thousands have risen up to bring charges against men of power with the crime of having looked not at them but through them for as long as any of them could remember. These women are not yet Madame Defarge knitting at the foot of the scaffold, but half a century of insufficient progress, on the score of sexual predation alone, now fills their heads with blood and leads them to lash out at its ongoing pervasiveness, branding men to the left and to the right with accusations that include acts of real evil as well as those of vulgar insensitivity. As James Baldwin might have put it, an oppressed people does not always wake up a saint; more often it wakes up a murderer.

For many of us, it is dismaying to behold, in a movement meant to correct for social injustice, the development of what can seem like vigilante politics; the dismay, in fact, is being accorded disproportionate attention, as though its existence is more important than what gave rise to it. But if we stop for a moment to think rather than react, we soon come to realize that the courageous demand that begins with a visionary’s declaration of rights can, and usually does, descend quickly into the maddened belligerence characteristic of those who cannot stop rehearsing a grievance that feels very old and reaches far into the past. That is the course history has usually taken, and for the moment, we in America are all trapped in its turmoil.

My generation of second-wave feminists discovered how hard it is to build a case for women’s rights from the inside out, how few approached with a wholeness of mind and heart the prospect of equality for women. Those of us in the 1970s and ’80s who said (and kept on saying) that the subordination of women had now become intolerable were often denounced as witches, bitches and worse: denatured fanatics staring into a vision of the future that would upend the world as we knew it. Our radicalism lay in declaring the risk well worth taking: a calculation society as a whole is never willing to act on; it must be driven to it. But we feminists were persuaded that the American democracy was not only healthy enough but also mature enough to give up the idea that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not. We were convinced that what today we saw by the hundreds would tomorrow surely be seen by the thousands, and the day after that by the millions. Only people of serious ill will or intellectual deficiency or downright political greed would oppose the obvious. And after all, how many of them could there be?

As the decades wore on, I began to feel on my skin the shock of realizing how slowly — how grudgingly! — American culture had actually moved, over these past hundred years, to include us in the much-vaunted devotion to egalitarianism. However many thousands of women continued to join our ranks, we kept hearing: “Love is the most important thing in a woman’s life; that’s just nature.” “Women can be good but never great (thinkers, artists, politicians); again: nature.” “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to marry the Great Man, you want to be the Great Man. How very unnatural.” “Whatever happened, she was asking for it.” I remember thinking: Who says such things to a human being the speaker considers as real as he is to himself? Who tells anyone that the wish to experience oneself to the fullest is unnatural? Who thinks it acceptable that a set of needs described as essential to anyone’s humanity be considered necessary for some but not for others? Who, indeed?

I soon came to feel — and I still feel — that social and political inequality is one of the worst burdens anyone can be made to shoulder. The sheer unfairness of it! The contempt inscribed in it. My own angry disbelief in those years swelled until I found myself copying out quotes from people like the Cromwellian soldier who, on the scaffold, said: I never could believe that some men were born booted and spurred and ready to ride, and others born saddled and ready to be ridden. I, too, was now willing to go to war.

It’s not necessarily true that only a social explosion can galvanize cultural change, but inevitably, in the face of the failure to act — the term “sexual harassment” is now almost 50 years old — that’s the way it feels when that rage reawakens. And the way it feels is now compelling a movement bent on making transparent (once again!) what it’s like to live, as a class of people, brutalized or ignored but either way socially invisible.

The silence imposed by that invisibility! For better or worse, only liberationist politics — loud, brash and bullying as it sometimes seems — has ever broken it. The pity of it all is that the silence returns as the inequities once again get swept under the rug, where they fester, and wait for the next moment when the rug will turn into a rock under which these wormlike suppressions have morphed into snakes that come out hissing, should the rock be turned over.

‘A Purge Is Coming’

As told to Yamiche Alcindor by a Capitol Hill Aide

I think women on Capitol Hill right now are just kind of breathing a sigh of relief that people finally can talk about these things and not have to suffer when they come forward. A lot of people are saying, “I wonder who’s going to be next,” because everyone knows that this is just the beginning. We really feel as if a purge is coming. I don’t think that a lot of people necessarily know who, but as soon as a name comes out, then you start to hear people saying, like: “Oh, yeah. I heard that guy was creepy.”

They asked me to pitch in and just talk to survivors who call Representative Jackie Speier’s office. It’s such a gut punch when you hear the name of the member of Congress who harassed them. Al Franken was hard. It hurts the most when it’s men who have built their political careers advocating for women and then show such disdain for actual female human beings. I think it also just really shows how important it is to have women elected to office, promoting more women to senior staff and having more women involved in Capitol Hill positions and in the political process.

He’s Accused. Now What?

By Jazmine Hughes and Collier Meyerson

Jazmine Hughes: I casually know some of the men who have been accused of sexual harassment in our circles, and there are a handful I consider friends. My first thought was: What am I supposed to do with these assholes? I believe the women! But how would I show that? Did you see how Gayle King responded to the Charlie Rose accusations? It’s the best instance of “what to do when your friend is accused of sexual harassment” that I’ve seen.

Collier Meyerson: I was actually seized with panic when I heard about a friend accused of sexual misconduct. I never considered what would happen when a close friend, one whose struggles and goodness I know intimately, is questioned. Do I cast out every man who has overstepped a boundary, or only people who I’ve heard are serial sexual assaulters? I watched that clip of Gayle King, and the thing she said that most resonated with me was “You can hold two ideas in your head at the same time.” We can remember and understand that our friendships to the accused are real and also be on the side of survivors of sexual assault. But as we stumble through this, I’m feeling scared to say anything publicly, for fear of reproach. The environment is so incredibly polarized, and women can’t even feel out what to do when their loved ones are accused. I feel like I can’t even mourn that loss. Do you feel that way?

Hughes: For once, I feel grateful to not be famous — having this burden to comment is so unfair. This secondhand shame is insulting, and unproductive, and still somehow makes this into a problem for women. Personally, though, regarding these friends, I’ve answered questions when asked, but I’m not “spreading the word.”

I’ve also had long talks with friends who have been named; they’re promising but depressing. They admit to rehabilitation, but also to guilt. They’ve changed, but they had to have something to “change” away from. Everyone’s trying to get better — but what does better look like? How do we measure penance?

Meyerson: “How do we measure penance?” is exactly what I’ve been thinking about. Men repent, or if they’re famous, they retreat after their apologies. But it feels as though there are all these proverbial eyeballs looking toward women to make the decision for all men: What now? And that’s what I’m so troubled by. I don’t know the answer. In my universe, there is this expectation to purge. As my boyfriend said recently: “Humans have always tended toward purging, and it’s never worked out.”

Hughes: If I could point to anything tangible, it’s that I’d want the men to feel shame — not embarrassment, but a deep, abiding sense of wrongdoing that causes them pain and follows them like a stench. But then ... there are my friends, who’ve made the “correct” apologies or sought treatment of their own volition or stopped drinking or left the industry or left town. Which is heartening, but is that because my standards are low? What’s enough, both for myself and other people? I have a friend who is cooling her relationships with incendiary acquaintances because she doesn’t want her tacit approval to signal to other women that the guy is reasonable. Here’s a question: Say you’re having a party. Do you invite the Friend?

Meyerson: Thinking about this moment, I realize that this is not the first time any of us have heard stories about friends of ours crossing the line or harassing someone. I had a friend tell me the other day, “I remember when you told me I made this one girl feel uncomfortable because she had to say no twice, and I never forgot that.” And then there are the one or two men I’ve been friends with who have had more serious allegations against them, whom I’ve since let go. I think the right answer is that each case is different, each relationship is different.

Would I invite “that person” to a party? If I have an investment in the man, I’d go to my community and speak with them about what they’re comfortable with.

Hughes: I’m impressed that you’ve been able to talk to your male friends who might’ve slipped up in such clear terms. I have trouble doing that. What do you say?

Meyerson: I’ve had those moments a few times now: Men asking me if what they did was O.K., but it’s all subjective. What doesn’t seem like a big deal to me might have been quite a big deal to another woman. All of us have different boundaries. I don’t really have some sort of boilerplate response. It’s based on an accumulation of feelings I have about the person, about what I perceive their particular transgression to be. But I want to ask you: We’ve established that ostracizing can be important, if only just in the short term, for the mental health of women. And I really do think that. But is it appropriate for every man? And how long do we cast them out? Forever?

Hughes: It feels animalistic, in a way — at times, I see men and I want to lash out, like a mother protecting her cubs. It comes from a place of deep-seated anger that I’ve never accessed before. I guess all I can do is ostracize as long as I need to feel safe.

This email exchange has been edited and condensed.

Sorry, Not Sorry

By Parul Sehgal

When I was a child, I lived near a notorious landfill called Smokey Mountain. It jutted out of the heart of Manila — a ziggurat of decomposing plastic bags, high as a 10-story building. Squatters made their homes on its slopes and perished in the frequent fires. From time to time, I recall the city promising to raze it and put in proper housing but never making good. Smokey Mountain flourished for years.

It was my early object lesson in selective blindness. You can ignore anything if you put your mind to it, apparently — even two million metric tons of smoldering trash. Anywhere you look, there’s a Smokey Mountain of a kind, a site of shame or suffering that we refuse to reckon with — even as it bursts into flames.

The recent statements from men accused of sexual harassment are among the stranger documents of shame I have encountered: putative apologies garlanded with self-congratulation, bristling with rage. Some sound like grotesque inversions of award-acceptance speeches, dutifully acknowledging family and friends, casts, crews, networks and agents. Others attempt clumsy deflection. Kevin Spacey, accused of assaulting numerous young men, takes the opportunity to come out of the closet and, horrifyingly, equates his alleged crimes with being gay. Louis C.K. repeatedly mentions how much his victims admired him in his open letter — and invokes his penis so insistently that it feels as if he’s covertly indulging his exhibitionism all over again. Jeffrey Tambor responds to charges of sexual harassment and aggression on the set of “Transparent” with further aggression. Many claim that the behavior is in the past and seem irritated to have to answer for it. After all, as Mark Halperin protests, he’s mostly cured now.

These statements of the men seem especially shabby when compared with the majestic testimonies of the women who have come forward. In their interviews, essays and op-eds, they relive moments of terror and humiliation and shame, even as they are forced to establish their credibility and, in some cases, account for their silence over the years. Intense introspection marks these statements. The women audit themselves to a fault and reckon painfully with what speaking out might cost them. In a column in The Hollywood Reporter, the screenwriter Jenny Lumet described being sexually assaulted by Russell Simmons — and her fear of going public now: “I have built a life in the past 25 years and a reputation in my industry. I need no one to have this visualization of me. I will, like the others, lose work because of this.” She wrestles with guilt — “As a woman of color, I cannot express how wrenching it is to write this about a successful man of color” — and worries about the effect of this story on his children. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing. In response, Simmons offered little more than a limp admission of his thoughtlessness before turning to his real task: buoying up his shareholders.

But in this way these statements — even when garbled, terse or self-serving — are revealing. You can glimpse how the men have learned to live with — and avert their eyes from — their own cruelty. You can see how they continue to insulate themselves from fully understanding the suffering they have caused. How much easier it is to cop to “thoughtlessness” or “insensitivity” (another favorite word of the accused) — to hurting someone’s feelings, essentially — than to acknowledge the realities women enumerate: panic, revulsion, rage, depression, decades of lost work. There’s a profound dissonance between the gravity of the events the women describe and the men’s mild interpretations.

Almost all the accused lean on abstract language and passive voice. They are sorry women “felt disrespected,” “were hurt,” “felt pain.” There is a sort of splitting that occurs, too; many men express remorse that “their behavior” has hurt people, as if their behavior were a rogue doppelgänger that needs to be reeled in. A few, like Louis C.K., say they are trying to reconcile their behavior with who they are. These maneuvers effectively remove women from the story. The narrative changes: It becomes less about men grappling with what they’ve done to someone else and more about men lamenting what they have done to themselves — and especially their careers. It takes on an existential hue — “a journey” for Harvey Weinstein, “a reckoning” for Leon Wieseltier. For Mark Halperin, it’s a sickness to rise up and defeat. Stories of abuses of power — and their systematic concealment — are spun as redemption narratives. These men are suddenly Odysseus in exile.

Odysseus, of course, finds his way home. Which is what many of the women coming forward fear. “There seems to be a formula for redemption: Apologize, put your head down, remove yourself from the public eye, come back up after enough time has passed, align yourself with the people that you’ve wronged and then resume your place back in line exactly where you were kicked out,” the actress Olivia Munn, one of at least six women who have accused Brett Ratner of sexual misconduct, told The Los Angeles Times. The public censure, the shows being canceled, the outrage, she says, is just pruning; “the disease still remains in the tree.”

Smokey Mountain was eventually shut down in 1995. It’s still inhabited, but more sparsely. You can take tours now and imagine it in its heyday. A few miles away, a new dump thrives. It’s twice the size.

‘There’s a Warning System’

As told to Kathy Dobie by a Bartender

I’m 32, and I’ve been a bartender for 10 years, five in New York City. There’s always been a sort of warning system that bartenders have for everything from people who drink too much to sexual predators. Even in a city as big as New York, everyone in the industry knows one another. Bartenders and waiters take care of people — that’s our job. So it’s important that we take care of one another.

When I was 21, at my first official bartending job, the owner had already been sued for sexual harassment, I heard. One night, I went into his office to take him the money from the register, and he patted my butt on my way out. I immediately put on a stern face and said, “No!” as if he were a dog. From that day forward, he never tried anything like that. My experience in the industry has been that if you assert yourself and make your boundaries clear, they will be respected. It’s actually a largely liberal industry, and that sense of community, of fairness, of gender equality, I think it’s felt a little more strongly in this industry than others, because more often than not you work as a team, men and women together. I felt that if somebody were to act inappropriately toward me, I could immediately go to a co-worker, a co-owner, and it would shame them. My industry’s not like the entertainment industry. There’s only so many big-time producers, but there are enough bars and restaurants in the world to employ everyone. I know people are not always as fortunate as I am. I’ve never been in a position where if I were to quit on the spot, I would go hungry the next day, or worked in a small town where there’s nowhere else to go. I don’t have to pick from the bottom of the barrel. But there’s a lot of bottom of the barrel out there.

They Looked the Part

By Laura Kipnis

When Henry Kissinger famously said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, what he actually meant, I think, is that power makes an unattractive man more alluring. Attractive men don’t need aphrodisiacs: Physical attractiveness is its own aphrodisiac. In Kissinger’s formulation, power is a fungible currency — interchangeable with beauty, and sufficient quantities of it offset shortfalls in physical appeal.

The question is whether Kissinger’s premise has reached its expiration date.

Or that’s what I found myself wondering following the first round of sexual-harassment revelations, as conversations with friends inevitably turned, often with dark hilarity, to the physical hideousness of so many of the accused men. Of course, the hilarity was tinged with a bit of guilt, voices were lowered — because we weren’t in high school, right? Having been subject to the brutality of appearance rankings ourselves, we should refrain from imposing them on others, right? Still, surveying the photo arrays of the accused, you suspected that these were not the sought-after guys in high school. Now, old and smug, bloated with power and fine cuisine, their physical unloveliness gave the unfolding story a pleasing Grimm-like quality: They’d acted monstrously, and they looked the part.

As friends shared their own episodes of harassment and gross come-ones, I noticed a theme emerging, something I hadn’t considered. Being hit on by someone you judged unattractive was regarded as more insulting than being encroached on by someone decent-looking. A friend who’d had to physically fight off a drunken but not uncomely movie star with whom she’d shared a limo described the ordeal with amused outrage, but a mild overture from an aging, balding editor who looked like a potato in horn rims (her description) left her fuming. It was a sudden glimpse into a complicated set of internal sociosexual calculations that I suspect we all perform. Clearly it’s the harassing behavior itself that’s wrong, but being harassed by someone from a different attractiveness echelon compounds the affront. Perhaps it risks lowering you in your own esteem — does he think he’s in my league? — yet you feel guilty for making such reckonings.

Everyone knows the principle of “assortative mating,” even those who aren’t familiar with the phrase. It refers to the tendency to pick mates who are similar to ourselves in characteristics like class and education, and also, of course, attractiveness. There’s nothing random about such choices, and obviously I’m saying nothing a user of Tinder or Grindr would find surprising. The more attractive you are — or perceive yourself to be — the more attractive you want your mate to be, other things being equal.

But other things aren’t always equal: power and money allow people — male people, mostly — to jump the queue, so to speak. At least that rogues’ gallery of unattractive harassers suggests this has been the operative fantasy. In the worst cases, it’s a fantasy that power overrides consent, in the way that handsomeness or charisma wins female favor, “sweeps a girl off her feet.” Like how being a rock star must feel — and were the harassing men rock stars in their imaginations, I wondered? “He’s a rock star,” people now say fawningly about every C.E.O. with a good fourth quarter. Do some of them start to believe it, misidentifying every woman they meet as a compliant groupie?

When I decided to crowdsource the attractiveness question on Facebook, my female friends were eager to weigh in. “I think it’s important for female humans to express their distaste for such male flesh,” one wrote. “Men like these have long lived with the assumption their flesh is tolerable, and some may believe it’s desirable.” Someone who knew one of the accused harassers long ago recalled him as exceedingly brilliant but exceedingly homely; bent on seducing women to get back at the girls who ignored him in his youth. For the women, talking about male appearance leveled the playing field; letting men experience the same kind of vulnerability women have long endured felt like a small victory.

Many of my male friends, however, were bristling, especially male progressives. They never thought about women in terms of appearance, more than a few said righteously. I was accused of body shaming, as well as superficiality, to which I retorted, summoning my inner Oscar Wilde, “Nothing is less superficial than appearance.”

Here’s something else I found curious, but no one was exactly saying: there were not a lot of good-looking men among the accused harassers. Do those guys refrain from harassing women, or is it that they’re less likely to get reported? Apparently men themselves believe it’s the latter. A male Facebook friend directed me to an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch titled “Sexual Harassment and You.” Shot in black and white, in the style of a 1950s educational film, it depicts two different men, one an ungainly dork (Fred Armisen), and the other a handsome stud (Tom Brady), coming on to two female co-workers. The dork is threatened with harassment charges; the stud gets dates and phone numbers. I noted that the writer and director were both male.

“Male power” has acquired a sleazier connotation than in Kissinger’s heyday. If some men have operated on the principle that women’s bodies were there for the plucking, regardless of niceties like consent, at least they’ve been getting away with it somewhat less lately. Which is not to say there isn’t still plenty of transactional sex and mating; plenty of “arm candy” at the side of powerful unsightly men. It’s not as though women haven’t been complicit in propping up these arrangements. Let’s be honest: We, too, have been known to leverage what we have, where we can. The question, obviously, is whether female versions of power would be less sleazy than male versions have been, especially because we keep hearing that the solution to the sexual-harassment problem is to put more women in positions of power. But even if men act out sexually more than women typically have, do we gain anything by playing the women-as-men’s-betters card? Moral smugness isn’t a great look, either. According to my informants, attractiveness matters plenty to women; we do our share of ranking and assessing, inequitable as that may be. The point is not assuming that your attractions are reciprocated. And that whatever obliviousness certain guys have displayed on that front ends — right around now.

‘I Felt Ostracized’

As told to Jaime Lowe by a Soldier

I was a service member in the Army for nearly a decade. It seemed that men pulling women on top of their laps was not uncommon. It happened to me only when I was off duty, but always by my superiors. I lost count of how many times my ass was slapped or I was brushed up against. Stuff like that became so exhausting and conflicting. Conflicting because a lot of the time it was with guys I trusted and worked really well with.

In the winter of 2011, my unit was in Kuwait. One time during a break, I went behind a shipping container to smoke a cigarette, and I was chatting with a sergeant from our company. About a month later, I was talking to an acquaintance who worked with this sergeant, and he just started joking about the time I gave the sergeant a blowjob behind the shipping container. I found out that the sergeant had been spreading rumors about very specific sexual acts that I had supposedly performed on him and others in the company. It was mortifying, and everyone seemed to know.

I decided to make an informal complaint about it, and then I felt ostracized by members of my unit. It felt as if the unit was trying to protect this guy and not me. I was questioned, and some of the queries focused on the fact that I was always seen with men or that I encouraged a certain culture. Basically, I was being accused of asking for it because I told a dirty joke every now and again. I could tell what was happening, so I ultimately filed a formal complaint. That was extremely nerve-racking. It meant I was under an even bigger microscope. There were those who wanted to send me back home or to another base or to another unit altogether. They were just going to leave him there and uproot me. Remove the victim from the situation instead of the person causing the problem. There’s a good-old-boy network.

People in power are willing to ignore bad behavior because it’s convenient or because outstanding performers in the unit are being protected. These guys are wonderful at their jobs, but some can be monsters behind closed doors.

Answers for My Daughter

By Heidi Julavits

In mid-November, my daughter began to notice the men. She had heard the reports about Harvey and Louis and Kevin and Al, and now she had a question. “Why have no women been accused of sexual misconduct?” she asked.

I was on autopilot and responded from an unthinking place: “These abuses are often a function of a power inequity, and many more men are in positions of power than women.”

Was my response an explanation? A justification? A brushoff? Did it imply an essentialist reading of gender? Was it, at a bare minimum, useful? At 13, my daughter will have her first job next summer. Substantive engagement with a soon-to-be underling about the dynamics of workplace power abuse seemed fairly critical.

Around this time, I started to mishear the news. Sound waves entered my inner ear; men became women. I misheard, “[Name of famous female writer that sounds like Roy Moore], Alabama’s Republican candidate for the Senate, is alleged to have made sexual advances toward a woman who was 14 years old at the time.” I heard, “[Name of famous female writer that sounds like Roy Moore] forcibly kissed her when she was a high school student.” In the absence of anything to laugh about, this misheard news made me giddy. Why? Women commit such abuses; it’s no joke whatsoever. Maybe my brain wanted to hear fake news to complicate a secret message that I could not help worrying other people might be hearing and believing: Men abuse power, and women do not. Men have overbearing sex drives they cannot control, and women do not.

Such thinking quickly lends itself to other “thinking,” like the thinking displayed by James Damore, the writer of the “Google Employee Memo.” Among his messages: The reason so few women work in tech is because women are biologically different from men, and we need to accept that women are gregarious (rather than assertive); women prefer aesthetics to ideas; women seek a work-life balance rather than professional status. The sum being: Women will never be as good as men at, for example, coding.

I am not delivering such messages — at least not intentionally. But I recalled what I heard when I was a girl, when my mother and her friends actively fought for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I understood “equal rights for women” to mean that women, historically, were not allowed to do what men were allowed to do and that women should be allowed to do all those things. I did not find this message controversial.

But combined with the response I gave to my daughter, and the recent habits of my inner ear, I sensed another potential perversion of meaning. Men and women were equal. Men were not hornier than women or slimier than women. I might have been reassuring my daughter that when she assumed a position of power, she would be able to balance the scales; she and her female friends could sexually abuse powerless people, of any gender, with unrepentant (until caught) vigor.

I decided to ask my daughter why she thought men were disproportionately guilty of sexual harassment in the workplace. She wondered if the preponderance of men in the news might be connected to the fact that, she had heard or read somewhere, a majority of all murders were committed by men. Then she paused. She thought about what her “thinking” implied. “To say that is a stereotype,” she said. “That women don’t murder or rape or harass, and men do. Because really no one should do any of those things.”

Right. No one should do any of those things. Somewhere along the way, baked into the acceptable standards of behavior for people in power, is a thing that nobody should do. And yet it became an entitlement. My daughter and I talked about power; was power to blame? Was power an unavoidably corrupting force? But to claim that power always corrupts risked excusing the individual offenders.

We finally settled on one useful point for future thinking and action: For the first time during my lifetime, and also by implication, during hers, victims were proving more powerful than the power that created them. The next step would seem to involve the nonvictims in the redefinition of how power works. Because in the current system, it could be argued that there are three types of people: people in power, victims and nonvictims. Recently, I witnessed a nonvictim learn about the decades of power abuses perpetrated by a friend and colleague. “I just wonder if I’ve been complicit,” the nonvictim worried. To which I wanted to reply: There can be nonvictims only so long as there are victims. If you do not call out your friend’s behavior, then yes, you can count yourself complicit.

On Thanksgiving, my family played a game of charades. Many people were involved, ages ranging from 8 to 85. I asked my son, who is 8, to contribute a clue. He gave me “sexual harassment.” I asked him if he knew what it was. He said, “It’s when you touch somebody, and they don’t want you to touch them.” Good enough. I put “sexual harassment” in the salad bowl; I felt it had earned its cultural place alongside “Little House on the Prairie” and “Kim Kardashian.” Maybe, too, I considered it a bit of an experiment. Who would pull the clue? Would a man’s performance of “sexual harassment” be more easily identifiable to the group over a woman’s? Maybe it mattered only that the action be legible to all genders, no matter the body performing it.

The person who pulled the clue was a man in his 60s. He approached the other team. He waggled his tongue; he exaggeratedly pretended to grab the bodies of the opposition in all the appropriately inappropriate places. Everyone knew immediately what he was doing. Men and women, girls and boys, all called out his actions, correctly, by name.

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and the author of “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.” Weronika Gesicka is a Polish visual artist focused on questions of identity, both in a personal and social context , and topics related to memory. Vivian Gornick is a New York-based essayist, memoirist and literary critic. She is a recipient of a Ford Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of more than 10 books, a number of which have been nominated for major prizes. Zoe Heller contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books and has published three novels, including “Notes on a Scandal.” Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor at the magazine. Sarah Illenberger is a Berlin-based artist, illustrator and designer. Ina Jang is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her latest project, “Utopia,” was shown this year at Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle in Switzerland. Heidi Julavits is the author of “The Folded Clock: A Diary,” four novels and a forthcoming book on rape culture and parenting, to be published by Crown in 2018. Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus.” Olivia Locher is a photographer based in New York who is known for her sarcastic approach to studio photography, with a heavy focus on color and concept. Her first monograph, “I Fought the Law,” was published by Chronicle Books in September. Tracy Ma runs a graphic-design practice in New York and is an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design. Collier Meyerson is a contributor to The Nation and a Nobler fellow at The Nation Institute. Meghan O’Rourke is a poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of “The Long Goodbye” and, most recently, the poetry collection “Sun in Days.” Rachel Perry uses sculpture, photography, performance, and drawing to remark on the unremarkable in our daily lives. Paula Scher has been a principal at the international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991; she is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. Parul Sehgal is a book critic at The Times. Amber Vittoria is an illustrator living and working in New York City. Jenna Wortham is a staff writer for the magazine.

Opening animation by Jessica Svendsen and Ben Barry. “As told to” illustrations by Chloe Scheffe. Source photos for Gesicka: ClassicStock/Alamy. Photograph of Illenberger concept by Johannes Berger. Produced by Rodrigo de Benito Sanz, Kyle Ligman and Alice Yin.

Related Coverage

The conversation: seven women discuss work, fairness, sex and ambition.

Emily Bazelon moderates a round table with Anita Hill, Laura Kipnis, Lynn Povich, Soledad O’Brien, Amanda Hess and Danyel Smith to talk about how — or if — real change is possible.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Dec. 12, 2017

Seven Women Discuss Work, Fairness, Sex and Ambition

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What’s Really Holding Women Back?

Robin J. Ely
Irene Padavic

Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible to put in those hours, and so their careers inevitably suffer.

Not so, say the authors, who spent 18 months working with a global consulting firm that wanted to know why it had so few women in positions of power. Although virtually every employee the authors interviewed related a form of the standard explanation, the firm’s data told a different story. Women weren’t being held back because of trouble balancing work and family; men, too, suffered from that problem and nevertheless advanced. Women were held back because they were encouraged to take accommodations, such as going part-time and shifting to internally facing roles, which derailed their careers.

The real culprit in women’s stalled advancement, the authors conclude, is a general culture of overwork that hurts both sexes and locks gender equality in place. To solve this problem, they argue, we must reconsider what we’re willing to allow the workplace to demand of all employees.

It’s not what most people think.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

To explain why women are still having trouble accessing positions of power and authority in the workplace, many observers point to the challenge of managing the competing demands of work and family. But the data doesn’t support that narrative.

The Research

The authors conducted a long-term study of beliefs and practices at a global consulting firm. The problem, they found, was not the work/family challenge itself but a general culture of overwork in which women were encouraged to take career-derailing accommodations to meet the demands of work and family.

The Way Forward

This culture of overwork punishes not just women but also men, although to a lesser degree. Only by recognizing and addressing the problem as one that affects all employees will we have a chance of achieving workplace equality.

As scholars of gender inequality in the workplace, we are routinely asked by companies to investigate why they are having trouble retaining women and promoting them to senior ranks. It’s a pervasive problem. Women made remarkable progress accessing positions of power and authority in the 1970s and 1980s, but that progress slowed considerably in the 1990s and has stalled completely in this century.

RE Robin J. Ely is the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty chair of the HBS Gender Initiative.
IP Irene Padavic is the Mildred and Claude Pepper Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Florida State University.

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Women in the Workplace 2023

Women in the Workplace

This is the ninth year of the Women in the Workplace report. Conducted in partnership with LeanIn.Org , this effort is the largest study of women in corporate America and Canada. This year, we collected information from 276 participating organizations employing more than ten million people. At these organizations, we surveyed more than 27,000 employees and 270 senior HR leaders, who shared insights on their policies and practices. The report provides an intersectional look at the specific biases and barriers faced by Asian, Black, Latina, and LGBTQ+ women and women with disabilities.

About the authors

This year’s research reveals some hard-fought gains at the top, with women’s representation in the C-suite at the highest it has ever been. However, with lagging progress in the middle of the pipeline—and a persistent underrepresentation of women of color 1 Women of color include women who are Asian, Black, Latina, Middle Eastern, mixed race, Native American/American Indian/Indigenous/Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Due to small sample sizes for other racial and ethnic groups, reported findings on individual racial and ethnic groups are restricted to Asian women, Black women, and Latinas. —true parity remains painfully out of reach.

The survey debunks four myths about women’s workplace experiences and career advancement. A few of these myths cover old ground, but given the notable lack of progress, they warrant repeating. These include women’s career ambitions, the greatest barrier to their ascent to senior leadership, the effect and extent of microaggressions in the workplace, and women’s appetite for flexible work. We hope highlighting these myths will help companies find a path forward that casts aside outdated thinking once and for all and accelerates progress for women.

The rest of this article summarizes the main findings from the Women in the Workplace 2023 report and provides clear solutions that organizations can implement to make meaningful progress toward gender equality.

State of the pipeline

Over the past nine years, women—and especially women of color—have remained underrepresented across the corporate pipeline (Exhibit 1). However, we see a growing bright spot in senior leadership. Since 2015, the number of women in the C-suite has increased from 17 to 28 percent, and the representation of women at the vice president and senior vice president levels has also improved signiﬁcantly.

These hard-earned gains are encouraging yet fragile: slow progress for women at the manager and director levels—representation has grown only three and four percentage points, respectively—creates a weak middle in the pipeline for employees who represent the vast majority of women in corporate America. And the “Great Breakup” trend we discovered in last year’s survey continues for women at the director level, the group next in line for senior-leadership positions. That is, director-level women are leaving at a higher rate than in past years—and at a notably higher rate than men at the same level. As a result of these two dynamics, there are fewer women in line for top positions.

To view previous reports, please visit the Women in the Workplace archive

Moreover, progress for women of color is lagging behind their peers’ progress. At nearly every step in the pipeline, the representation of women of color falls relative to White women and men of the same race and ethnicity. Until companies address this inequity head-on, women of color will remain severely underrepresented in leadership positions—and mostly absent from the C-suite.

“It’s disheartening to be part of an organization for as many years as I have been and still not see a person like me in senior leadership. Until I see somebody like me in the C-suite, I’m never going to really feel like I belong.”

—Latina, manager, former executive director

Four myths about the state of women at work

This year’s survey reveals the truth about four common myths related to women in the workplace.

Myth: Women are becoming less ambitious Reality: Women are more ambitious than before the pandemic—and flexibility is fueling that ambition

At every stage of the pipeline, women are as committed to their careers and as interested in being promoted as men. Women and men at the director level—when the C-suite is in closer view—are also equally interested in senior-leadership roles. And young women are especially ambitious. Nine in ten women under the age of 30 want to be promoted to the next level, and three in four aspire to become senior leaders.

Women represent roughly one in four C-suite leaders, and women of color just one in 16.

Moreover, the pandemic and increased ﬂexibility did not dampen women’s ambitions. Roughly 80 percent of women want to be promoted to the next level, compared with 70 percent in 2019. And the same holds true for men. Women of color are even more ambitious than White women: 88 percent want to be promoted to the next level. Flexibility is allowing women to pursue their ambitions: overall, one in ﬁve women say ﬂexibility has helped them stay in their job or avoid reducing their hours. A large number of women who work hybrid or remotely point to feeling less fatigued and burned out as a primary beneﬁt. And a majority of women report having more focused time to get their work done when they work remotely.

The pandemic showed women that a new model of balancing work and life was possible. Now, few want to return to the way things were. Most women are taking more steps to prioritize their personal lives—but at no cost to their ambition. They remain just as committed to their careers and just as interested in advancing as women who aren’t taking more steps. These women are defying the outdated notion that work and life are incompatible, and that one comes at the expense of the other.

Myth: The biggest barrier to women’s advancement is the ‘glass ceiling’ Reality: The ‘broken rung’ is the greatest obstacle women face on the path to senior leadership

For the ninth consecutive year, women face their biggest hurdle at the ﬁrst critical step up to manager. This year, for every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, 87 women were promoted (Exhibit 2). And this gap is trending the wrong way for women of color: this year, 73 women of color were promoted to manager for every 100 men, down from 82 women of color last year. As a result of this “broken rung,” women fall behind and can’t catch up.

Progress for early-career Black women remains the furthest behind. After rising in 2020 and 2021 to a high of 96 Black women promoted for every 100 men—likely because of heightened focus across corporate America—Black women’s promotion rates have fallen to 2018 levels, with only 54 Black women promoted for every 100 men this year.

While companies are modestly increasing women’s representation at the top, doing so without addressing the broken rung oﬀers only a temporary stopgap. Because of the gender disparity in early promotions, men end up holding 60 percent of manager-level positions in a typical company, while women occupy 40 percent. Since men signiﬁcantly outnumber women, there are fewer women to promote to senior managers, and the number of women decreases at every subsequent level.

Myth: Microaggressions have a ‘micro’ impact Reality: Microaggressions have a large and lasting impact on women

Microaggressions are a form of everyday discrimination that is often rooted in bias. They include comments and actions—even subtle ones that are not overtly harmful—that demean or dismiss someone based on their gender, race, or other aspects of their identity. They signal disrespect, cause acute stress, and can negatively impact women’s careers and health.

Years of data show that women experience microaggressions at a signiﬁcantly higher rate than men: they are twice as likely to be mistaken for someone junior and hear comments on their emotional state (Exhibit 3). For women with traditionally marginalized identities, these slights happen more often and are even more demeaning. As just one example, Asian and Black women are seven times more likely than White women to be confused with someone of the same race and ethnicity.

As a result, the workplace is a mental mineﬁeld for many women, particularly those with traditionally marginalized identities. Women who experience microaggressions are much less likely to feel psychologically safe, which makes it harder to take risks, propose new ideas, or raise concerns. The stakes feel just too high. On top of this, 78 percent of women who face microaggressions self-shield at work, or adjust the way they look or act in an eﬀort to protect themselves. For example, many women code-switch—or tone down what they say or do—to try to blend in and avoid a negative reaction at work. Black women are more than twice as likely as women overall to code-switch. And LGBTQ+ women are 2.5 times as likely to feel pressure to change their appearance to be perceived as more professional. The stress caused by these dynamics cuts deep.

Women who experience microaggressions—and self-shield to deflect them—are three times more likely to think about quitting their jobs and four times more likely to almost always be burned out. By leaving microaggressions unchecked, companies miss out on everything women have to oﬀer and risk losing talented employees.

“It’s like I have to act extra happy so I’m not looked at as bitter because I’m a Black woman. And a disabled Black woman at that. If someone says something offensive to me, I have to think about how to respond in a way that does not make me seem like an angry Black woman.”

—Black woman with a physical disability, entry-level role

Myth: It’s mostly women who want—and benefit from—flexible work Reality: Men and women see flexibility as a ‘top 3’ employee benefit and critical to their company’s success

Most employees say that opportunities to work remotely and have control over their schedules are top company beneﬁts, second only to healthcare (Exhibit 4). Workplace ﬂexibility even ranks above tried-and-true beneﬁts such as parental leave and childcare.

As workplace ﬂexibility transforms from a nice-to-have for some employees to a crucial beneﬁt for most, women continue to value it more. This is likely because they still carry out a disproportionate amount of childcare and household work. Indeed, 38 percent of mothers with young children say that without workplace flexibility, they would have had to leave their company or reduce their work hours.

But it’s not just women or mothers who benefit: hybrid and remote work are delivering important beneﬁts to most employees. Most women and men point to better work–life balance as a primary beneﬁt of hybrid and remote work, and a majority cite less fatigue and burnout (Exhibit 5). And research shows that good work–life balance and low burnout are key to organizational success. Moreover, 83 percent of employees cite the ability to work more eﬃciently and productively as a primary beneﬁt of working remotely. However, it’s worth noting companies see this diﬀerently: only half of HR leaders say employee productivity is a primary beneﬁt of working remotely.

For women, hybrid or remote work is about a lot more than flexibility. When women work remotely, they face fewer microaggressions and have higher levels of psychological safety.

Employees who work on-site also see tangible beneﬁts. A majority point to an easier time collaborating and a stronger personal connection to coworkers as the biggest beneﬁts of working on-site—two factors central to employee well-being and eﬀectiveness. However, the culture of on-site work may be falling short. While 77 percent of companies believe a strong organizational culture is a key beneﬁt of on-site work, most employees disagree: only 39 percent of men and 34 percent of women who work on-site say a key beneﬁt is feeling more connected to their organization’s culture.

Not to mention that men benefit disproportionately from on-site work: compared with women who work on-site, men are seven to nine percentage points more likely to be “in the know,” receive the mentorship and sponsorships they need, and have their accomplishments noticed and rewarded.

A majority of organizations have started to formalize their return-to-office policies, motivated by the perceived benefits of on-site work (Exhibit 6). As they do so, they will need to work to ensure everyone can equally reap the benefits of on-site work.

Recommendations for companies

As companies work to support and advance women, they should focus on five core areas:

tracking outcomes for women’s representation
empowering managers to be effective people leaders
addressing microaggressions head-on
unlocking the full potential of flexible work
fixing the broken rung, once and for all

Sixty percent of companies have increased their financial and staffing investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past year. And nearly three in four HR leaders say DEI is critical to their companies’ future success.

1. Track outcomes to improve women’s experience and progression

Tracking outcomes is critical to any successful business initiative. Most companies do this consistently when it comes to achieving their financial objectives, but few apply the same rigor to women’s advancement. Here are three steps to get started:

Measure employees’ outcomes and experiences—and use the data to fix trouble spots. Outcomes for drivers of women’s advancement include hiring, promotions, and attrition. Visibility into other metrics—such as participation in career development programs, performance ratings, and employee sentiments—that influence career progression is also important, and data should be collected with appropriate data privacy protections in place. Then, it’s critically important that companies mine their data for insights that will improve women’s experiences and create equal opportunities for advancement. Ultimately, data tracking is only valuable if it leads to organizational change.

Take an intersectional approach to outcome tracking. Tracking metrics by race and gender combined should be table stakes. Yet, even now, fewer than half of companies do this, and far fewer track data by other self-reported identifiers, such as LGBTQ+ identity. Without this level of visibility, the experiences and career progression of women with traditionally marginalized identities can go overlooked.

Share internal goals and metrics with employees. Awareness is a valuable tool for driving change—when employees are able to see opportunities and challenges, they’re more invested in being part of the solution. In addition, transparency with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals and metrics can send a powerful signal to employees with traditionally marginalized identities that they are supported within the organization.

2. Support and reward managers as key drivers of organizational change

Managers are on the front lines of employees’ experiences and central to driving organizational change. As companies more deeply invest in the culture of work, managers play an increasingly critical role in fostering DEI, ensuring employee well-being, and navigating the shift to flexible work. These are all important business priorities, but managers do not always get the direction and support they need to deliver on them. Here are three steps to get started:

Clarify managers’ priorities and reward results. Companies need to explicitly communicate to managers what is core to their roles and motivate them to take action. The most effective way to do this is to include responsibilities like career development, DEI, and employee well-being in managers’ job descriptions and performance reviews. Relatively few companies evaluate managers on metrics linked to people management. For example, although 61 percent of companies point to DEI as a top manager capability, only 28 percent of people managers say their company recognizes DEI in performance reviews. This discrepancy may partially explain why not enough employees say their manager treats DEI as a priority.

Equip managers with the skills they need to be successful. To effectively manage the new demands being placed on them, managers need ongoing education. This includes repeated, relevant, and high-quality training and nudges that emphasize specific examples of core concepts, as well as concrete actions that managers can incorporate into their daily practices. Companies should adopt an “often and varied” approach to training and upskilling and create regular opportunities for coaching so that managers can continue to build the awareness and capabilities they need to be effective.

Make sure managers have the time and support to get it right. It requires significant intentionality and follow-through to be a good people and culture leader, and this is particularly true when it comes to fostering DEI. Companies need to make sure their managers have the time and resources to do these aspects of their job well. Additionally, companies should put policies and systems in place to make managers’ jobs easier.

3. Take steps to put an end to microaggressions

Microaggressions are pervasive, harmful to the employees who experience them, and result in missed ideas and lost talent. Companies need to tackle microaggressions head-on. Here are three steps to get started:

Make clear that microaggressions are not acceptable. To raise employee awareness and set the right tone, it’s crucial that senior leaders communicate that microaggressions and disrespectful behavior of any kind are not welcome. Companies can help with this by developing a code of conduct that articulates what supportive and respectful behavior looks like—as well as what’s unacceptable and uncivil behavior.

Teach employees to avoid and challenge microaggressions. Employees often don’t recognize microaggressions, let alone know what to say or do to be helpful. That’s why it’s so important that companies have employees participate in high-quality bias and allyship training and receive periodic refreshers to keep key learnings top of mind.

Create a culture where it’s normal to surface microaggressions. It’s important for companies to foster a culture that encourages employees to speak up when they see microaggressions or other disrespectful behavior. Although these conversations can be difficult, they often lead to valuable learning and growth. Senior leaders can play an important role in modeling that it is safe to surface and discuss these behaviors.

4. Finetune flexible working models

The past few years have seen a transformation in how we work. Flexibility is now the norm in most companies; the next step is unlocking its full potential and bringing out the best of the benefits that different work arrangements have to offer. Here are three steps to get started:

Establish clear expectations and norms around working flexibly. Without this clarity, employees may have very different and conflicting interpretations of what’s expected of them. It starts with redefining the work best done in person, versus remotely, and injecting flexibility into the work model to meet personal demands. As part of this process, companies need to find the right balance between setting organization-wide guidelines and allowing managers to work with their teams to determine an approach that unlocks benefits for men and women equally.

Measure the impact of new initiatives to support flexibility and adjust them as needed. The last thing companies want to do is fly in the dark as they navigate the transition to flexible work. As organizations roll out new working models and programs to support flexibility, they should carefully track what’s working, and what’s not, and adjust their approach accordingly—a test-and-learn mentality and a spirit of co-creation with employees are critical to getting these changes right.

Few companies currently track outcomes across work arrangements. For example, only 30 percent have tracked the impact of their return-to-office policies on key DEI outcomes.

Put safeguards in place to ensure a level playing field across work arrangements. Companies should take steps to ensure that employees aren’t penalized for working flexibly. This includes putting systems in place to make sure that employees are evaluated fairly, such as redesigning performance reviews to focus on results rather than when and where work gets done. Managers should also be equipped to be part of the solution. This requires educating managers on proximity bias. Managers need to ensure their team members get equal recognition for their contributions and equal opportunities to advance regardless of working model.

5. Fix the broken rung for women, with a focus on women of color

Fixing the broken rung is a tangible, achievable goal and will set off a positive chain reaction across the pipeline. After nine years of very little progress, there is no excuse for companies failing to take action. Here are three steps to get started:

Track inputs and outcomes. To uncover inequities in the promotions process, companies need to track who is put up for and who receives promotions—by race and gender combined. Tracking with this intersectional lens enables employers to identify and address the obstacles faced by women of color, and companies can use these data points to identify otherwise invisible gaps and refine their promotion processes.

Work to de-bias performance reviews and promotions. Leaders should put safeguards in place to ensure that evaluation criteria are applied fairly and bias doesn’t creep into decision making. Companies can take these actions:

Send “bias” reminders before performance evaluations and promotion cycles, explaining how common biases can impact reviewers’ assessments.
Appoint a “bias monitor” to keep performance evaluations and promotions discussions focused on the core criteria for the job and surface potentially biased decision making.
Have reviewers explain the rationale behind their performance evaluations and promotion recommendations. When individuals have to justify their decisions, they are less likely to make snap judgments or rely on gut feelings, which are prone to bias.

Invest in career advancement for women of color. Companies should make sure their career development programs address the distinct biases and barriers that women of color experience. Yet only a fraction of companies tailor career program content for women of color. And given that women of color tend to get less career advice and have less access to senior leaders, formal mentorship and sponsorship programs can be particularly impactful. It’s also important that companies track the outcomes of their career development programs with an intersectional lens to ensure they are having the intended impact and not inadvertently perpetuating inequitable outcomes.

Practices of top-performing companies

Companies with strong women’s representation across the pipeline are more likely to have certain practices in place. The following data are based on an analysis of top performers—companies that have a higher representation of women and women of color than their industry peers (Exhibit 7).

This year’s survey brings to light important realities about women’s experience in the workplace today. Women, and particularly women of color, continue to lose the most ground in middle management, and microaggressions have a significant and enduring effect on many women—especially those with traditionally marginalized identities. Even still, women are as ambitious as ever, and flexibility is contributing to this, allowing all workers to be more productive while also achieving more balance in their lives. These insights can provide a backdrop for senior leaders as they plan for the future of their organizations.

Emily Field is a partner in McKinsey’s Seattle office; Alexis Krivkovich and Lareina Yee are senior partners in the Bay Area office, where Nicole Robinson is an associate partner; Sandra Kügele is a consultant in the Washington, D.C., office.

The authors wish to thank Zoha Bharwani, Quentin Bolton, Sara Callander, Katie Cox, Ping Chin, Robyn Freeman, James Gannon, Jenn Gao, Mar Grech, Alexis Howard, Isabelle Hughes, Sara Kaplan, Ananya Karanam, Sophia Lam, Nina Li, Steven Lee, Anthea Lyu, Tess Mandoli, Abena Mensah, Laura Padula, David Pinski, Jane Qu, Charlie Rixey, Sara Samir, Chanel Shum, Sofia Tam, Neha Verma, Monne Williams, Lily Xu, Yaz Yazar, and Shirley Zhao for their contributions to this article.

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Women's Rights in the Workplace

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The ACLU works to ensure that all women—especially those facing intersecting forms of discrimination—have equal access to employment free from gender discrimination, including discrimination based on sex stereotypes, pregnancy, and parenting; discrimination in the form of barriers to working in fields from which women have traditionally been excluded; and the systemic undervaluing of work traditionally performed by women.

Although pregnancy discrimination has long been illegal, workers who are pregnant or breastfeeding are often fired or pushed out of the workplace. This practice is rooted in the stereotype that women should be mothers, not workers, and it is reinforced by workplace policies modeled on traditional male norms.

The ACLU works to end wage discrimination in the workplace and ensure that all workers—regardless of sex, race, national origin, age, or disability—are able to bring home every dollar they rightfully earn. As a result of discrimination, including employers’ reliance on gender stereotypes, women lack parity with men in earnings. On average, women today earn just 78 cents for every dollar that men earn—an increase of only 17 cents on the dollar since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was enacted. The figures are even more dismal for women of color. Black women are paid only 64 cents and Latinas only 54 cents for every dollar that white men earn. Obstacles such as punitive pay secrecy policies and weak remedies in some of our laws make it difficult to challenge the ongoing wage gap.

A range of barriers prevent women from having an equal opportunity to succeed in jobs from which they have traditionally been excluded. These can include formal barriers, such as physical ability tests unrelated to job performance or bans on their ability to serve in combat units, but they can also include other forms of discrimination and unconscious bias, including policies that force women out of non-traditional sectors like shipping and factory work when they become pregnant or return to work after having a baby.

Finally, the work of caring for children, sick family members, and elderly parents has traditionally been assumed to be, and often is, “women’s work.” This caregiving work, although essential to society, tends to be undervalued and is often either unpaid (when women combine care for their own families with paid work) or underpaid (when they work in caregiving occupations, such as in nursing homes). Workplace policies still fail to account for these obligations, and workers with child or elder care responsibilities often face sex discrimination and harassment, which inhibits their advancement in the workforce.

What does gender equality look like today?

Date: Wednesday, 6 October 2021

Progress towards gender equality is looking bleak. But it doesn’t need to.

A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women’s rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work. Women’s health services, poorly funded even before the pandemic, faced major disruptions, undermining women’s sexual and reproductive health. And despite women’s central role in responding to COVID-19, including as front-line health workers, they are still largely bypassed for leadership positions they deserve.

UN Women’s latest report, together with UN DESA, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 presents the latest data on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The report highlights the progress made since 2015 but also the continued alarm over the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate effect on women’s well-being and the threat it poses to future generations.

We’re breaking down some of the findings from the report, and calling for the action needed to accelerate progress.

The pandemic is making matters worse

One and a half years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people remains devastating and disproportionate. The combined impact of conflict, extreme weather events and COVID-19 has deprived women and girls of even basic needs such as food security. Without urgent action to stem rising poverty, hunger and inequality, especially in countries affected by conflict and other acute forms of crisis, millions will continue to suffer.

A global goal by global goal reality check:

Goal 1. Poverty

Globally, 1 in 5 girls under 15 are growing up in extreme poverty.

In 2021, extreme poverty is on the rise and progress towards its elimination has reversed. An estimated 435 million women and girls globally are living in extreme poverty.

And yet we can change this .

Over 150 million women and girls could emerge from poverty by 2030 if governments implement a comprehensive strategy to improve access to education and family planning, achieve equal wages and extend social transfers.

Goal 2. Zero hunger

Small-scale farmer households headed by women earn on average 30% less than those headed by men.

The global gender gap in food security has risen dramatically during the pandemic, with more women and girls going hungry. Women’s food insecurity levels were 10 per cent higher than men’s in 2020, compared with 6 per cent higher in 2019.

This trend can be reversed , including by supporting women small-scale producers, who typically earn far less than men, through increased funding, training and land rights reforms.

Goal 3. Good health and well-being

In the first year of the pandemic, there were an estimated additional 1.4 million additional unintended pregnancies in lower- and middle-income countries.

Disruptions in essential health services due to COVID-19 are taking a tragic toll on women and girls. In the first year of the pandemic, there were an estimated 1.4 million additional unintended pregnancies in lower and middle-income countries.

We need to do better .

Response to the pandemic must include prioritizing sexual and reproductive health services, ensuring they continue to operate safely now and after the pandemic is long over. In addition, more support is needed to ensure life-saving personal protection equipment, tests, oxygen and especially vaccines are available in rich and poor countries alike as well as to vulnerable population within countries.

Goal 4. Quality education

Half of all refugee girls enrolled in secondary school before the pandemic will not return to school.

A year and a half into the pandemic, schools remain partially or fully closed in 42 per cent of the world’s countries and territories. School closures spell lost opportunities for girls and an increased risk of violence, exploitation and early marriage .

Governments can do more to protect girls education .

Measures focused specifically on supporting girls returning to school are urgently needed, including measures focused on girls from marginalized communities who are most at risk.

Goal 5. Gender equality

Women are restricted from working in certain jobs or industries in almost 50% of countries.

The pandemic has tested and even reversed progress in expanding women’s rights and opportunities. Reports of violence against women and girls, a “shadow” pandemic to COVID-19, are increasing in many parts of the world. COVID-19 is also intensifying women’s workload at home, forcing many to leave the labour force altogether.

Building forward differently and better will hinge on placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

Goal 6. Clean water and sanitation

Only 26% of countries are actively working on gender mainstreaming in water management.

In 2018, nearly 2.3 billion people lived in water-stressed countries. Without safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities, women and girls find it harder to lead safe, productive and healthy lives.

Change is possible .

Involve those most impacted in water management processes, including women. Women’s voices are often missing in water management processes.

Goal 7. Affordable and clean energy

Only about 1 in 10 senior managers in the rapidly growing renewable energy industry is a woman.

Increased demand for clean energy and low-carbon solutions is driving an unprecedented transformation of the energy sector. But women are being left out. Women hold only 32 per cent of renewable energy jobs.

We can do better .

Expose girls early on to STEM education, provide training and support to women entering the energy field, close the pay gap and increase women’s leadership in the energy sector.

Goal 8. Decent work and economic growth

In 2020 employed women fell by 54 million. Women out of the labour force rose by 45 million.

The number of employed women declined by 54 million in 2020 and 45 million women left the labour market altogether. Women have suffered steeper job losses than men, along with increased unpaid care burdens at home.

We must do more to support women in the workforce .

Guarantee decent work for all, introduce labour laws/reforms, removing legal barriers for married women entering the workforce, support access to affordable/quality childcare.

Goal 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Just 4% of clinical studies on COVID-19 treatments considered sex and/or gender in their research

The COVID-19 crisis has spurred striking achievements in medical research and innovation. Women’s contribution has been profound. But still only a little over a third of graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field are female.

We can take action today.

Quotas mandating that a proportion of research grants are awarded to women-led teams or teams that include women is one concrete way to support women researchers.

Goal 10. Reduced inequalities

While in transit to their new destination, 53% of migrant women report experiencing or witnessing violence, compared to 19% of men.

Limited progress for women is being eroded by the pandemic. Women facing multiple forms of discrimination, including women and girls with disabilities, migrant women, women discriminated against because of their race/ethnicity are especially affected.

Commit to end racism and discrimination in all its forms, invest in inclusive, universal, gender responsive social protection systems that support all women.

Goal 11. Sustainable cities and communities

Slum residents are at an elevated risk of COVID-19 infection and fatality rates. In many countries, women are overrepresented in urban slums.

Globally, more than 1 billion people live in informal settlements and slums. Women and girls, often overrepresented in these densely populated areas, suffer from lack of access to basic water and sanitation, health care and transportation.

The needs of urban poor women must be prioritized .

Increase the provision of durable and adequate housing and equitable access to land; included women in urban planning and development processes.

Goal 12. Sustainable consumption and production; Goal 13. Climate action; Goal 14. Life below water; and Goal 15. Life on land

Women are finding solutions for our ailing planet, but are not given the platforms they deserve. Only 29% of featured speakers at international ocean science conferences are women.

Women activists, scientists and researchers are working hard to solve the climate crisis but often without the same platforms as men to share their knowledge and skills. Only 29 per cent of featured speakers at international ocean science conferences are women.

And yet we can change this .

Ensure women activists, scientists and researchers have equal voice, representation and access to forums where these issues are being discussed and debated.

Goal 16. Peace, justice and strong institutions

Women's unequal decision-making power undermines development at every level. Women only chair 18% of government committees on foreign affairs, defence and human rights.

The lack of women in decision-making limits the reach and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency recovery efforts. In conflict-affected countries, 18.9 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women, much lower than the global average of 25.6 per cent.

This is unacceptable .

It's time for women to have an equal share of power and decision-making at all levels.

Goal 17. Global partnerships for the goals

Women are not being sufficiently prioritized in country commitments to achieving the SDGs, including on Climate Action. Only 64 out of 190 of nationally determined contributions to climate goals referred to women.

There are just 9 years left to achieve the Global Goals by 2030, and gender equality cuts across all 17 of them. With COVID-19 slowing progress on women's rights, the time to act is now.

Looking ahead

As it stands today, only one indicator under the global goal for gender equality (SDG5) is ‘close to target’: proportion of seats held by women in local government. In other areas critical to women’s empowerment, equality in time spent on unpaid care and domestic work and decision making regarding sexual and reproductive health the world is far from target. Without a bold commitment to accelerate progress, the global community will fail to achieve gender equality. Building forward differently and better will require placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

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Womens Rights in the Workplace Essay example

Brittany Dorris Mr. Dean Ford Eng. 101 04 October 2010 A Wife, a Mom, and a Worker Women fought very hard for their rights in the workplace. Some of them, including Susan B Anthony, went above and beyond the norm. Yet, today our rights are still not the same as a man’s. At one point women weren’t allowed to work at all, and today they are allowed to have jobs while still being home makers. Although improvements have been made, there are still several dilemmas that need to be addressed. A women earns less than a man when doing the same work, and that is extremely unfair. Another issue in the workplace is that men underestimate women due to lack of strength and discrimination . There are also the issues of pregnancy and sexual …show more content…

Sadly, she is still paid less than the men at her job. If she is truly one of the best employees then she should be given a raise instead of being awarded less cash. It is illegal to not hire someone based on their race, yet it is legal to pay a woman less due to her sex. It should be clear to everyone that women are treated poorly and unfairly in the workplace everyday. Another stereotypical belief is that women aren’t as intelligent as men. If this were true, then the female generations of our past would not have come as far as they have today in the workplace. There are women involved in politics, the medical field, and education. If men were truly more intelligent, then women would not be capable of being successful in those fields. Linda Tapp, president of Crown Safety in Cherry Hill, and a very successful female, states that “ gender discrimination is still live and well. No matter how much we like to think things have changed, there are more than a few people out there who think a woman can still not do the same jobs a man can do”(Eglash). In my own experience, I have learned that female teachers and doctors do an equally good job as males in those fields. A woman is fully capable of doing a job that requires high intellect, just as a man is. I believe that it is ridiculous and unjustified for a man to treat a woman at work poorly because he believes that men are more

Essay on Gender Discrimination in the Workplace

4 Works Cited

It seems that women workers have reached a plateau in society. In order for women to be respected (as men are) in the workplace there needs to be a redistribution of domestic and family work. It’s acceptable now for women to work; but this acceptance into the workforce has not drastically changed what they, women, are expected to perform at home. There is no way for women to move forward to equality in pay if they are not recognized as contributers to their job (i.e. women are still expected to perform outside of work in the family setting as well in a way that men are only expected to perform at work and not at home).

`` Please Fire Me `` By Deborah Garrison Essay

Women have long been fighting for their right to be seen as equal to men. Even to this day, women continue to fight for their rights, things such as the right to non-gender discriminatory wages. While there may be some arguments over the state of gender equality in the modern world, it is undeniable that there have been great strides made toward recognizing the female 's worth in the workforce and as a human being. Despite these strides, however, things are still not yet ideal for women and many of the issues females face today are the very same issues that have been plaguing them for decades. While it is unfortunate the oppression of women has been so long-lived, the length of that exposure has thankfully enabled many talented writers to both lament over the fact and emphasize the need for gender equality.

Market Revolution and Second Great Awakening

Women have been a vital key to the shaping and progression of our society. Throughout time, women’s roles and opportunities in the family, workplace, and society have greatly evolved. They started from being housewives that don’t have many rights, even in the household, to being valued citizens in our

Research Paper On Betty Friedan

Women have virtually the same rights as men. However, the fault needing to be recognized in today’s society is the way that women are treated. Even in simple areas, such as jobs, women are put on the back burner. A woman is able to become a CEO of a company, nonetheless, she will struggle twice as hard as a man would. Even as an employee, women are statistically paid less than men are.

Discrimination Against Women in the Workplace Essay example

Although some of the worst employment discrimination was eliminated by the Civil Rights Act in 1964, many women continue to undergo unfair and unlawful discrimination in the workplace. Even though women have come a long way, they are still being discriminated against in certain fields of work. High-end jobs, most commonly large companies and medical fields, continue to discriminate against women even though they have the same job qualifications as men.

Essay on Women in the Workplace

The "glass ceiling" has held women back from certain positions and opportunities in the workplace. Women are stereotyped as part-time, lower-grade workers with limited opportunities for training and advancement because of this "glass ceiling". How have women managed their careers when confronted by this glass ceiling? It has been difficult; American women have struggled for their role in society since 1848. Women’s roles have changed significantly throughout the past centuries because of their willingness and persistence. Women have contributed to the change pace of their role in the workplace by showing motivation and perseverance.

Essay about Women in The Workplace

8 Works Cited

Gender plays a huge role in workplace 'success' and can be a big challenge especially if the employee is a woman in a male dominated workplace or career. No matter how 'hard-nosed,' 'ruthless,' 'workaholic' a woman may be, or how much personal success she achieves, there will always tend to be some type of obstacle to keep her from getting completely to the top of the corporate ladder. She must also still fight stereotypes that undermines her confidence or limits her potential. Since the early 20th century, women and minorities have sought equal opportunities in education and in the labor force with little success. These obstacles or barriers are all known as the glass ceiling.

Mill Women's Equality

That image of women can be changed if affirmative action is reinforced and allowed qualified employees who have been discriminated against to get a job. Also, the gap of pay between men and women is a concrete example of inequality between them. For example, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in 2015, women with a full time jobs made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Women work as harder as men, and they should deserve to have equal pay. Women at work should be allowed to progress at the same pace as men and should also be respected. Furthermore, women are subject to domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. In order to reduce or banned those troubles that torment women more effectively, laws should be passed. Also, equality of women within their family requires a sharing of responsibilities between members of the family. Women should not be the only one responsible for domestic chore, taking care of their children and parents. Therefore, they should get support from their

Gender Discrimination in the Workplace Essay example

Women are one of the most groups being discriminated against today. They try very hard to fit in and be successful in their careers. Discrimination against women is found in many workplaces. Some managers try to fix this problem, but others just ignore it. Companies that pretend that gender discrimination doesn’t exist are usually the ones that get sued for it more often. Other companies try to avoid law suits by dealing with gender discrimination and resolving conflicts before it gets to the law suits.

Women 's Unpaid Labor By Susan M. Shaw And Janet Lee 's Women

In the quite hours of early morning my mother rises out of bed, as she has done every morning for the past twenty-two years. She quietly begins her long day by making tea and cooking breakfast. Before the day ends, my mother would have cooked several meals, cleaned several times and worked a full time job. My mother’s daily routine is not unique and has historically been done by women for centuries. Even today, women are supposed to do it all, have a family, and take care of the house/children and work full-time. Women who are in the workforce are unpaid and the work they do at home is viewed as inferior. They often deal with sexism and racism in the workplace. Changes in law and our thought process need to occur to create and an equitable system of work for all women.

Discrimination Against Women in the Workplace

From the beginning of time the male and female have been expected to perform certain roles in society. Males have been expected to work and provide for their family while the female raises the children, cooks, cleans and keeps the house in order. Today many women have broken that tradition and are starting their careers and becoming more independent. Even though females today are braking away from that stereotype, they are being discriminated in the work place because there are still individuals out there that believe that women should play a certain role and that they are not strong enough to work in a cooperation or

Gender Inequality Within The Workplace Essay

The generation now has made it easier to equalize men and women but there is still a substantial amount of places where gender inequality is still happening in the workplace and where females still face discrimination. Women are often discriminated in the workplace and are usually not promoted as quickly as men are and they also receive less pay. History shows that women have not always been defined as property and thought of as second class citizens. But in the 21st century many have seen a drastic change in the so called “traditional” family ways where women are suppose to stay home and take care of the household chores, food, and children and men are suppose to work to support their family and provide financial stability. Many assume that in the workplace women are more vulnerable and less competent than men because women 's instincts are to put their family before work or anything else. Whereas men are the ones who will usually stay the late hours to work. People on both sides of the political spectrum and everywhere in between seem to be fearful of what is to come and more fearful of others than they are often willing to admit.

Essay on Gender Inequality in the Workplace

9 Works Cited

Women have experienced a historic situation of inequality in the social as well as professional aspects. Women were normally the ones that would take care of children, do the chores in the house, and in rural areas; they would work in the field with the rest of the family. However, today’s women have become more self-sufficient and independent from the predominant male figure within every historical family. Gender inequality in the workplace is becoming less common; yet, gender is a factor that affects men and women. Especially women have been subjected to a historical discrimination that has influenced society to decide which job is more suitable for women than men. However women have confronted and tried to break down the barriers that

Essay about Women in the Workforce

6 Works Cited

The sight of a working woman today is not something that causes one to look twice. However, this was not always the case. It was a long struggle for women to get to where they are today, and there is still a long way to go. There were a few momentous occasions throughout history that caused a shift in the way women were viewed as workers, such as the need for workers during World War II, the Equal Pay Act, and the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. Women have made great strides in integrating themselves into the workforce alongside men and continue to do so today.

Gender Equality In The Workplace Essay

30 Works Cited

Rapid changes in the global economic market entail transformations affecting not only the external environment of organizations, but also its internal operations and processes (Hall, 2008; Hodgetts, 2002). One important change that has altered the nature of contemporary organization is the “acknowledgement, development and systematic use of the skills and knowledge of employees” (Ramirez et al 2007, p 496). The central role of employees’ participation in the success of the organization involves not only “high performance work systems… [but] they also involve the decentralization of decisions and work enrichment that is providing employees with opportunities for involvement in decision-making and innovation.” (Wood & de

Women’s Work Advantages and Disadvantages Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

This argumentative essay about women’s work explains all the disadvantages and advantages of being a woman in the workplace. The positive and negative effects of being a working mother are also presented, so you might draw your own conclusion on the issue.

Introduction

Disadvantages

In today’s world, women take active roles in employment, unlike during the olden days when they stayed at home and took care of their families. Women taking active roles in jobs have advantages and disadvantages. In contemporary society, women and men have equal opportunities for employment.

Working Women Advantages

The advantages of women working include more income for their families, the opportunity to explore their talents, and the promotion of economic growth. When women work, they make money that adds to their families’ financial well-being. This helps pay bills, buy food, and educate children. Women have goals and objectives to achieve in their lives. Working allows them to pursue their dreams and talents, as well as work on their goals by pursuing careers of their choice. Finally, women who work contribute towards economic growth through their jobs.

Women’s Work Disadvantages

Disadvantages for working women include the absence of enough time for their families, pressure from work-related stress, and conflicts of interest. Working women have little time to take care of their families because their jobs are very demanding and time-consuming. Many jobs are very stressful, and many women cannot handle high levels of work-related stress. Their nature predisposes them to anxiety and depression more than when compared to men. Finally, there is a conflict of interests. Their roles as mothers compromise their performance at work. They use working hours to take care of their children at the expense of their jobs.

Today, women seek employment opportunities just like men. This increases income for their families and gives them opportunities to explore their talents by pursuing careers of their choice. However, it affects their families because they do not spend enough time with their children. In addition, their role as mothers has involved my performance at work.

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Essay: Women’s Rights in the Late 20th Century

After World War II, women’s struggle for equality achieved a mixed record of success. The women’s rights movement won equal opportunities in higher education and employment relatively quickly in the 1940s and 1950s. The modern concept of women’s equality as “feminism” appeared in the 1960s, led by activists such as Betty Friedan. Some of its victories in the legislative arena were completely inadvertent, while one of its grandest objects and subject of its greatest efforts resulted in defeat. Moreover, the movement was dominated by an intellectual and professional leadership at some distance from ordinary women. Despite the vagaries of the movement, it was remarkably successful in fundamentally changing society and women’s roles as well as attitudes towards women.

World War II was instrumental in the origins of the Women’s Movement. The classic image of “Rosie the Riveter” reflected the fact that millions of women went into factories when men were mobilized into the military. However, many unmarried and poor women had already participated in the industrial economy for a century. With demobilization after the war, more than three million women quit their jobs to return to their roles as homemakers or were let go to make room for returning men.

There was a lingering split from the 1920s between future First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and feminist leader of the National Women’s Party, Alice Paul. Roosevelt fought to keep protective legislation for women in terms of working hours or physical tasks, and Paul wanted an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that made women completely equal under the law. Paul was so frustrated by the lack of progress on the ERA that she resorted to “red-baiting” by labeling its opponents Communists and reporting them to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Post-war American culture was rather conservative and supported traditional roles for women. The images of women as mothers and homemakers on the new media of television were quite reflective of the reality for many suburban women. The marriage rate was increasing, a Baby Boom resulted in more than 76 million births between 1946 and 1964, and the divorce rate dropped. The American people supported traditional roles for women, and as one post-war poll noted, 63 percent were opposed to married women working outside the home.

In 1963, feminist author Betty Friedan wrote a path-breaking book, The Feminine Mystique that challenged traditional roles for women.

She described the sense of dissatisfaction that many women felt as “the problem with no name” and wrote, “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction…Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay besides her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’” (Friedan, The Feminine Mystique , 1963).

Friedan’s book was a best-seller and struck a chord with many women, particularly of her social class. But, some women were poorer and did not have the luxury of choosing whether to work or not because necessity forced them into the workplace. Other women did not share Friedan’s dislike of women’s traditional roles as mother and housewife.

In the early 1960s, many changes were developing for women’s equality in employment and education. By 1960, the number of working women had risen to 35 percent of the workforce with increasing numbers of married women. This probably reflected the fact that many families wanted the extra disposable income to participate in the growing consumer economy more than an increasing desire of women to find personal satisfaction from working. Women were attending higher education in higher numbers, earning nearly 40 percent of the degrees by 1960 and the numbers would continue to grow. In May, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the oral contraceptive, “the Pill,” for women, and millions of women were soon using it for birth control despite the fact that many states outlawed contraceptives. The Pill changed the sexual lives of women throughout the nation. Women’s careers would not be shortened by unanticipated pregnancies, and women would have fewer children.

The Pill became involved in constitutional issues when the Supreme Court took up the question. In 1965, the Supreme Court would overturn anti-contraception laws in Griswold v. Connecticut , arguing that the “penumbras” in the Bill of Rights—in the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments—create “zones of privacy.” Moreover, the majority also used the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that there are “certain fundamental rights” not listed in the Bill of Rights as the Ninth Amendment specifically recognizes. But, should the courts lay down new rights in decisions or should the people be the ones who would define those rights through the amendment process? Moreover, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly states that, “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” not the courts (The United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, 1866). By overturning the anti-contraceptive laws of a vast majority of states, the Supreme Court undermined the rights of states to determine laws for their own citizens.

Women won legal equality in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The House Rules Committee Chairman, Howard Smith (D-VA), was a segregationist who may have attempted to halt civil rights for African Americans by including additional rights for women by banning discrimination in employment based on sex—although he claimed he supported women’s equality. To further muddy the waters, many northern liberals and labor unions supported protective legislation for women and opposed the amendments to the Civil Rights act that gave legal protection against discrimination to women. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Act passed both houses of Congress and was signed by President Johnson to become law. The Act established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), an executive agency that would be charged with enforcing the law.

In 1966, several feminists formed the National Organization of Women (NOW) and issued a “Statement of Purpose.” The NOW statement was primarily a call for an end to discrimination in education, employment, civil society, and culture. The Statement of Purpose sought to ban discrimination against women with legal and constitutional protections by the government.

It called upon “the power of American law, and the protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to the civil rights of all individuals, must be effectively applied and enforced to isolate and remove patterns of sex discrimination, to ensure equality of opportunity in employment and education, and equality of civil and political rights and responsibilities on behalf of women” (National Organization of Women, “Statement of Purpose,” 1966).

Only a year later, at the second annual NOW conference, the organization called for a “Bill of Rights for Women” that included all the items in the Statement of Purpose and added a call for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), publicly-funded daycare centers across the nation, and a repeal of all laws banning abortion. Over the next few years, NOW devoted a great deal of its efforts to lobbying several different federal agencies for enforcing Title VII (part of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or national origin), to pressuring Congress to pass the ERA, and expanded its agenda to include other feminist issues such as recognizing that lesbian rights were “a legitimate concern of feminism.” The struggle for the ERA was the most public and significant battle in the quest for women’s equality. In 1972, both houses of Congress passed the ERA by overwhelming majorities to fulfill the two-thirds requirement for constitutional amendments. The ERA needed three-fourths of the state legislatures to ratify the amendment before 1979 (later extended to 1982) for it to become the law of the land. The proposed amendment was quickly ratified by dozens of states and then stalled, eventually winning ratification in 35 states just short of the necessary 38, and failed.

The struggle for the ERA was the most public and significant battle in the quest for women’s equality. In 1972, both houses of Congress passed the ERA by overwhelming majorities to fulfill the two-thirds requirement for constitutional amendments. The ERA needed three-fourths of the state legislatures to ratify the amendment before 1979 (later extended to 1982) for it to become the law of the land.

The ERA failed in large part due to the strong grassroots campaign called “STOP ERA” at the state and local level, spearheaded by a conservative lawyer and activist, Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly advanced the view, embraced by many religious conservatives and other Americans, that the ERA would have baleful consequences for women. She said that the constitutional amendment would subject women equally to the military draft, end protections in child custody and divorce proceedings, lead to the decline of the traditional family, support abortion rights, back homosexual rights, and lead to unisex bathrooms. Whether or not it would have contributed these things, Schlafly organized a grass-roots campaign at the local and state level called “Stop ERA” which successfully defeated the ERA.

Feminists supported legalized abortion to protect women’s reproductive rights and the “right to control her own body.” They campaigned to overturn state abortion laws and then pushed cases to the Supreme Court in order to overturn all state laws. In the landmark case of Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court legalized abortion throughout the country based upon the precedent established in the Griswold decision. The movement to legalize abortion had adopted a lengthy and costly campaign to change abortion laws in the states, but then it shifted its strategy to the courts. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion for the Supreme Court, and much like Justice Roger B. Taney in the Dred Scott decision, sought to use the Court to settle a highly contentious social and political question. To that end, Justice Blackmun spent time at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota conducting medical and historical research on the topic. In a 7-2 decision, the Court decided that state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional. It created the trimester framework for pregnancy and stated that during the first trimester there was an unlimited right to abortion. After that, the state had a “compelling interest” in “protecting the potentiality of human life” and could regulate abortions though a physician’s approval. In the last trimester, the state could proscribe abortion except for the protection of the life or health of the mother.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Byron White called the opinion “an exercise of raw judicial power” because, he argued, the Court “fashions and announces a new constitutional right” which overrides laws in a majority of states. “The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 states are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the [issue],” White wrote (Justice Byron White, Roe v. Wade Dissenting Opinion, 1973).

The Roe decision hardly settled the question in the minds of the American people and set off a decades-long battle in the public square on the highly contentious subject. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court sowed perhaps more confusion.

4.7 man pickets outside new haven planned parenthood 1967

The Roe decision hardly settled the question in the minds of the American people and set off a decades-long battle in the public square on the highly contentious subject.

Yet, the Court declared that it must uphold a women’s right to have an abortion because it must always uphold precedent (previous decisions) or the court’s legitimacy would be questioned. However, only a few decades before, it purposefully and famously rejected precedent in the Brown decision that had the effect of overturning Plessy .

The struggle for women’s equality may have lost the battle of the ERA, but it won the war. Affirmative action, or giving preference to certain groups in hiring, for women was highly successful in employment, and women entered the professions in such numbers that it was commonplace. Disparities in pay for the same jobs began to disappear. Affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions was so successful that institutions of higher education had to begin looking for ways to attract more male students. Women entered politics and won higher and higher offices. Most of NOW’s original agenda was achieved, though feminists would still say that the “glass ceiling” for women prevented them from rising to complete parity with men at the highest levels of business or politics.

The women’s movement was on the whole successful in achieving equality for women, and women could now choose whether to have a traditional role or work outside the home professionally. Fifty years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, American women continued to debate the meaning of feminism and its relevance to their lives once greater equality and liberty were achieved. While men have shouldered some additional burdens in the home and family, women still have not been released from their traditional roles cooking, cleaning, and caring for children even as they’ve assumed new roles in society. Women have found that although they won greater employment opportunities and equality, they are struggling to “have it all” by bearing the double-burden of traditional roles and work.

Women’s Rights in the Late 20th Century

A global story

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series . In this essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality 100 years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U.S. Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world.

The year 2020 will stand out in the history books. It will always be remembered as the year the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the globe and brought death, illness, isolation, and economic hardship. It will also be noted as the year when the death of George Floyd and the words “I can’t breathe” ignited in the United States and many other parts of the world a period of reckoning with racism, inequality, and the unresolved burdens of history.

The history books will also record that 2020 marked 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in America, intended to guarantee a vote for all women, not denied or abridged on the basis of sex.

This is an important milestone and the continuing movement for gender equality owes much to the history of suffrage and the brave women (and men) who fought for a fairer world. Yet just celebrating what was achieved is not enough when we have so much more to do. Instead, this anniversary should be a galvanizing moment when we better inform ourselves about the past and emerge more determined to achieve a future of gender equality.

Australia’s role in the suffrage movement

In looking back, one thing that should strike us is how international the movement for suffrage was though the era was so much less globalized than our own.

For example, how many Americans know that 25 years before the passing of the 19th Amendment in America, my home of South Australia was one of the first polities in the world to give men and women the same rights to participate in their democracies? South Australia led Australia and became a global leader in legislating universal suffrage and candidate eligibility over 125 years ago.

This extraordinary achievement was not an easy one. There were three unsuccessful attempts to gain equal voting rights for women in South Australia, in the face of relentless opposition. But South Australia’s suffragists—including the Women’s Suffrage League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, as well as remarkable women like Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Lee, and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls—did not get dispirited but instead continued to campaign, persuade, and cajole. They gathered a petition of 11,600 signatures, stuck it together page by page so that it measured around 400 feet in length, and presented it to Parliament.

The Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Bill was finally introduced on July 4, 1894, leading to heated debate both within the houses of Parliament, and outside in society and the media. Demonstrating that some things in Parliament never change, campaigner Mary Lee observed as the bill proceeded to committee stage “that those who had the least to say took the longest time to say it.” 1

The Bill finally passed on December 18, 1894, by 31 votes to 14 in front of a large crowd of women.

In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman to stand as a political candidate in South Australia.

South Australia’s victory led the way for the rest of the colonies, in the process of coming together to create a federated Australia, to fight for voting rights for women across the entire nation. Women’s suffrage was in effect made a precondition to federation in 1901, with South Australia insisting on retaining the progress that had already been made. 2 South Australian Muriel Matters, and Vida Goldstein—a woman from the Australian state of Victoria—are just two of the many who fought to ensure that when Australia became a nation, the right of women to vote and stand for Parliament was included.

Australia’s remarkable progressiveness was either envied, or feared, by the rest of the world. Sociologists and journalists traveled to Australia to see if the worst fears of the critics of suffrage would be realised.

In 1902, Vida Goldstein was invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt—the first Australian to ever meet a U.S. president in the White House. With more political rights than any American woman, Goldstein was a fascinating visitor. In fact, President Roosevelt told Goldstein: “I’ve got my eye on you down in Australia.” 3

Goldstein embarked on many other journeys around the world in the name of suffrage, and ran five times for Parliament, emphasising “the necessity of women putting women into Parliament to secure the reforms they required.” 4

Muriel Matters went on to join the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. In 1908 she became the first woman to speak in the British House of Commons in London—not by invitation, but by chaining herself to the grille that obscured women’s views of proceedings in the Houses of Parliament. After effectively cutting her off the grille, she was dragged out of the gallery by force, still shouting and advocating for votes for women. The U.K. finally adopted women’s suffrage in 1928.

These Australian women, and the many more who tirelessly fought for women’s rights, are still extraordinary by today’s standards, but were all the more remarkable for leading the rest of the world.

A shared history of exclusion

Of course, no history of women’s suffrage is complete without acknowledging those who were excluded. These early movements for gender equality were overwhelmingly the remit of privileged white women. Racially discriminatory exclusivity during the early days of suffrage is a legacy Australia shares with the United States.

South Australian Aboriginal women were given the right to vote under the colonial laws of 1894, but they were often not informed of this right or supported to enroll—and sometimes were actively discouraged from participating.

They were later further discriminated against by direct legal bar by the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, whereby Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were excluded from voting in federal elections—a right not given until 1962.

Any celebration of women’s suffrage must acknowledge such past injustices front and center. Australia is not alone in the world in grappling with a history of discrimination and exclusion.

The best historical celebrations do not present a triumphalist version of the past or convey a sense that the fight for equality is finished. By reflecting on our full history, these celebrations allow us to come together, find new energy, and be inspired to take the cause forward in a more inclusive way.

The way forward

In the century or more since winning women’s franchise around the world, we have made great strides toward gender equality for women in parliamentary politics. Targets and quotas are working. In Australia, we already have evidence that affirmative action targets change the diversity of governments. Since the Australian Labor Party (ALP) passed its first affirmative action resolution in 1994, the party has seen the number of women in its national parliamentary team skyrocket from around 14% to 50% in recent years.

Instead of trying to “fix” women—whether by training or otherwise—the ALP worked on fixing the structures that prevent women getting preselected, elected, and having fair opportunities to be leaders.

There is also clear evidence of the benefits of having more women in leadership roles. A recent report from Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) at King’s College London, shows that where women are able to exercise political leadership, it benefits not just women and girls, but the whole of society.

But even though we know how to get more women into parliament and the positive difference they make, progress toward equality is far too slow. The World Economic Forum tells us that if we keep progressing as we are, the global political empowerment gender gap—measuring the presence of women across Parliament, ministries, and heads of states across the world— will only close in another 95 years . This is simply too long to wait and, unfortunately, not all barriers are diminishing. The level of abuse and threatening language leveled at high-profile women in the public domain and on social media is a more recent but now ubiquitous problem, which is both alarming and unacceptable.

Across the world, we must dismantle the continuing legal and social barriers that prevent women fully participating in economic, political, and community life.

Education continues to be one such barrier in many nations. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women. With COVID-19-related school closures happening in developing countries, there is a real risk that progress on girls’ education is lost. When Ebola hit, the evidence shows that the most marginalized girls never made it back to school and rates of child marriage, teen pregnancy. and child labor soared. The Global Partnership for Education, which I chair, is currently hard at work trying to ensure that this history does not repeat.

Ensuring educational equality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality. In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes. Good intentions will not be enough to achieve the profound wave of change required. We need hard-headed empirical research about what works. In my life and writings post-politics and through my work at the GIWL, sharing and generating this evidence is front and center of the work I do now.

GIWL work, undertaken in partnership with IPSOS Mori, demonstrates that the public knows more needs to be done. For example, this global polling shows the community thinks it is harder for women to get ahead. Specifically, they say men are less likely than women to need intelligence and hard work to get ahead in their careers.

Other research demonstrates that the myth of the “ideal worker,” one who works excessive hours, is damaging for women’s careers. We also know from research that even in families where each adult works full time, domestic and caring labor is disproportionately done by women. 5

In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes.

Other more subtle barriers, like unconscious bias and cultural stereotypes, continue to hold women back. We need to start implementing policies that prevent people from being marginalized and stop interpreting overconfidence or charisma as indicative of leadership potential. The evidence shows that it is possible for organizations to adjust their definitions and methods of identifying merit so they can spot, measure, understand, and support different leadership styles.

Taking the lessons learned from our shared history and the lives of the extraordinary women across the world, we know evidence needs to be combined with activism to truly move forward toward a fairer world. We are in a battle for both hearts and minds.

Why this year matters

We are also at an inflection point. Will 2020 will be remembered as the year that a global recession disproportionately destroyed women’s jobs, while women who form the majority of the workforce in health care and social services were at risk of contracting the coronavirus? Will it be remembered as a time of escalating domestic violence and corporations cutting back on their investments in diversity programs?

Or is there a more positive vision of the future that we can seize through concerted advocacy and action? A future where societies re-evaluate which work truly matters and determine to better reward carers. A time when men and women forced into lockdowns re-negotiated how they approach the division of domestic labor. Will the pandemic be viewed as the crisis that, through forcing new ways of virtual working, ultimately led to more balance between employment and family life, and career advancement based on merit and outcomes, not presentism and the old boys’ network?

This history is not yet written. We still have an opportunity to make it happen. Surely the women who led the way 100 years ago can inspire us to seize this moment and create that better, more gender equal future.

December 7,1894: Welcome home meeting for Catherine Helen Spence at the Café de Paris. [ Register , Dec, 19, 1894 ]
Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World , (Text Publishing, 2018).
Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, (Melbourne University Press, 1993)
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, (Icon Books, 2010)

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series. Learn more about the series and read published work »

About the Author

Julia gillard, distinguished fellow – global economy and development, center for universal education.

Gillard is a distinguished fellow with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is the Inaugural Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. Gillard also serves as Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, which is dedicated to expanding access to quality education worldwide and is patron of CAMFED, the Campaign for Female Education.

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“Democracy is a universally recognized ideal based on common values shared by people across the world, irrespective of cultural, political, social and economic differences. As recognized in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action , democracy is based on the freely expressed will of the people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives . Democracy, development, rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.” - United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

The principles of democracy insist on, especially from a twenty-first century perspective, the inclusion of all people, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, or ability. And yet governments around the world have a history of barring certain classes of people from being heard, seen, and fairly represented. Throughout history this has been especially true for women. And yet, despite repeated and ongoing attempts to sideline women in society, there has always been a consistent female force, fighting for freedom, equality, and democratic ideals.

For example, Chilean women who lived during Pinochet’s dictatorship were under the threat of constant danger, but they resisted by creating dissident art and forming the Moviemento Pro Emancipación de la Mujer. The Turkish coup of 1980 inspired a feminist movement that existed in open rebellion. They decried their loss of freedom and organized mass protests, including a 1987 march against gender-based violence. And here, in the United States of America, one of the oldest modern democracies in the world, it took a staggering 144 years for women in the US to be granted suffrage with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. It would take 45 more years for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be passed before Black women gained full access to the vote. But the right to vote was not just granted to women—they had to fight for it.

There are endless examples of “the fairer sex” doing anything in their power to be seen as the equal sex—these examples are a testament to women's impact on society, government, and history. As we celebrate Women’s History Month in March, Facing History has curated a list of resources to showcase female upstanders who have fought for freedom, human rights, and promoted the principles of democracy, even under oppressive regimes and laws restricting them from representation.

The American Revolution and Challenging the Ideals of a Fledgling Democracy

Elizabeth freeman.

Entering the world as Mum Bett in the mid-sixteenth century, Elizabeth Freeman was born into slavery. As the white men around her—and notably her enslaver, Colonel Ashley—spoke of rights and freedoms amidst the creation of the Declaration of Independence and war with England, the idea of her own freedom took root. Freeman acquired legal representation in Massachusetts and sued for her right to be free. She became the first African American to win her freedom from the courts in Massachusetts, leading to abolition of slavery in that state. Learn more about Freeman’s life from the National Women’s History Museum and from the New-York Historical Society .

Judith Sargent Murray

Born into a wealthy family in 1751, Judith Sargent Murray was curious and intelligent, but was not permitted to attend school because of her gender. Undeterred, she turned to her family’s extensive library and became a self-taught intellectual and writer. Murray was a radical (at the time) advocate for white women’s rights, declaring that men and women held equal ability if given equal access to education. Murray penned her first essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” in 1770—it was finally published 20 years later.

This Facing History Reading , included in our US History Curriculum Collection , excerpts “On the Equality of the Sexes” and offers questions and exercises for deeper reflection and connection to the text. The entire essay can be found here .

Learn more about Murray’s life from the National Women’s History Museum .

Suffragettes and the Right to Vote

Frances ellen watkins harper.

In 1825 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born to free African American parents. Following the death of her parents, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, the latter of whom was an impassioned abolitionist. As a young adult she was mentored by her uncle’s friend William Still known as the “father of the Underground Railroad.” Harper then became a strong voice in the anti-slavery movement and a fierce supporter of women’s rights, publishing works based on these ideals and delivering speeches across the country.

This Facing History Reading excerpts one of her most famous speeches and offers connection questions for deeper learning.

Learn more about Harper’s life from the National Women’s History Museum .

Emmeline Pankhurst

It is perhaps no surprise that Emmeline Pankhurst became among the most influential suffragists in Great Britain. Born in 1858, she was raised by parents committed to the full expansion of rights to women. She went on to found the Women’s Franchise League and later the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) whose famous slogan was “Deeds not Words.” Pankhurst threw her body and mind into the suffrage cause including participating in a hunger strike and being jailed on multiple occasions for her provocative protests.

This Facing History Handout on Women in Edwardian Society includes excerpts from Pankhurt’s “Freedom or Death” speech and offers a wide range of connection questions.

Learn more about Pankhurst’s life from the National Park Service .

The Pursuit for Civil Rights and Racial Equality

Anti-apartheid movement.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness.” South Africans abolished slavery in 1834, but the colonial influence on the country made segregation the de facto state. It wasn’t until the National Party, which ran on a platform of Afrikaner nationalism, won the 1948 South African election that segregation was codified by law. One way that Black women in South Africa pushed back on segregationist policies was to protest the limitations placed on the free movement of Black Africans in the country. The 1950s saw the formation of the Federation of South African Women. In 1956 this grassroots movement enjoined a crowd 20,000 strong to march to Pretoria. Facing History’s Confronting Apartheid Collection provides a comprehensive set of lessons to explore critical moments in South Africa's history. This collection includes the Reading: Women Rise Up Against Apartheid and Change the Movement .

Mamie Till-Mobley

Mamie Carthan was born in Mississippi in 1921, but as a toddler she moved just outside of Chicago, Illinois with her parents. On July 25, 1941 she gave birth to her only child, Emmett Till. In the summer of 1955, when Emmett was 14, Mamie dropped her son off at the train station in Chicago to go visit her Uncle Moses’s farm in Mississippi and spend some time with family. He never came home. On August 28 Emmett was brutally murdered by a group of white men, led by the husband of a shopkeeper who was incensed that the young boy had allegedly whistled at his wife. The horrific death of her son, and the subsequent acquittal of Emmett’s murderers, resulted in Mamie Till-Mobley’s emergence as a leading activist for the civil rights movement.

Facing History’s “I Wanted the Whole World to See”: The Murder of Emmett Till Unit includes the following moving accounts of Mamie Till-Mobley as a mother and a civil rights pioneer. Reading: “ I Knew I Had to Give Him the Talk ” Lesson: " A Rallying Cry and a Cause "

Today’s Global Advocates for Human Rights

Anti-war sudanese organizers.

During the 30 year rule of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudanese women came out multiple times to protest the abhorrent treatment of women under his regime, often in open defiance of their family or the law. In 2019 it was estimated that two-thirds of Sudanese protesters were women. The military coup d'état in 2019 prompted the current devastating civil war between rival factions in Sudan, and again women face the biggest obstacles among the violence. Almost 90% of Sudanese people seeking refugee status in neighboring Chad are women. Learn more about the plight of Sudanese women today in these articles from Al Jazeera and the Norwegian Refugee Council . A look at the freedom and peace efforts of Sudanese women can be seen in these reports from the Christian Michelsen Institute and ReliefWeb .

Protest against the Islamic Republic of Iran's Regime

The 2022 arrest and death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jhina Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police has led to what some are calling a new Iranian Revolution. Since Amini’s death the people of Iran—including a flood of girls and women who have risked the same fate—have crowded the streets to demand an end to the brutal tactics and oppressive laws of the theocratic, dictatorial government. Even as the street protests have decreased, Iranian women continue to fight back through acts of civil disobedience including not following the strict veiling regulations or opting to go out publicly without a hijab altogether. The protest call of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom - shown above in Kurdish) continues to galvanize the movement, garnering support and participation from Iranians of all backgrounds in Iran and abroad. Learn more about the Iranian women mobilizing government resistance in these articles from Ms. and the Wilson Center . These quotes collected by Women’s Voices Now provide an inspirational glimpse at some of the individuals pushing for change.

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5 Women’s Rights Essays You Can Read For Free

Women and girls are the most disenfranchised group in the world. Even in places where huge strides have been made, gaps in equality remain. Women’s rights are important within the realm of human rights. Here are five essays exploring the scope of women’s rights, which you can download or read for free online:

“A Vindication on the Rights of Woman” – Mary Wollstonecraft

Mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft is a juggernaut of history in her own right, though for a different reason. Self-educated, Wollstonecraft dedicated her life to women’s education and feminism. Her 1792 essay A Vindication on the Rights of Woman represents one of the earliest writings on women’s equality. In the Western world, many consider its arguments the foundation of the modern women’s rights movement. In the essay, Wollstonecraft writes that men are not more reasonable or rational than women, and that women must be educated with the same care, so they can contribute to society. If women were left out of the intellectual arena, the progress of society would stop. While most of us believe the idea that women are inherently inferior to men is very outdated, it’s still an accepted viewpoint in many places and in many minds. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is still relevant.

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – Audre Lorde

Poet and activist Audre Lorde defied the boundaries of traditional feminism and cried out against its racist tendencies. While today debates about intersectional feminism (feminism that takes into account race, sexuality, etc) are common, Audre Lorde wrote her essay on women’s rights and racism back in 1984. In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde explains how ignoring differences between women – whether its race, class, or sexuality – halts any real change. By pretending the suffering of women is “all the same,” and not defined by differences, white women actually contribute to oppression. Lorde’s essay drew anger from the white feminist community. It’s a debate that feels very current and familiar.

“How to convince sceptics of the value of feminism” – Laura Bates

Laura Bates founded the Everyday Sexism Project website back in 2012. It documents examples of everyday sexism of every degree and has become very influential. In her essay from 2018, Bates takes reader comments into consideration over the essay’s three parts. This unique format allows the essay to encompass multiple views, just not Bates’, and takes into consideration a variety of experiences people have with skeptics of feminism. Why even debate skeptics? Doesn’t that fuel the trolls? In some cases, yes, but skeptics of feminism aren’t trolls, they are numerous, and make up every part of society, including leadership. Learning how to talk to people who don’t agree with you is incredibly important.

“Why Can’t A Smart Woman Love Fashion?” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most influential voices in women’s rights writing. Her book, We Should All Be Feminists , is a great exploration of 21st-century feminism. In this essay from Elle, Adichie takes a seemingly “small” topic about fashion and makes a big statement about independence and a woman’s right to wear whatever she wants. There is still a lot of debate about what a feminist should look like, if wearing makeup contributes to oppression, and so on. “Why Can’t A Smart Woman Love Fashion?” is a moving, personal look at these sorts of questions.

“The male cultural elite is staggeringly blind to #MeToo. Now it’s paying for it.” – Moira Donegan

There are countless essays on the Me Too Movement, and most of them are great reads. In this one from The Guardian, Moira Donegan highlights two specific men and the publications that chose to give them a platform after accusations of sexual misconduct. It reveals just how pervasive the problem is in every arena, including among the cultural, intellectual elite, and what detractors of Me Too are saying.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Essay On Women Rights

500 words essay on women rights.

Women rights are basic human rights claimed for women and girls all over the world. It was enshrined by the United Nations around 70 years ago for every human on the earth. It includes many things which range from equal pay to the right to education. The essay on women rights will take us through this in detail for a better understanding.

Importance of Women Rights

Women rights are very important for everyone all over the world. It does not just benefit her but every member of society. When women get equal rights, the world can progress together with everyone playing an essential role.

If there weren’t any women rights, women wouldn’t have been allowed to do something as basic as a vote. Further, it is a game-changer for those women who suffer from gender discrimination .

Women rights are important as it gives women the opportunity to get an education and earn in life. It makes them independent which is essential for every woman on earth. Thus, we must all make sure women rights are implemented everywhere.

How to Fight for Women Rights

All of us can participate in the fight for women rights. Even though the world has evolved and women have more freedom than before, we still have a long way to go. In other words, the fight is far from over.

First of all, it is essential to raise our voices. We must make some noise about the issues that women face on a daily basis. Spark up conversations through your social media or make people aware if they are misinformed.

Don’t be a mute spectator to violence against women, take a stand. Further, a volunteer with women rights organisations to learn more about it. Moreover, it also allows you to contribute to change through it.

Similarly, indulge in research and event planning to make events a success. One can also start fundraisers to bring like-minded people together for a common cause. It is also important to attend marches and protests to show actual support.

History has been proof of the revolution which women’s marches have brought about. Thus, public demonstrations are essential for demanding action for change and impacting the world on a large level.

Further, if you can, make sure to donate to women’s movements and organisations. Many women of the world are deprived of basic funds, try donating to organizations that help in uplifting women and changing their future.

You can also shop smartly by making sure your money is going for a great cause. In other words, invest in companies which support women’s right or which give equal pay to them. It can make a big difference to women all over the world.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Women Rights

To sum it up, only when women and girls get full access to their rights will they be able to enjoy a life of freedom . It includes everything from equal pay to land ownerships rights and more. Further, a country can only transform when its women get an equal say in everything and are treated equally.

FAQ of Essay on Women Rights

Question 1: Why are having equal rights important?

Answer 1: It is essential to have equal rights as it guarantees people the means necessary for satisfying their basic needs, such as food, housing, and education. This allows them to take full advantage of all opportunities. Lastly, when we guarantee life, liberty, equality, and security, it protects people against abuse by those who are more powerful.

Question 2: What is the purpose of women’s rights?

Answer 2: Women’s rights are the essential human rights that the United Nations enshrined for every human being on the earth nearly 70 years ago. These rights include a lot of rights including the rights to live free from violence, slavery, and discrimination. In addition to the right to education, own property; vote and to earn a fair and equal wage.

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Discrimination against Women in the Workplace

How it works

Various studies report that inequality still persists despite women making great milestones in the place of work (Bach, 2018). A recent survey conducted by Social Institutions and Gender Index (2018) shows that women discrimination in the United States is much higher when compared to discrimination against women in Australia, Colombia, regions of Eastern Europe, and Western Europe (Bach, 2018). The report by Social Institutions and Gender Index also highlighted the existing gender compensation differences in US, as well as the perseverance of an unconscious gender discrimination (Bach, 2018).

These findings are attributed to female underrepresentation in the workplace. According to research, close to 42 percent of working women in US have reported experiencing discrimination on work due to their gender (Parker & Funk, 2017). This highlights the disparity in gender discrimination, simply observing the sheer size of reportings relative to harassment reports by men provide concrete evidence. In 2017, Pew Research Center undertook a survey to investigate women’s experiences with regards to discrimination at work; According to the Pew Research Center findings, women report a wide range of personal experiences, stretching all the way from receiving less pay than male colleagues for performing similar work to being denied the opportunity to take on crucial work assignments (Parker & Funk, 2017). More studies conducted among working adults show that females are almost twice (42% women compared to 22% males) as likely as males to report they have faced one or more of various forms of gender discrimination on the job (Gough & Noonan 2013).

While some countries including the United States has put into place anti-discrimination laws to curb cases of gender and sexual discrimination, societal roles, rules, and practices instruct and motivate men to devalue or value women (Wolfe, 2019). Women are constantly subjected to unfair behavior for instance being told “you run like a girl” has somehow become a common thing to say. But the question is where did the idea that women or girls some how do things “poorly” compared to boys or men. It is ridiculous that women who are competent and skilled may be left out of consideration in promotions because they are perceived to have a chance of getting pregnant (Wolfe, 2019). Nevertheless, a job may be given to a man who is less competent simply because he is a man. The most rampant form of gender discrimination encountered by women is pay or income inequality. 25% of employed women in US report they have been paid less compared to a male counterpart doing the same work (Parker & Funk, 2017). Research reveals that only 5% of working men report to have received less pay than a female colleague. As reported by the US Census Bureau, women earn 20% less than what men earn (Bach, 2018). In comparison to men, women are about four times (23% of working females versus 6% of employed males) more likely to report they have been handled in a manner that demonstrates that they are less skilled because of their gender (Parker & Funk, 2017).

Although pay gap is considered as the main form of gender discrimination, there are also notable gaps on other areas. 15 percent of employed women report they have earned little support from senior managers compared to a male who was performing similar task. In contrast, only 7% of employed males say to have experienced similar encounter. Working women are twice (10% of working women versus 5% men) as likely as men to report that they have not been shortlisted for the most valuable job assignments as result of their gender (Plickert & Sterling, 2017). Considering the arguments presented above, this paper hypothesized that women are more discriminated in the workplace because of their gender. Furthermore, the paper theorized that women are discriminated against in the workplace not because of their performance level, but because of the existing societal roles, norms and rules. In fact, some of females have made significant achievement in terms of education, management, leadership, and other aspects of life. Perhaps if we continue to shed light on the discrimination of women in the workplace eventually things will improve.

According to Gough and Noonan (2013), the belief that females are less dedicated and motivated in their careers is among the most cited explanations for ongoing women discrimination in work. Several researchers and scholars hold the view that stereotyped stigmas lead to women getting less challenging responsibilities than their male colleagues (Plickert & Sterling, 2017). The act of assigning less challenging tasks to women hinders career growth and development in females. Focusing on social roles and gender stereotypes, spreads discrimination into the workplace. Masculine customs demonstrated in the performance of high risk assignments and hard work still dictate many blue collar workplaces. The demand to demonstrate masculinity assumes a diverse form among workers (Thornton, 2016). In high-ranked occupations such as legal firms, the symbol of masculinity is propagated by professionals performing tasks for long hours to exhibit commitment in the place of work (Thornton, 2016).

Women, in particular mothers, encounter gender stereotypes concerning being less dedicated to their job, inability to meet a job assignment and underrated in their performance despite performing just as well as the opposite sex. According to the US labor force, an ideal employee is defined as a person who works weekly for 40 hours and overtime, has no or little to no time to bare and raise children, and is regularly available to the employer (Plickert & Sterling, 2017). Going by this definition alone is proof to conclude that women face difficulties in undertaking and meeting the expectations that are important to the firm. The notion that women are less committed to work may commence once women marry. This is in line with the supposition that women will get pregnant the moment they marry. Plickert and Sterling (2017) argue that when women come back from maternity leave, they start to experience differential treatment in the workplace. For example, the moment women return from family leave, their work commitment is questioned and they may be passed over for vital job promotions or assignments. Women are treated in a manner that assumes they have become less skilled because of giving birth.

Studies by Sloan (2012), and Budig and Hodges (2010) point out that it is presumed the moment women birth kids, they can no longer be dedicated to both job and family. Nonetheless, the researchers (Sloan (2012); and Budig and Hodges (2010) reveal that it is job experiences and not societal or gender obligations that determine dedication to a job. Taking into account the variations in insights of cultural “ideal job” requirements of mothers and fathers, females are not expected to be full time employees. Within the context of men, full-time job time tables and families are seen as compatible commitments (Sloan, 2012). On the other hand, an identical combination for females is considered as competing dedications (Sloan, 2012). Generally, the biased perceptions of performance and commitment promote women discrimination in the workplace.

Another explanation proposed for the persisting women discrimination in places of work is the differences by education. Among working females, the proportion of women reporting to have witnessed workplace sexual abuse is approximately the same across, educational, partisan, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds (Parker & Funk, 2017). However, research shows that the situation is much different when it comes to specific types of discrimination in the workplace. Research has identified significant variations among women that are deeply ingrained mostly in their education level (Sloan, 2012). Females with a University degree or higher education level report to experience discrimination within a scale that is at a considerably higher rates compared to females with lower education levels. 57% of employed women with postgraduate degree report they have faced some form of workplace gender discrimination (Parker & Funk, 2017). This number is relatively higher compared to 40% of women with bachelor’s degree and 39% of women who never completed college reporting similar experiences (Parker & Funk, 2017).

About 29% of women having postgraduate degree claim they have encountered recurrent discrimination on the job as result of their gender, in relation to 18% of women with bachelor’s degree and 12% of women with lower level of education (Parker & Funk, 2017). Likewise, 27% of employed women with postgraduate degree are more likely than their counterparts with lower levels of education (11% of women with bachelor’s degree and 13% of women with less education) to report they have received less backing from senior managers compared to a male performing the same job assignment (Parker & Funk, 2017). Studies have found that feeling alienated at work, as well as being passed over for work training or promotion closely follow the same pattern (Thornton, 2016).

From the perspective of wages, employed women with bachelor’s degree or higher education are much more probable compared to women with less education to report they have received being paid a lower wage than a man who did. Statistically, 30% of women with bachelor’s degree or more compared to about 21% of women with less education argue they have received less pay than a male in the same rank (Parker & Funk, 2017). Overall, research shows that women with greater family earnings are nearly equally probable to have faced one or more form of gender-oriented discrimination in the workplace (Parker & Funk, 2017).

Race and ethnicity have also been given as explanations for perpetuation of gender discrimination at work. An estimated 53% of working black women report they have encountered at least one form of gender discrimination in the workplace (Parker & Funk, 2017). In contrast, only 40% of White and 40% of Hispanic have said they have experienced gender discrimination at work (Parker & Funk, 2017). Studies reveal that 29% of employed black women compared with 9% of Hispanic and 8% of Whites have reported to have been passed over for most vital job tasks because of their gender (Parker & Funk, 2017).

In conclusion, women have made significant advances in terms of work experiences and education. In fact, some women have partaken in various industries that are male dominated and have emerged successful. However, recent studies show that women continue to experience different forms of gender discrimination in the workplace (Parker & Funk (2017); Gough & Noonan (2013)). Women are nearly three times more likely than men to claim they have encountered frequent small insults at job due to their gender orientation. Women have reported to have experienced various forms of gender discrimination including training opportunities, equal pay, and promotions (Parker & Funk, 2017). Societal norms, education levels, and ethnicity and race have been cited as some of the factors fueling women discrimination in the workplace (Thornton, 2016).

Bach, N. (2018). American Women Face More Discrimination than Europeans, Report Finds. Accessed from http://fortune.com/2018/12/07/gender-discrimination-us-oecd-report/
Budig, M. J., & Hodges, M. J. (2010). Differences in disadvantage: Variation in the motherhood penalty across white women’s earnings distribution. American Sociological Review, 75(5), 705-728.
Gough, M., & Noonan, M. (2013). A review of the motherhood wage penalty in the United States. Sociology Compass, 7(4), 328-342.
Parker, K., & Funk, C. (2017). Gender discrimination comes in many forms for today’s working women. Pew Research Center, December, 14.
Plickert, G., & Sterling, J. (2017). Gender Still Matters: Effects of Workplace Discrimination on Employment Schedules of Young Professionals. Laws, 6(4), 28.
Thornton, M. (2016). Work/life or work/work? Corporate legal practice in the twenty-first century. International journal of the legal profession, 23(1), 13-39.
Wolfe, L. (2019). Corporations Sued for Gender Discrimination Against Women and Men. Accessed from https://www.thebalancecareers.com/gender-discrimination-against-women-and-men-3515719

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Women's Rights In The Workplace Essay

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What Rights Is a Woman Owed?

A new book from two New York Times reporters— The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America —details how fights about abortion are actually debates about the place of women in American life.

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A decision of the Supreme Court, once made, nearly always stands. When the court rules about the meaning of the Constitution, it has lasting power to define the country. But words of a dissent are not always lost to history.

There is a tradition in the United States, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2002, where eventually, over time, the greatest dissents become the law of the land. “That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.”

The dissent in Roe v. Wade in 1973 laid the foundation of its overturning nearly 50 years later, and with its reversal a new dissent emerged in Dobbs .

The three justices appointed by Democrats—Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—had written an unusually agonized opinion, and a warning. “After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had,” the dissenters wrote. “The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away.”

boston, ma october 17 a protester holds a poster with ruth bader ginsburg's face and text reading "we dissent" as roughly 1,000 demonstrators take over the streets around boston common in a show of resistance to president trump in boston on oct 17, 2020 the demonstrations were planned by the womens march organization that staged marches around the world the day after trumps inauguration to protest the confirmation of supreme court nominee amy coney barrett and to rally voter opposition to trumps reelection photo by jonathan wiggsthe boston globe via getty images

They concluded with overt words of sadness, a rare seeping of emotion into the legal language of the court. “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”

Six days into this new America, the first post-Roe justice took her oath of office for the Supreme Court. For the first time, there were four women on the court. And, for the first time, a Black woman. As she transformed the court, she also entered a court transformed, riven by polarization and mistrust, ruling over a divided nation.

Cameras flashed as Ketanji Brown Jackson took her seat at her Senate confirmation hearing, in the spring before the decision. The hearing made clear the new questions that would define her era.

As the questioning on the second day dragged into hour 13, Marsha Blackburn, the lone Republican woman on the committee, took the microphone. The senator, who famously preferred the title congressman during her earlier years in the House, had made her name through the antiabortion cause. She led one of the congressional committees that investigated Planned Parenthood in 2015, fanning the controversy with the audacious charge that the group was selling “baby body parts on demand.”

washington, dc march 21 us supreme court nominee judge ketanji brown jackson is sworn in during her confirmation hearing before the senate judiciary committee in the hart senate office building on capitol hill march 21, 2022 in washington, dc judge ketanji brown jackson, president joe biden's pick to replace retiring justice stephen breyer on the us supreme court, will begin four days of nomination hearings before the senate judiciary committee if confirmed by the senate, judge jackson would become the first black woman to serve on the supreme court photo by win mcnameegetty images

“I’m a pro-life woman,” Blackburn now explained, in her honeyed Tennessee twang, from the edge of a long U-shaped table. “I find it incredibly concerning that someone who is nominated to a position with life tenure on the Supreme Court holds such a hostile view toward a view  that is held as a mainstream belief that every life is worth protecting.”

The Dobbs decision was coming soon, Blackburn said. There would be a new precedent. Would Jackson commit to following the court’s decision on Dobbs , should Roe no longer apply? It was the reverse of the standard question about Roe that Republicans had asked for decades. Now, Blackburn was asking whether Jackson would respect what her movement had spent so many decades working to achieve: the fall of federal abortion rights as a new precedent in American law.

The woman who would become the country’s first Black female justice responded by giving an upside-down—and yet the same—version of the answer used by Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. “Whatever the Supreme Court decides in Dobbs will be the precedent of the Supreme Court. It will be worthy of respect in the sense that it is the precedent.”

Blackburn pivoted to another question, one that was far more unusual. It was one that no one could remember ever being asked of a Supreme Court nominee. “Can you provide a definition for the word woman ?” she asked.

washington, ca march 21 supreme court nominee judge ketanji brown jackson sits in the audience area with her family during her senate judiciary committee confirmation hearing on capitol hill on march 21, 2022 in washington, dc judge jackson was picked by president biden to be the first black woman in united states history to serve on the nation's highest court to succeed supreme court associate justice stephen breyer who is retiring kent nishimura los angeles times via getty images

Jackson paused. “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t,” she responded. “You can’t?” asked Blackburn, her voice rising. “Not . . . not in this context,” Jackson responded. “I’m not a biologist.”

Blackburn pounced. She expressed concern about a transgender swimmer who won a collegiate swimming championship just days earlier. For conservatives, this was a gotcha moment, a way to stoke conservative outrage about transgender rights and show how far the country had strayed from traditional values. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is, underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said. “It tells our girls that their voices don’t matter. . . I think it tells them that they are second-class citizens.”

Americans didn’t have a clear answer either. Searches of the word woman spiked after the exchange, leading Dictionary.com to select it as the word of the year for 2022. The word woman , so simple and common, was “inseparable from the story of 2022,” they wrote. Decades of political warfare happened over abortion and pregnancy, a nine-month period when women gave of their own bodies and blood to grow new beings. Yet the symbolism of Roe had been so much bigger than just the temporary phase of pregnancy. When the nation fought about abortion, it was debating the place of women in American life.

.css-1aear8u:before{margin:0 auto 0.9375rem;width:34px;height:25px;content:'';display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1aear8u:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/elle/static/images/quote.fddce92.svg);} .css-1bvxk2j{font-family:SaolDisplay,SaolDisplay-fallback,SaolDisplay-roboto,SaolDisplay-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1bvxk2j b,.css-1bvxk2j strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1bvxk2j em,.css-1bvxk2j i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1bvxk2j i,.css-1bvxk2j em{font-style:italic;} In America, a nation that from its founding declared that all men were created equal, it was never in doubt that all white men had rights.”

For nearly half a century, Roe was seen as a foundation of women’s freedoms in America. A pregnant woman could legally choose whether she wanted to bear a child. It was a ruling ushered in by a rapidly changing understanding of women’s place—economically, legally, and domestically—in the national project. When Roe was decided, women could not get a credit card in their own names, could not legally refuse sex to their husbands, lacked guarantees not to be fired if they became pregnant, and did not have legal protections against sexual harassment. There were no female senators, and the first female Supreme Court justice—Sandra Day O’Connor—would not be confirmed for another eight years.

The Dobbs decision effectively restored childbearing as an inescapable fate for pregnant women and girls in broad swaths of conservative America. Yet it could not turn back the clock. America was changing. And as Jackson’s presence on the congressional dais underscored so vividly, the societal changes since Roe were now “deeply rooted”—if not in American history, then certainly in the reality of the American present.

Dobbs was now the guiding force for the country’s laws. But the mass outrage that met the ruling showed that the country had not resolved the essential question intertwined with the long national battle over abortion: What rights is a woman owed?

The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America

In America, a nation that from its founding declared that all men were created equal, it was never in doubt that all white men had rights. But from the beginning, the place of women was always less certain, as Abigail Adams made clear to her husband in 1776 when he served in the Continental Congress to craft the foundation of this new nation: “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors,” she wrote. “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Generations later, even the most basic understanding of the role and rights of women in the American experiment, even the essence of what makes a woman herself, remained unresolved. The majority of justices in Dobbs , representing a minority of Americans, declared one answer. A minority of justices in Dobbs , representing a majority of Americans, had their own reply.

And on the final day of Jackson’s hearings, when the Republican senators returned to Blackburn’s line of questioning about womanhood, the soon-to-be newest justice offered an answer of her own. It cut through political lines. It did not wrestle with faith or race or ideology or the law. Instead, it spoke both to a woman’s sense of self-determination and the interdependent relationship that defined the abortion question for so many.

“I know I am a woman, I know Senator Blackburn is a woman,” she said, her voice strong. “And the woman I admire most in the world is in the room today. My mother.”

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Post-Election

What is Project 2025 And Why Is It Alarming?

By Matt Cohen

June 28, 2024

A photo of former President Donald Trump whispering something to former Attorney General Bill Barr.

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The general election is still about four months away and, with the latest polls showing an incredibly tight race , anything can happen in that time. But that hasn’t stopped former President Donald Trump who, in concert with top Republicans and conservative figures and organizations, already sketched out a plan to reshape the federal government in their image.

The plan is called Project 2025 — a collection of policy transition proposals that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website states. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

What, exactly, is Project 2025?

Simply put, Project 2025 is a massive, 920-page document that outlines exactly what the next Trump presidency would look like. This doesn’t just include policy proposals — like immigration actions, educational proposals and economic plans — but rather a portrait of the America that conservatives hope to implement in the next Republican administration, be it Trump or someone else. The document is a thorough blueprint for how, exactly, to carry out such a vision, through recommendations for key White House staff, cabinet positions, Congress, federal agencies, commissions and boards. The plan goes so far as to outline a vetting process for appointing and hiring the right people in every level of government to carry out this vision.

The opening essay of the plan, written by Heritage Project President Kevin D. Roberts, succinctly summarizes the goal of Project 2025: a promise to make America a conservative nation. To do so, the next presidential administration should focus on four “broad fronts that will decide America’s future.”

Those four fronts include:

Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

The rest of the document sketches out, in detail, how the next Republican administration can execute their goals on these four fronts. That includes comprehensive outlines on what the White House and every single federal agency should do to overhaul its goals and day-to-day operations — from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Defense, Small Business Administration and Financial Regulatory Agencies. Every sector of the executive branch has a detailed plan in Project 2025 that explains how it can carry out an ultra-conservative agenda.

Project 2025 is supported by the same right-wing groups bringing dozens of anti-democracy lawsuits that will impact the outcome of this year’s election.

Democracy Docket is the only news outlet tracking and reporting on these cases — sign up for our free daily and weekly newsletters to get the latest updates sent straight to your inbox.

Why should we be worried about Project 2025?

As The New Republic notes , Project 2025 is “a remarkably detailed guide to turning the United States into a fascist’s paradise.” The primary document of Project 2025, the magazine explains, lays out what is essentially a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.”

It’s a terrifying vision of what American life could look like, but what’s most concerning about Project 2025 is its playbook for the first 180 days of a hypothetical second Trump term. “The time is short, and conservatives need a plan,” the playbook states. “The project will create a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.”

Among the numerous troubling suggestions laid out in the playbook is a detailed plan to essentially purge the federal workforce of tens of thousands of workers in favor of hiring ones who will adhere to the conservative principles of Project 2025. Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who’s director of Project 2025’s Presidential Transition Project, told the Associated Press the 180 day transition plan is a “clarion call to come to Washington… People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”

Much of the 180-Day Playbook reads like a cult’s recruiting pamphlet, explaining how department and agency heads should be vetting potential candidates. “This book is functionally an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can,” Dans writes in the intro to the Playbook . “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

Who’s behind Project 2025?

Project 2025 is the brainchild of The Heritage Foundation , the 50-year-old conservative think tank that’s among the most influential right-wing organizations in the country.

In its nearly half century of existence, The Heritage Foundation has used its resources, influence and money to push its conservative agenda in just about every facet of American life: anti-abortion advocacy , voter suppression , anti-climate policies , and anti-LGBTQ advocacy .

Though The Heritage Foundation organized Project 2025 , the initiative is actually a coalition made up of more than 100 right-wing groups, including notorious groups like America First Legal , the Public Interest Legal Foundation and Moms For Liberty . According to NBC News , a huge web of right-wing dark money groups connected to Project 2025, led by the Leonard Leo-connected Donors Trust, has seen a large bump in donations since the project was announced.

The chapters in the Project 2025 plan and 180-Day Playbook were written by “more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country,” the group says. That includes former Trump administration officials and notable right-wing figures, like former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller , former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli , and Peter Navarro , a former top trade advisor to Trump.

Read the full 2025 Project plan here.

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In conclusion, women's equality in the workplace is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires a concerted effort from individuals, organizations, and society as a whole. By addressing the gender pay gap, lack of representation in leadership positions, and workplace harassment and discrimination, we can create a more equitable and inclusive work environment for all employees.
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