Gendered Challenges: Career Obstacles and Biases Impacting Women’s Advancement

Workplaces often operate under masculine norms and values, creating an inherently gendered environment. This systemic bias poses significant challenges for women, particularly in advancing their careers. Women typically face fewer growth opportunities, harsher scrutiny, and diminished recognition of their achievements compared to men.

These biases are usually unconscious but extend beyond the workplace, affecting all areas of economic life, including financial services, housing markets, and social settings. Addressing these pervasive challenges is crucial for creating equitable and supportive environments where BIPOC women executives can thrive.

These resources aim to equip members with information to recognize signs of microaggression and discrimination, promoting a more inclusive and fair economic and social landscape.

Hidden Biases and Thoughtful Equality: Concepts Often Overlooked and Rarely Combined

Research & Sources

New research examines gender bias within four industries with more female than male workers — law, higher education, faith-based nonprofits, and health care. Having balanced or even greater numbers of women in an organization is not changing women’s experiences of bias. Bias is built into the system and continues to operate even when more women than men are present. Leaders can use these findings to create gender-equitable practices and environments which reduce bias. First, replace competition with cooperation. Second, success can be measured by goals, not by time spent in the office or online. Third, equitable reward structures should be implemented, and remote and flexible work should be provided with autonomy. Finally, increase transparency in decision-making.  Source: Harvard Business Review

It doesn’t matter that we consciously know women and men are fundamentally equal with respect to their ambition, talent, commitment, and competitiveness, most of us—women as well as men—don’t see them as equal. SOURCE

The constant interruptions when you’re in a meeting; the insistence by your manager that the reason your male counterpart earns more than you is because his role truly is ‘different.’ . SOURCE

Avoiding Pitfalls

Microaggressions are defined as verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group. For Black people, they are ubiquitous across daily work and life. You can respond in one of three ways: let it go, call it out immediately, or bring it up at a later date. Here’s a framework for deciding which path is right for the situation and how to handle the conversation if you choose to have one. First, discern what matters to you. Second, disarm the person who committed the microaggression; explain that you want to have an uncomfortable conversation. Third, challenge them to clarify their statement or action, then focus them on its negative impact. Finally, decide how you want to let the incident affect you. Source: ARTICLE

Being a woman of color at work often means being the only one, if not one of the only ones, in the room.  Black women account for only 8% of the private sector workforce and 1.5% of leadership, Hispanic women make up for 6% of the workforce and 1.3% of leadership. Source

Pathways Forward

Men dominate most workplaces and operate by masculine norms, values, and expectations. In other words, our workplaces are highly gendered. As a result, women generally have a harder time advancing in their careers than do men. In relation to men, women receive fewer career-enhancing opportunities, they are judged more critically, and their accomplishments are more often ignored or downplayed. To put this most simply, women’s ability to advance in their careers is systematically (if unconsciously) obstructed because they are women.   Source: FORBES