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 shows that gender bias persists in female-majority industries like law, higher education, faith-based nonprofits, and health care, highlighting the need for leaders to foster equity through cooperation, goal-based success metrics, fair rewards, flexible work, and transparent 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

In 2022, Black women earned just 66.5 cents—and 69.1 cents for those working full-time year-round—for every dollar paid to White men. SOURCE

If the overall gender pay gap isn’t enough cause for alarm, the wage gaps for Black and Hispanic women relative to white men are even larger due to compounded discrimination and occupational segregation based on both gender and race/ethnicity. SOURCE: Economic Policy Institute

Avoiding Pitfalls

Microaggressions—subtle but harmful racial slights—are common in Black people’s daily lives, and addressing them involves choosing to ignore, confront immediately, or revisit later using a thoughtful approach: assess what matters, disarm the person, clarify and explain the harm, and decide how to move forward. 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

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

Pathways Forward

Workplaces are shaped by masculine norms, making it harder for women to advance as they face fewer opportunities, harsher judgment, and less recognition—systematically hindering their progress. Source: FORBES

A Survival Guide for Black, Indigenous, and Other Women of Color in Academia. Source The Chronicle

Women of Colour face unique barriers that impact their professional growth, as well as their psychological well-being.  SOURCE: Thousand and One