Sexism in Workplace
A consultancy identifies three unconscious bias at corporate office
It was nearly four decades ago when I heard about gender equality movement in the United States. In the class of political science, professors offered a case study of Japanese workplace in comparison with other countries, especially developed ones in Europe and America. Most Western nations have strived to achieve significant progress in closing gender gap at workplaces.
The latest edition of World Economic Forum report indicated the statistics of gender gap around the world and estimated that it takes 135 years to close the gap. Among the nations in the survey, Japan has been still slow in adapting the progressive change. It ranks a sad 121st.
The other research shows more or less the similar result for the Japanese gender mix in glass-ceiling index by the Economist, a English liberal newspaper. Most Asian countries find themselves at the bottom of the ranking but Japanese position looks far below the OECD average. This is very disappointing.
On January 29th, two Deloit consultants warned more than fifty audience in online Zoom event in New York and Tokyo. The structural distortion is prevelent at the outset in for-a-proft organization, experts claim. It will never be fixed without preventive action. The majority (male group) can be positioned to exercise superiority in the corporate performance. The strengths in numbers underline the female group in discriminatory circumstances, human rights activists in organizational behavior mentioned.
Why does it happen in corporate offices?
They identified three unconscious bias which male workers are not aware of. For a first, office workers don’t realize similarity bias, in which humans are fond of similar taste and common traits. Most humans tend to object to unfamiliar orientations.
The second bent can be found in the inclination toward making a lot of confirmation. The tendency establishes the common group to share with each other in the first place. Differences are not welcome. It is a lot easier to agree with the common ground than to differ from eath other with compounding background.
Lack of energy deepens the gender bias. Being exhausted from excessive work with no or little extra time and space in mind, humans rush to search the quick and easy solutions. They don’t want to spend time solving predetermined injustice without economic gain, which have been ignored for a long time.
Corporate executives left behind unsolved problems in gender disparity in workplaces in Tokyo. The Western believers in gender equality rethink a fair trade with barbarians in practice.Western advocates raise the voice to pull the deal from existing contracts with business.
It has been four decades since my first encounter to gender equality. Without conscious initiative to reform the sexism, female workers will no longer be tolerable to the conditions. They join the workforce but the choice of firm is very selective.