steve b wrote:I'm all for it;equality. But, during this sweeping change that I fully support, can you also bring the bar back to "equal" for jobs and college applications? Maybe even go as far as removing the Gender and Race blocks any type of job / college / loan application. I sure would like some of those bonus points I see handed out during Department tests.
I have no idea where you work or even what kind of work you do, Steve, but I can assure you that women are not picking up any sort of "bonus points" in the job market. Even when performing the same tasks as male coworkers, studies continue to show that women earn less and they advance more slowly.
It's clear enough that women do enjoy greater opportunity than they have in the past. In the 1950s, a smart woman who wanted a career could choose between being a nurse or a school teacher. Certainly, they have more choice today. (Side note: The lack of choices in 1950s amounted to a tax on smart women that subsidized public education; the fact that smart women have other choices today is arguably the single biggest reason for the decline in the quality of public education in the US since 1950s.)
But there's growing evidence that women's gains in the job market may be slowing and, in some cases, reversing. Part of that is due to changing demographics and, in particular, the rising influence of non-Western cultures. People tend to see what they expect to see. On the one hand, this is as it should be, because if the world weren't largely predictable and didn't behave roughly as we expected, life would be a maelstrom and we'd be unable to survive as a species. But this same mechanism that allows us to function also results in us experiencing evidence that our world-view is flawed as threatening. We accept change only when the evidence is overwhelming that we must.
A lot of our expectations of gender and social roles are controlled by early socialization. Whatever the status of women in the West, it's probably less elsewhere. Outside the West, women can traditionally be caregivers but not real players. The rising prominence of young Indian (and other, non-Western) male engineers in the US high-tech workforce probably portends erosion of women's outcomes in these higher-paid, higher-status occupations. Because getting involved in the problem amounts to choosing sides between minorities, an uncomfortable proposition at best for an employer, and because non-Western male engineers already outnumber women engineers in many high-tech companies, I personally expect this problem to get much worse, not better, and for employers to turn a largely blind eye toward it.
Here in the US, we do have Federal Title VII which mandates equal opportunity but, no matter what you may have heard, the protections are largely toothless, at least in any situation where males are politically astute enough to avoid obvious mistakes. For example, it's perfectly legal for a manager to fire a female employee because he thinks she's not very smart regardless of the truth of the matter, just so long as he's careful to avoid saying he believes that
because she's a woman. A woman who believes she was unfairly discriminated against faces an uphill battle: Legal costs to pursue a case typically run $250,000 or more and the most one might typically win are attorney's fees and lost wages, which the complainant has a duty to mitigate by finding another job. The standard for punitive damages is that the employer's behavior must be "egregious," which the courts tend to interpret with questions like, "But was there actual penetration?" The bottom line is that women who believe they've been victims of discrimination are usually well-advised to simply walk away from it.
So while outcomes for women in the job market have undeniably improved over the last 50 years, they do not yet enjoy the same opportunity, their legal protections are weaker than most people imagine, and, most worrisome, there's serious reason to suspect the trend toward improvement in their outcomes may have crested.
If your outcomes in life and on the job aren't meeting your expectations, Steve, it seems unlikely to me that it's because the women around you are getting unfair bonus points. Your posts here suggest your own behavior might be something to look at. Certainly, if you're getting feedback that coworkers occasionally experience you as rude or combative, that might be something to work on.
