Occupational inequality is the unequal treatment of people based on gender, sexuality, age, disability, socioeconomic status, religion, height, weight, accent, or ethnicity in the workplace.
[7] Women and minorities are disproportionately placed into the peripheral sector early on in their careers with little chance of moving into the primary group to achieve equal occupational status.
Women have always dominated the humanities,[citation needed] while men have held a sizeable difference when it comes to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
The existence of this complementarity indicates that the socioeconomic status, by means of its direct effect on access to human capital, determines employee skill sets and employability.
Members of low-SES communities lack access to the educational opportunities, which would enable them to develop the skills they need to advance economically and increase their employability in a skills-biased economy.
[25] Unless the employer proves it an undue hardship, dress and grooming accommodations, as well as reasonable adjustments to allow for the individual to practice their religion may be required.
In her article, "Don't put my name on it," Sandra Smith, a sociologist at the University of California Berkeley, discusses the prevalence of discriminatory practices in our society today.
"From a social capital theoretical perspective, deficiencies in access to mainstream ties and institutions explain persistent joblessness among the black urban poor".
Regardless of true mental or physical capabilities, African Americans are disadvantaged when it comes to attaining a job, simply because they aren't part of the largely white networks that dominate our society today.
However, historical discriminatory attitudes that continue to plague the country today are making it difficult for people of minorities to attain jobs, especially because of the significance of networking and the extent to which is generates success.
"Mothers were recommended a 7.9% lower starting salary than non-mothers" (Correll and Bernard 2005)[30] When women return to work after maternity leave they can feel uncertain about where they stand.
"According to figures analysed by the House of Commons library, 14 per cent of the 340,000 women who take maternity leave each year find their jobs under threat, when they try to return to work.”.
(Fairley 2013) [31] Tokenism is an extremely common practice in the workplace environment of today[citation needed]; it can essentially be defined as the act of going out of one's way to include members of minority groups.
According to Rosabeth Kanter's 1977 publication Men and Women of the Corporation, the inability to achieve equality within the workplace can be largely attributed to the placement of "token status" on certain groups of individuals.
However, balancing the numbers and ratios is not necessarily the biggest issue at hand: many researchers suggest that power, privilege, and prestige are more important factors in the relationship between dominant and secondary groups in the workplace.
[41] People's career experiences are largely affected by how they are viewed by their coworkers, and the way employees' actions are perceived may vary based on gender due to the existence of a "double bind" for women.
Women, on the other hand, are compared to stereotypes about passive femininity that mean if they are assertive, they are viewed as acting in conflict with their internal nature and criticized.
"[44] As some industries, such as Wall St. firms, rely on peer evaluations to determine pay, promotion, and more generally assess a worker's contribution and worth, how women are perceived will affect their career experiences.
"[45] Similarly, lab experiments and audit studies found that a "motherhood penalty" exists that can negatively affect wages and performance evaluations.
"[43] This may be due to cultural assumptions that women will leave work when they have children, thus causing other workers and managers to view them as less committed, even if they have expressed that this is not their plan.
[43] The double bind here exists because even if women try to present themselves as serious workers, their role as mothers or their ability to become pregnant causes employers to treat them differently.
In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex.
The Wall Street Journal came up with the term "the glass ceiling" to describe the barriers that women face in efforts to get promoted to top-tier positions within their corporations.
The "up-or-out" system prevalent in many consulting firms can help to explain the male-dominated hierarchy;[55] for women who require maternity leave their roles cannot be sustained in such an environment.
[63] In efforts to combat such prevailing culture, Wall Street firms have implemented equal opportunity guidelines, followed class action suits, placed diversity initiatives, and created grievance procedures.
[80] Although individuals subscribe to varying work-family ideologies, American institutions reflect a gendered division of labor that encourages women to be active in the domestic sphere and men in the workforce.
[79] These gender norms are particularly evident on Wall Street where men and women view either the breadwinner-homemaker model or full-time hired childcare as the answer if they choose to have children.
Compared with men who have more freedom to decide their workplaces, to move frequently in working system is obvious a disadvantage for women to improve their positions or to earn more income.
While all these non-traditional family lifestyles might present social challenges for the children as well as create undesirable career experiences, the two units that warrant the most consideration[according to whom?]
Individuals of different sexual orientations have been criticized, segregated and physically harassed for decades even within the labor community, a place which being homosexual should not reflect upon how well one performs a job.