According to a recent study done in the U.S., men and women still find it awkward to work together, and although it’s a battle as old as time itself, it’s becoming much more of an issue for women looking to establish themselves in the corporate environment.
It is estimated that roughly 60% of women in the business world consider having drinks at a business event to be inappropriate when one-on-one interactions between male and female coworkers were to happen.
The reason for this is based on religious beliefs, and depicting the workplace as an environment wherein employees fear harassment or being accused of impropriety. But in a way, an employee’s social life and career development does depend on these solo interactions.
The recent trend is that female staffers are being excluded from crucial conversations, networking opportunities and professional exposure, and in addition to this, consequently earning roughly R60,000 less annually than their male colleagues.
According to Women in the Workplace, a lot of female employees face push-backs whenever negotiating for promotions, and in comparison to their male counterparts, women in the business world tend to report fewer substantive interactions with their seniors, which leads to a lack of growth in their career paths.
Out of 144 countries on the World Economic Forum’s latest Gender Equality Report, South Africa ranked 15th, which clearly indicates that inequality is still a very prominent factor in the South African labor market.
In an effort to try and avoid women in the workplace being excluded from career advancement opportunities, we need to get to the root of why social interactions with colleagues of opposite sexes are deemed ‘inappropriate’ in the first place.
Just because an employee is female, she might well be overlooked as a great candidate to take along on a business trip, just because her boss is a male. To rule out any possibility of awkwardness, a male employee will instead be chosen for the opportunity, putting the female associate at a massive disadvantage, career wise.
The fact of the matter is that women simply aren’t being recognized as peers in the business world, but rather as distractions to their male counterparts.
Is it really a matter of men and women being unable to work together or being unable to achieve success together, as a team? The answer is no. It’s all about the unequal distribution of power in the workplace in general. This imbalance needs to be corrected so that men and women can finally start achieving more equal standing in the workplace.