When gender discrimination is brought up, the wage gap or gender-based harassment, more explicit examples, tend to come to mind. What’s not brought up enough in our conversations? The subtle, everyday sexism that is limiting women’s opportunities, access to resources, and positions of authority.
For one, research reveals that women in the workplace are held back due to 30 biases beyond their control. Factors such as class, cultural identity, accent, and marital status, are used by leaders in the workplace as excuses to hold women back from reaching higher positions in their jobs. The results of this study highlight an issue that continues to affect workplaces globally– the discrete biases that limit a woman’s career development.
Even when promoted, women in high-level positions can be labeled as overly dominating in making executive decisions, while men in the same positions are celebrated for being authoritative. This double standard is especially harmful as it discredits their achievements.
We see issues that hold girls and women in classrooms back too. Girls are socialized from a young age to have cooperative and agreeable personalities, making them feel like they need to be perfect to succeed academically. Reshma Saujani, the founder of the organization Girls Who Code, found that in her experience observing youth coding classes, girls are more likely to delete code that they’ve just written because it did not meet their own high standards. In comparison, Saujani observed that boys, when tasked with the same assignment were more likely to embrace it as a problem to solve, and they were not as fearful of mistakes or imperfections in their work.
Unrealistic expectations hold girls and women back from leading change in the world. In turn, all of us out on all the innovation and contributions women would make for society, if not for a world that teaches them to prioritize perfection.
Subtle sexism has also been shown to have impacts on women’s healthcare access, leading to delayed or inadequate healthcare. Healthcare providers often dismiss women’s symptoms as overly emotional, distressed, and anxiety-driven, resulting in misdiagnoses. The Journal of the American Heart Association reports that women who visit the emergency department for chest pain wait 29% longer than men to be evaluated for a possible heart attack. Another study showed that middle-aged women with chest pain were 2 times as likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness than men who had the same symptoms. These issues are rooted in implicit biases about women and result in limited access to life-saving resources.
Although there have been efforts to eradicate gender discrimination in these settings, such as mandated bias training at workplaces and for healthcare providers, these programs only strive to correct offensive behavior, and they do not inherently change the mindset behind misogyny.
Regardless, it’s clear that these issues are engraved in our day-to-day interactions. Not only is it exhausting to be constantly discredited and doubted, but it’s also tiring to see the dismissiveness of these problems– especially by those who do not notice and experience them. We need more women to come out and confront these forms of gender inequality, but importantly, we also need men to be part of the conversation. Gender discrimination against women is not, in fact, just a women’s issue, but it has implications for everyone.
