So Much So For Gender Diversity and Equality

Two incidents.

Two students.

Two different batches.

Different organizations.

One quest - search for a job.

One common result - denied.

Reasons for denial - Gender - Female. Problem - Marriage.

Bitter as it may sound, but its harsh truth. If you are a woman about to get married or a married woman searching for her first job, then you are in for trouble. For jobs don't come easy.

In the first case, the student had in fact joined an organization and it was her first day at work. During the course of her interaction with her new colleagues, she casually happened to state that her family may now possibly start thinking of getting her married within next six months. The heavens fell. Disaster struck. That was her first and last day with that organization. She was asked to quit. Would this have been the same reaction if she was a boy? Would he have been asked to quit his job too?

The second case is of a student who has been a consistent performer in academics, always eager and inquisitive to learn. A person with a smiling face and difficult to miss qualities still unable to find a job. In fact disqualified in the first round itself. Reason - married. In one organization she did go up to third round because nobody asked her if she was married. For a moment she believed she was finally through, till out of nowhere the M - word popped out. Today she is struggling to accept the fact that she is getting rejected because she is married and not because of her qualifications. Would her story have been different if she had been a boy? Would he have been denied a job too because he is a married man? And the worst part is that in one of the of organizations, it was a woman who denied her the opportunity.

No wonder then so much so for gender diversity and equality, it has a long way to go if the reports titled India Inc's gender diversity plagued by execution ills, Gender diversity - Most Indian companies skip diversity goals, Proportion of women directors up 180%, but gender diversity lags in India: Survey are anything to go by.

Its not that there are not any green shoots, but for now they occur more of an exception than a norm. Even Google could not escape the gender diversity trap, if you are aware of an ex-Google employee James Damore's anti-diversity memo that's absolutely sexist as Ruchika Joshi writes in post Gender Diversity in the Workplace: Going Beyond the Numbers Game for The Wire.

These are two of the stories which I am aware of, may be you have a couple of them or have been the one to experience it and if we do add those up, chances are we may realize we have not even touched the wall, forget the glass ceiling. As Ruchika Joshi puts in the same article, quoting Simone de Beauvoir who famously wrote “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, it is frustrating to have to argue against gender inequality rooted in theories of biological essentialism. Even if Damore got his science correct, researchers agree that biological differences between men and women cannot explain the gender disparity we witness in the workplace.

Original post on linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-much-gender-diversity-equality-anthony-colaco/

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