Blog

Inequality in the Workplace

• October 25, 2021

It is no secret that there is a divide in the world in so many ways, for example: gender, race, sexuality, age.

It was recently revealed that in London, there are a lot of inequalities represented by statue choice. This news showed that there are almost double the amount of statues of animals as there are of named women in London.

To further compare, around 20% of the statues are named men and then not even 5% of them are named females. Statues have a lot of subconscious influence over people and in this scenario, it is telling people that women are not even worth a quarter of what men are worth and this is not right.

These kinds of inequalities are spread throughout the working world as well as in so many other aspects of our lives, so it is best to try and prevent it wherever possible.

A mere 19% of people in the UK claim to see a type of gender equality in their workplace according to a 2021 survey by Samsung. That means, over 4 fifths of the working UK population believes that there is an inequality in the workplace around gender and it should be focused more heavily on by the world.

One big issue surrounding this gender divide is to do with the hiring process, nearly half of UK workers believe that certain jobs have predetermined genders attached to them - according to these workers, some jobs are exclusively for men and some are exclusively for women.

This kind of bias can also be seen in the application process, quite a big percentage of women (nearly 20%) will not even consider applying for jobs in fear that they will be discriminated against because of their gender.

Furthermore, the aforementioned statue inequality stretches even further than just gender inequality but also to racial inequality. Of all the London statues, there are a mere 1% of named statues of people of colour. 0.9% are male and 0.2% are female, further representing the gender divide here too. This tiny 1% is a quarter of named female statues and, much worse, 5% of the named male statues.

With there being only 56 years since the Race Relations Act brought in to prevent racial discrimination in the workplace, there is still a long way to go to truly ensure that this inequality is stamped out.

There are a lot of ways in which the world can evolve to fit with our current society, especially regarding the workplace.

A few examples of how this can begin to be achieved is through:

To exclude names from CVs - preventing any bias that could come from a feminine sounding name / a name that may seem anything other than ‘white British’.

Check job advertisements for any gendered wording - this will encourage more women to apply for the job as they will not be deterred by thinking that they are not wanted for the role.

Listen to your staff - if they feel like they are being discriminated against it is important to understand why and to fix those issues as soon as they arise.

Educate your staff - one way to fix these issues is to ensure that those in your office, especially those with more power (like bosses and managers), know the way that their actions could affect others. This is particularly key with the hiring department since they may have an unconscious bias when hiring new people, opting for appearance rather than experience.

It is important to address these issues in any part of society as the influence consequently spreads throughout the rest of the world. From statues to workplace to any kind of representation, it is important to make all of this truly mirror our society. There are not four times as many men in the country than there are women so this vast difference in representation is severely unjust - and the same with only 1% of people of colour.