History. Women in the Workplace

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Historical Background
Sexist Bias in the Workplace
Female Leadership
Areas for Further Research
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Women currently constitute a significant part of the world’s labor force and are now present in most, if not all, occupational areas. The last decades witnessed consistently “increasing numbers of women entering the workforce,” and this fact continues to reshape the social landscapes of many professional communities (Munn & Chaudhuri, 2016, p. 55). However, the mere fact of women becoming more and more critical as part of the workforce does not mean they do not encounter difficulties in the workplace caused by their gender. According to Ellemers (2014), it is far from evident that contemporary organizations view male and female employees as equally valuable. The inclusion of large numbers of women in the workforce is still a relatively recent development in historical terms, and not all social tensions associated with it have dissipated. Thus, to properly understand the challenges faced by women in their jobs, one should look into the problem from a historical perspective. Scholarly literature does that by focusing on different kinds of sexism embedded in organizational cultures as well as the difficulties encountered by female leaders, but there still are areas that mandate further research.

Historical Background

When speaking about women in the workplace as an issue for organizational psychology, one should be aware that it is a relatively recent problem in historical terms. Before the middle of the 20^th century, there were next to no organizational spaces where women acted as paid employees. According to Stanfors and Goldscheider (2017), while men dominated the sphere of public economy, women occupied the niche of “unpaid caring, nurture, maintenance, and also unpaid production” (p. 174). The Industrial Revolution and the corresponding demographic changes, especially the overall decrease in birth rate, created the conditions for the potential inclusion of women into the public economy. However, these changes did not immediately lead to greater female participation in the economy. Initially, society simply expected women to shift “from caring for quantities of children to improving the quality of their children” (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017, p. 176). As a result, before the 20^th century, women were poorly represented in the public economy, which had largely remained the exclusive domain of men.

This traditional distribution of roles between man as a provider and woman as a caregiver began to crumble in the 20^th century. By that time, the technological advances had created enough positions that society would deem suitable for female workers, mostly in the services. In the early 20^th century, the development of several sectors of the economy generated new job positions, “such as sales, banking and insurance, and public administration” (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017, p. 192). These opportunities attracted women, as they generally offered better payment for less effort compared to domestic service or manual labor. As a consequence, women’s representation in the service sector and administration grew consistently since the late 19^th century. In 1900, only 18 percent of American women had white-collar jobs, but by 1960 the same variable already amounted to 56 percent (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017). At the same time, the female employment rates in manual labor and domestic service had dropped correspondingly (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017). Thus, during the early decades of the 20^th century, women have entered the job market en masse, but only in several professional areas generally restricted to white-collar jobs.

The next logical step was in this process overcoming gender differences embedded in the distinction into separate economic spheres. From the 1950s onward, married and unmarried women alike demonstrated ever-increasing rates of participation in the workforce in developed countries. According to Stanfors and Goldscheider (2017), this trend began in the middle of the century and then was “strengthened greatly during the 1970s and 1980s” due to affirmative action as well as other factors (p. 175). While in the earlier period, a working married woman was stigmatized as having an unsuccessful husband, during the last 70 years, dual-earner couples comprise a progressively greater share of the global workforce (Munn & Chaudhuri, 2016). Stanfors and Goldscheider (2017) also point out that the gender gap in wages has decreased considerably. In 1957, the hourly wage for American women employed in manufacturing was roughly 60 percent of the men’s salary, and by 2009 it was more than 80 percent (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017). Hence, the research reveals a trend toward gradually mitigating gender differences in the workforce.

Thus, the literature on the topic distinguishes three historical periods of modern labor force participation. In the 19^th century, society restricted women to unpaid work; in the early 20^th century, women entered the public economic domain, and from the 1950s onward, they began overcoming gender differences (Stanfors & Goldscheider, 2017). According to the literature, the current historical trend with regard to women in the workplace is gradually mitigating gender differences. However, the scholars also cover the historical legacy of gendered labor division in detail, thus suggesting it inevitably affects women’s experience in the workplace.

Sexist Bias in the Workplace

One of the factors that have historically affected women in the workplace and persist in some organizations is explicit, sexist bias. Ellemers (2014) defines explicit bias as “blatantly sexist behavior [that] undermines women’s performance, for instance, in a job application situation” (p. 48). It manifested throughout the entire history of women’s employment in the public economic domain. Still, its most apparent exertion was characteristic for the first half of the 20^th century, when women already worked en masse, but the gender gap remained mostly uncontested. Stanfors and Goldscheider (2017) offer a possible example of explicit, sexist bias when describing the social condemnation of a working married woman for neglecting her reproductive responsibilities. Emerson and Murphy (2015) also point to the explicit bias when explaining how women are “widely stereotyped as less competent than men” (p. 295). According to the stereotype threat theory, negative stereotyping of a group, as in the explicit, sexist bias, undermines the motivation, ambition, and performance of said group (Emerson & Murphy, 2015). Therefore, explicit, sexist bias is one of the factors embedded in the organizational culture that historically affects women’s performance in the workplace negatively.

However, the sexist bias in the workplace may also be implicit. Ellemers (2014) defines implicit bias as a “perceived lack of fit” that does not manifest in any directly offensive behavior but still influences the decision-making in the organization (p. 49). Emerson and Murphy (2015) suggest that the fact of women comprising 47% of the American workforce but only accounting for a quarter of general and executive management is an example of implicit sexism. Implicit sexual bias is maybe even more dangerous than the explicit one for several reasons. To begin with, as correctly noted by Ellemers (2014), it is much harder to detect, and, due to being seemingly innocent, implicit sexist bias may not seem outright offensive despite if potentially detrimental effects. Secondly, implicit sexual bias is so pervasive that people may share it regardless of gender – and, thus, men and women alike may perceive female employees as less for certain positions (Ellemers, 2014). Thus, implicit sexist bias embedded in the organizational culture is also a factor that historically affects women’s performance in the.

On a deeper level, both explicit and implicit biases are symptoms of the broader issues with the organization’s functioning. Emerson and Murphy (2015) compare and contrast organizational lay theories – that is, the beliefs held by the members of an organization – regarding the employees’ intelligence. They define entity organizations as those professing a “fixed view of intelligence” (Emerson & Murphy, 2015, p. 296). They then distinguish entity organizations from incremental organizations – those that believe a given person’s “intelligence and ability can be developed through persistence and self-improvement” (Emerson & Murphy, 2015, p. 296). Interestingly enough, Emerson and Murphy (2015) point out that women are particularly reluctant to work in a company professing entity lay theory of intelligence. According to the authors, such companies “signal identity threat to women, increasing their stereotype expectations” (Emerson & Murphy, 2015, p. 305). Apparently, women assume that, in the organizations endorsing strict views of intelligence as predetermined and non-malleable, they are likely to be perceived as less capable. Thus, the research demonstrates that, historically, different forms of sexist bias against women in the workplace connect to a more significant issue of organizational lay theories of intelligence.

Female Leadership

Historical development of female participation in the workforce has also manifested in the increasing percentage of females in leadership positions in politics and the economy alike. The growing number of female leaders is not a mere coincidence but a historical trend. According to Hoyt and Murphy (2015), women currently hold a greater share “of leadership roles in political life and the workforce than ever before both in the United States and around the world” (p. 387). There are grounds to assume this development owes much to the purely practical rather than ideological considerations. Ellemers (2014) points out that business organizations “profit from gender diversity, especially at the (higher) management level” (p. 46). For example, the presence of women in the boards of directors correlates positively to the firm value in firms of any size, in any type of industry, and regardless of corporate governance measures (Ellemers, 2014). Yet, as Hoyt and Murphy (2015) note, women are still underrepresented as leaders. This fact means that, even in the current period, women in the workplace are still under the pressure of organizational norms that impede their careers.

One may find the heritage of the previous periods in the situations when women are promoted to high positions. As mentioned above, the historical trend of the last several decades is toward increasing the presence of women in economic and political leadership (Ellemers, 2014). Yet Ellemers (2014) also mentions another notable circumstance: the companies that appoint women to leadership positions tend to demonstrate worse performance than other organizations in the market prior to the appointment. This fact suggests that women obtain leadership positions in business when their companies go through hard times, meaning female leaders are appointed under less favorable conditions than their male counterparts. At worst, this indicates a consistent organizational practice that sabotages the efforts of a woman in the workplace. At best, it stems from perceiving women as “more suitable leaders… when there is much to lose and little to gain” due to their supposedly superior mediation and communication skills (Ellemers, 2014, p. 49). In any case, it seems that the tendency toward the increasing presence of women in leadership in the past decades coincides with the development of new organizational practices preventing female leaders from demonstrating their full potential.

Apart from that, women’s gradual rise to leadership positions in the late 20^th and 21^st centuries has also affected the career aspirations of other women in their respective workplaces. It would be natural to assume that observing successful female leaders would serve as a motivation for other women to pursue their careers more vigorously. Hoyt and Murphy (2015) note that strong female role models “can play an important role in protecting women from threats to their identity in leadership roles” (p. 392). Yet there is also another side to this issue: observing highly successful female leaders “has been shown to decrease women’s self-ratings of competence,” thus undermining their self-confidence and ambition (Hoyt & Murphy, 2015, p. 392). This tendency owes much to what Ellemers (2014) calls the Queen Bee Effect: female leaders tend to “distance themselves from ‘regular’ women” and portray themselves as different to avoid gender bias in their organizations (p. 50). Hence, the historical monopoly for leadership positions long enjoyed by men is so influential that those women who become successful in their workplaces feel pressured to reshape themselves into a more masculine image.

Areas for Further Research

One of the areas for further research on women in the workplace that requires more understanding is second-generation forms of discrimination and bias. Hoyt and Murphy (2015) define second-generation discrimination as “patterns of interaction among groups within the workplace that, over time, exclude non-dominant groups” through subtle and not readily evident practices (p. 394). While Ellemers (2014) also offers some examples of implicit sexist bias, which is an integrative part of second-generation discrimination, she does not make this particular topic her focus. Researching it in greater depth might yield interesting results regarding women’s position in the workplace under contemporary historical conditions.

Another area that needs to be understood in greater depth is how organizational structures characteristic for contemporary companies may influence women in the workplace. Hoyt and Murphy (2015) assume that organizations stressing flexibility, adaptability, and technical innovation are prone to decentralized governance that may, therefore, “foster patterns of interactions, decision making, and relationships that exclude women” (p. 394). Further research on the topic could either substantiate or correct this assumption.

Conclusion

As one can see, the scholarly literature on the history of women in the workplace distinguishes several stages of female participation in the labor force and central issues faced by women under contemporary historical circumstances. Until the end of the 19^th century, women scarcely participated in the workforce, but in the early 20^th century, they entered the labor market in specific fields. Since the 1950s, they began to overcome gender gaps in employment, but contemporary organizational practices still bear many legacies of male dominance from the preceding periods. One type of such heritage is sexism, whether explicit or implicit, embedded in the organizational practices and impeding women’s careers. Another example is issues faced by the female leaders: they are generally appointed under unfavorable circumstances and even then have to portray themselves as different from “regular” women and more masculine. Further research on second-generation gender discrimination and organizational structures promoting implicit sexism are also necessary. In general, the scholars agree that the current historical trend is toward empowering women in the workplace, but this requires overcoming many organizational legacies from the preceding periods of male domination.

References

Ellemers, N. (2014). Women at work: How organizational features impact career development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(1), 46-54.

Emerson, K.T.U., & Murphy, M.C. (2015). A company I can trust? Organizational lay theories moderate stereotype threat for women. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 295-307.

Hoyt, C.L., & Murphy, S.E. (2015). Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 27(3), 387-399.

Munn, S.L., & Chaudhuri, S. (2016). Work-life balance: A cross-cultural review of dual-earner couples in India and the United States. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 18(1), 54-68.

Stanfors, M., & Goldscheider, F. (2017). The forest and the trees Industrialization, demographic change, and the ongoing gender revolution in Sweden and the United States, 1870–2010. Demographic Research, 36, 173-226.

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