Many people like to act as though sex discrimination is not an issue in the U.S. anymore. They point to major strides that women have made in securing representation in technical fields and within highly paid professions to support their perspective. However, for the women who are trying to compete in the modern economy, it is often quite obvious that there is not truly a level playing field in place.
Female employees often face substantial challenges that their male coworkers do not need to overcome. Discrimination in the workplace can be overt, and it can also be somewhat subtle. Discrimination involving one worker or a group of employees openly mistreating someone because of their sex can be obvious. Systemic discrimination that affects all the employees at an organization can be harder to spot by those working at a company. These are just two of the more common ways that sex discrimination manifests to the detriment of female employees in the modern workforce.
In lower wages
Although both federal law and Indiana state statutes include rules that prevent companies from discriminating based on sex, along with numerous other characteristics, women often still find that they do not receive the same wages as men in the same positions.
The wage gap has remained mostly stable in recent decades. It results in women earning substantially less for the same work than their male counterparts. Women who are also from different ethnic backgrounds may experience even more significant wage gaps than white women in the workplace.
In the glass ceiling
The term glass ceiling refers to the seeming inability of many competent female workers to move into the upper echelons that the businesses that employ them. Women still represent only a tiny percentage of executives overall, and companies often only promote women up to a certain point and then begin passing them over for additional promotions despite their job performance remaining solid.
Both women who discover that they have received less pay than their male coworkers and those repeatedly denied advancement opportunities when the company chooses to instead promote male workers with the same or lower credentials may have grounds to bring a discrimination claim against the company that employs them.
Fighting back against workplace sex discrimination can help women to continue advancing their careers and to ultimately change unethical practices within specific organizations.