Gendered Politics in the Workplace

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Gendered Politics in the Workplace
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• What are workplace politics?
• Actions by individuals that attempt to push the
  agenda of a workplace in a direction that
  benefits some individuals/groups over others.
• Every workplace has politics. Politics become
  problematic when those in power use politics to
  discriminate against a group.

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• Politics
• Interests
• Conflict
• Power

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Politics of Workplace Culture

• Informal workplace cultures can create politics
  such that some groups benefit over others. Two
  types of political workplace cultures that harm
  women are
• Tokenism
• Comparable Worth Discrimination

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Job Sex Segregation and Politics

• JSS leads to the negative ramifications of
  tokenism and comparable worth discrimination.
• Because men and wo(men)/of color are usually in
  separate jobs
• When there are a few tokens in a job filled
  with dominants, the workplace culture makes it
  harder for tokens to succeed.
• We learn to devalue the skills associated with
  oppressed groups and only value the skills
  associated with the oppressor groups (comparable
  worth discrimination)

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Politics of Workplace Culture Tokenism

• 1)Kanter argues numbers (in and of themselves)
  can create a political atmosphere that
  discriminates against white women and people of
  color
• Skewed, Tilted, Balanced, Uniform

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• Tokens differ from people not in ability to do a
  task or in acceptance of work norms but only in
  terms of these secondary and informal
  assumptions. Kanter, p. 280
• People can thus be in a token position even if
  they have not been placed there deliberately for
  display.It is sufficient to be in a place where
  others of that category are not usually found, to
  the first of ones kind to enter a new group, or
  to represent a very different culture and set of
  interactional capacities to members of the
  numerically dominant category. 280

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Token Status Causes

• 1) Performance Pressures
• Public performance
• Extension of consequences
• Attention to a Tokens Discrepant Characteristics
• Fear of Retalitaion
• RESPONSES BY TOKEN
• Overachievement
• Invisibility

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Token Status Causes

• 2) Boundary Heightening
• Exaggeration of Dominants Culture
• Interruptions as Reminders of difference
• Overt Inhibition
• Loyalty Tests
• RESPONSES BY TOKENS
• Accept Isolation
• Become Insider

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Token Status Causes

• 3) Role Entrapment
• Status Leveling
• Stereotyped Role Induction
• RESPONSES BY TOKENS
• Accept Roles
• Isolate

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Comparable Worth

• Acker shows that the stated purpose of the job
  evaluation process (to evaluate male dominated
  and female dominated jobs and their skills) took
  secondary and sometimes tertiary purpose to
  upholding hierarchy and maintaining gender
  distinctions.

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• Politics were interwoven throughout the entire
  evaluation process. From deciding how to write
  the questionnairre which questions workers about
  their jobs, the relative weighting of factors,
  the definition of factors to the evaluation
  process itself.

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Skills favored male dominated jobs, like managers.

• For example, the know-how dimension is weighted
  heaviest with regards to points on the scale
  (60) and you can only score high on this
  dimension if your job is a supervisory one.
• Also, concepts like accountability tap into some
  skills already measured in know-how, thus
  managerial skills are being weighted more than
  once in different categories.
• For instance, women are commonly responsible for
  people and not property, and these skills are not
  thought of as worthy of pay

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Rejected were skills in jobs dominated by female

• With working conditions, all outside jobs were
  thought of as more hazardous then working inside.
  
• factors as, role loading, having to perform
  multiple different tasks or time demands, do
  something by a deadline or having to work with
  frequent interruptions were not considered skills.

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Reproducing Hierarchy

• The most important task was to ensure that
  managers deserved more pay, so their tasks were
  double or sometimes triple counted.
• Despite this, jobs dominated by women that were
  evaluated similarly as jobs dominated by men were
  paid less.
• Nothing changed because of politics!