Thursday, August 21, 2014
I understood gender discrimination once I added “Mr.” to my resume and landed a job
Quartz: It was the late 90s and I was at an interesting phase of my career. For the first time in my life I possessed relevant qualifications, experience and could also show a successful track record in my chosen career path. I had the job seeker’s trifecta. It was also summer and my current employer was pissing me off with its penny-pinching ways, so after three years of ball-busting effort I decided a break and a job change was in order. Displaying characteristic overconfidence in myself, I quit my job (without burning any bridges) and set about applying for others.
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3 comments:
It is always positive to see articles about gender discrimination from a man's perspective. Of course, a woman's perspective on gender should be just as valuable as that of a man, but it certainly is not always received that way. The point that I think is the strongest is at the end when the author mentions a former coworker who was a woman at the same level in the company as he was. Her presence made members of the office, including him, believe that gender discrimination is not the issue. If women want those positions, they just have to work for them, the same way men do. But once Kim O'Grady went through this experience with his resume, he realized how wrong this assumption is. This was about the author's experience in the late 90s, and sadly the mentality that O'Grady explained is still held by so many people.
I wish I could say this was eye-opening, but sadly I am not even surprised by this article. Discrimination in the work place is very real, be it against women or minorities. While I myself haven’t applied to enough jobs to have noticed any discrimination against me because of my gender, it has come up in circumstances other than job searches and never fails to anger and bewilder me. Whenever I think about the future, the ways in which our society and the entire world are going to keep evolving, I can’t fathom us going toward a positive course when so many people are still made out to be inferior because of their gender, ethnicity, origin, beliefs, etc…
I believe that it is so important for the performing arts industry, be it film, theater or other art forms, to use their extraordinary potential to reach out to people in a conscious, positive way. It is important to create plays, make movies, write books that not only include people from all walks of life but also tell stories where we see those people in roles or situations that are unusual, unconventional, unexpected. And having a token stay-at-home dad or successful business woman just isn’t enough. Little girls who want to be engineers can’t be a TV show’s claim to diversity anymore; they need to be characters of their own rather than quota requirements. I realize that we have come a long way in means of acceptance of diversity, but current events and continuing issus prove that there is an even longer way to go.
It really is amazing what pronouns and gendered nouns can make on a resume. I recently saw a study where the exact same resumes were sent out. Same schooling, same degrees, same work experience, same age, etc. The only difference between the resumes were that one was a girl's name and one was a boy's. When the "people" began to get results form their job applications, the female applications got extremely lower feedback and/or follow-up interviews from their initial resumes. It's stupid that even after more than a decade, so little has changed that men are still more likely to get jobs that are women are just as qualified to do.
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