̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - discrimination

Women are ‘running with leaded shoes’ when promoted at work, says study

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:13:24 +0000

Women and men feel different at work, as moving up the ranks alleviates negative feelings such as frustration less for women than for men, says a sweeping new study on gender differences in emotion at work.

̽��ֱ��study, led by researchers at Yale ̽��ֱ�� and co-authored by Jochen Menges at Cambridge Judge Business School, finds that rank is associated with greater emotional benefits for men than for women, and that women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks.

Because emotions are important for leadership, this puts women at a disadvantage akin to running with ‘leaded shoes’, according to the study, which is based on nearly 15,000 workers in the US.

̽��ֱ��results, published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, tie the different ways women and men experience emotions at work to underrepresentation at every level of workplace leadership.

Little previous research on gender and workplace emotions

̽��ֱ��study notes that, while the glass ceiling for women has been extensively documented, there has been surprisingly little research on gender differences in emotions at work. Understanding this is particularly important as emotions influence job performance, decision-making, creativity, absence, conflict resolution and leadership effectiveness.

̽��ֱ��practical implications of the study are that organisations must provide support to women as they advance, including formal mentoring relationships and networking groups that can provide opportunities to deal with emotions effectively while supporting women as they rise within organisational ranks.

“It would be hard for anyone to break through a glass ceiling when they feel overwhelmed, stressed, less respected and less confident,” said Menges, who teaches at both the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich and Cambridge Judge Business School.

“This emotional burden may not only hamper promotion opportunities for women, but also prevent them from contributing to an organisation to the best of their ability. More needs to be done to level the playing field when it comes to emotional burdens at work,” said Menges, whose research often focuses on leadership, motivation and other workplace issues.

Women feel more ‘overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated’ at work

̽��ֱ��study finds gender does make a difference for the emotions that employees experience at work. Compared to men, women reported feeling more overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, tense, and discouraged, and less respected and confident.

Women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks. Although these feelings decreased for both men and women as they moved up in rank, the extent to which rank diminished negative feelings differed between the sexes. For instance, moving up rank did alleviate frustration and discouragement in both men and women, but it did so more for men than for women.

̽��ֱ��study says that because women experience more negative and fewer positive feelings in climbing the organisational ladder, this puts women at a disadvantage in attaining leadership roles.

At the lowest levels of employment, women reported feeling significantly more respected than men, yet this reverses as people climb within an organisation, resulting in men feeling significantly more respected than women at higher levels.

̽��ֱ��research used data from 14,618 adult US workers (50.7% male, 49.3% female) reflecting a diversity of race, ethnicity and industries, to test the following factors:

--Differences in the emotions that men and women experience at work.

--If gender interacts with rank to predict emotions.

--Whether the association between gender and emotions is mediated by emotional labour demands.

--If this relationship differs as a function of the proportion of women in an industry or organisational rank.

Feelings ranging from ‘inspired’ to ‘stressed’

Emotions were assessed using two different methods. Participants used a sliding scale to indicate how often they had experienced 23 feelings at work in the previous three months. ̽��ֱ��items included ten positive emotions such as “interested”, “proud” and “inspired”, and 13 negative responses including “bored”, “stressed” and “envious”. Participants were also asked to report their typical feelings about work in open-ended responses about how their job had made them feel over the past six months.

In addition, to assess positional power, participants were asked to place themselves on a ladder with ten steps representing where people stand in their organisation.

Inhibiting negative emotion is not the answer

̽��ֱ��study concludes that simply smothering emotion in the workplace isn’t the answer: Inhibiting negative emotions for a prolonged time increases burnout, and negatively impacts performance and personal well-being.

It recognises there are areas of future research which include how gender interacts with other categories of identity, such as race and ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. Women of colour face stronger glass ceiling effects than white women and have to simultaneously navigate bias and discrimination based on their gender and race.

̽��ֱ��authors also suggest further investigation to establish whether women’s negative experiences can impose an emotional glass ceiling because obstacles such as unequal treatment at work causes emotions such as feeling disrespected, which in turn can become an additional barrier to advancement.

Reference:
Christa L. Taylor et al. ‘Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women.’ Sex Roles (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11199-021-01256-z

Adapted from a story on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

Promotion at work has greater emotional benefit for men than women, says a new study on gender and workplace emotion.

Maskot

Colleagues sitting at conference table

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Boy, girl... or intersex? Law and gender

amb206 — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 08:15:13 +0000

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the birth of a child must, by law, be registered within 42 days of the baby being born. To register the birth, the parents (or parent) must provide various pieces of information including the sex of the baby. But what happens if the child has been born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t match the typical definitions of female or male?

Since 2013, it has been possible for children born in Germany to be legally recorded on their birth certificate (and later in life) as ‘indeterminate’. While this remains controversial, especially among intersex groups who see it adding to stigmatisation, it creates a legal gender status other than male or female.

Worldwide, a very small percentage of babies are born intersex – an umbrella term that covers a range of genetic variations that may be apparent at birth or emerge later in an individual’s development. But, argues lawyer Dr Jens Scherpe, their relatively low number doesn’t make these individuals any less important than those judged by society as ‘normal’ in terms of their physiology.

Scherpe carries out research within one of the most controversial and sensitive areas of family law – jurisprudence and gender. His introduction to the topic came when he was working at the Max Planck Institute in his native Germany and was asked to carry out research into nationality and change of legal gender for a case heard by the Constitutional Court. He began talking to transgender people and learning about their experiences.

“Once you meet people directly affected by laws which discriminate against them, you begin to feel differently and I’ve become a passionate advocate for change in the law in this area. I began to question the way in which we seek to categorise people and apply labels. What right does the state have to classify people as male or female in official documents such as birth certificates and passports – and do we actually need gender categories?”

After completing a comparative project on the legal status of transgender people, Scherpe focused attention on the law as it relates to intersex people, a group whose voices are beginning to be heard more forcefully. Because intersex people are a minority and frequently face discrimination, they are often bracketed together with other groups as LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex). Each of these groups, however, is differently affected by the law as it applies to sex and gender.

With funding from the DAAD- ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies (see panel), Scherpe organised a workshop in 2016 on ‘ ̽��ֱ��Legal Status of Intersex Persons’ as a forum to discuss some of the most pressing issues. It brought together participants from ten jurisdictions, including Germany which, as part of a wide-reaching human rights agenda, is making growing provision in the law for people who do not wish to be identified by the binary categories of male or female.

Germany has not been alone in making changes to the ways in which gender is recorded. Changes to the law have been mooted in several countries, including India and Nepal. In 2015, Malta took a lead in passing legislation allowing people to determine their own gender – and for parents, in certain cases, to postpone the marking of gender on a baby’s birth certificate until the child’s gender identity is confirmed.

While welcoming these changes, Scherpe says there is much more to be done to ensure that intersex individuals have the same rights, and are accorded the same respect, as the majority of the population.

One of the themes to emerge from the workshop is a growing concern that cosmetic (rather than medically necessary) surgery is carried out almost routinely. Intersex pressure groups argue that the medicalisation of intersex leads to violations of human rights and that corrective surgery can have devastating consequences.

“Most people strongly condemn the practice of female genital mutilation,” says Scherpe. “But children born with genitalia that don’t match what society regards to be male or female are routinely ‘corrected’ by invasive surgery, agreed by parents who fear the stigma attached to having a different child and who believe that their child will be seriously disadvantaged. Would we operate on a child who had red hair because we’d prefer them to have brown or fair hair – or change a child’s eye colour from brown to blue?”

At the core of this debate is the view, still held by many medical professionals, that intersex is a ‘disorder’ rather than a ‘difference’. Much of the argument surrounding intersex, and the issues it raises in a gendered world, centres on the use of language and how we choose to define ourselves. There is, for example, widespread debate about the definitions of the terms sex and gender in the highly competitive environment of world athletics.

“Because they’re so intertwined with sense of self, and can appear so threatening to our boy/girl view of the world, these questions are understandably super-sensitive. Even the terminology used will be perceived as discriminatory by some. And you can be certain of abuse from those who disagree with you for even investigating the issues concerned. But neither of those things should deter us from seeking to improve the law,” says Scherpe.

Not being part of the communities he writes about may be seen to add credibility to his work; he has no self-interest in pursuing changes in the law relating to any of the groups he works with. On the other hand, his lack of personal experience of the extra challenges faced by minority communities means that he needs to listen to a great many people to find out how their lives intersect with the law.

He adds: “What matters to me is that as a society we have a duty to ensure that all our members are provided with a legal framework, free from discrimination and stigmatisation, within which they can live happy and healthy lives.”

Boy or girl? This is one of the first questions all new parents are asked. In a small percentage of cases, the answer isn’t straightforward: the child is intersex. In a highly gendered society, how does the law apply to people whose physiology doesn’t fit the binary categories of male and female?

What right does the state have to classify people as male or female in official documents such as birth certificates and passports – and do we actually need gender categories?

Jens Scherpe

Jack Wright

Girl, boy

Studying Germany

Jens Scherpe’s work is one of over 30 projects that were funded last year through a research Hub in Cambridge which focuses on Germany.

Historian Dr Hanna Weibe and theologian Dr Ruth Jackson are fascinated by how politics and religion worked together in Germany after the political upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars; Dr Simon Stoddart is interested in urbanism in Iron Age Germany; Dr David Trippett in how Wagner arrived at his theory of melody as a means of communication; and Dr Ksenia Gerasimova in why Germany chooses organic agriculture.

These and over 30 other projects have been supported through the €1m DAAD- ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies, with funds from the Foreign Ministry of the Federal Republic. “This money was given in recognition of the fact that Cambridge arguably now has the largest number of scholars working on Germany and German culture in the world outside Germany itself,” says Professor Chris Young, who co-leads the Hub with Professor Chris Clark.

“Why study Germany?” asks Young. “Germany is widely regarded as a model economy that appears to be working when others are struggling. Understanding the country’s economic and political importance, especially given the implications and impact of Brexit, is a golden opportunity for us and for Europe. How, for instance, has Germany coped with immigration or austerity? What facets of its history, culture, politics and theology have influenced the way that Germany is today?”

Through the breadth and depth of the research it supports, the Hub hopes to create a German-focused interface between the ̽��ֱ�� and governmental bodies, both in the UK and in Germany, and be a nexus for the Anglo-German relationship.

“Germany has shaped the world in which we live and influenced the ways in which we think about, experience and seek to change it,” adds Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, and patron of the Hub. “ ̽��ֱ��gains in knowledge that [the Hub] will bring can only enrich and strengthen the ties that bind Germany and the world.”

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Opinion: Hard Evidence: Muslim women and discrimination in Britain

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 10:31:11 +0000

̽��ֱ��controversy surrounding a now-infamous “I confronted a Muslim” tweet – and a subsequent race-hate charge – reminds us that tackling discrimination against British Muslims remains as big a challenge as ever.

For those who missed it, PR-man Matthew P Doyle took to Twitter to announce: “I confronted a Muslim woman in Croydon yesterday. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said ‘Nothing to do with me’. A mealy mouthed reply.”

Police were alerted to the incident when Doyle’s ill-judged comments about the encounter were retweeted by bemused internet users. While charges were eventually dropped, the story is a prime example of the type of discrimination encountered on a daily basis by many British Muslim women and an exception to an otherwise overlooked phenomenon.

Everyday incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination rarely make headline news – but recent research from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic Studies found that discrimination is the daily norm for many British Muslims.

While previous research in this area has often focused on acts of physical violence, none of those interviewed for the Cambridge study had experienced crime of this type. But almost all, whether male or female, felt they had experienced prejudice. As one Muslim man living in the north of England stated: “… there’s an atmosphere, there’s definitely an atmosphere.”

Interviewees shared numerous accounts of being ignored in shops, being stared at on public transport and being targeted by discrimination. While they were seldom criminal in nature, these acts were described as always hurtful – and often leading to dramatically increased fears of criminal victimisation, particularly among older Muslim women.

Muslim voices

One Muslim woman gave an account of discrimination from supermarket staff packing groceries:

When we’re shopping … right away from the person who’s serving you … he or she [is] serving someone who’s white you get a full conversation out of them, but the minute they see you with a hijab, right okay, pack yourself.

Another gave one of many examples of discrimination on public transport:

When I’m in my normal get-up … I can sit in the bus like everyone else and I’m fine, people talking away just getting on with it, you know, you’ll even find someone sitting next to you trying to strike conversation … wear a hijab and it’s almost like … nobody even wants to smile at you … they want to keep at arm’s length from you.

These troubling accounts echo previous victim and discrimination studies undertaken by the centre. Analysis of data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales (previously the British Crime Survey) revealed that levels of personal crime (crimes ranging from verbal abuse to serious attack) and crimes including some form of physical violence are broadly similar for all minority religion groups (with the sad exception of Jewish communities who face higher overall levels of crime).

A forthcoming study of discrimination data from the Ethnic Minority British Election Study 2010 (EMBES), a large-scale survey of ethnic minority communities, tells a different overall story. Data from EMBES suggests that non-white Muslims who experience discrimination are more likely than non-white Christians to suffer it on the street – but perhaps no more likely than Hindu and Sikh communities. (Muslim victims may appear from Figure 3 to suffer more discrimination on the street than Hindus and Sikhs but the differences are not statistically significant and so should not be used to describe larger national patterns.)

However, there are stark differences between female discrimination victims within the EMBES data. Non-white Muslim women appear far more likely to suffer discrimination on the street than their female non-white, non-Muslim counterparts. These differences are large and statistically significant, therefore provide a more reliable estimate of differences throughout the UK. ̽��ֱ��experiences shared by female Muslim interviewees in the recent study offered strong support for the statistical evidence.

Visible difference

One probable explanation for the increased risks faced by British Muslim women is of course the higher visibility of those who choose to wear a headscarf or face veil (as many of the interviewees do). Several interviewees drew direct links between daily incidents of discrimination and the abundance of negative news stories concerning Muslims and Islam.

Hostile coverage of Muslims in Britain. Critical Currents in Islam, CC BY

Others (the lucky few perhaps) were careful to stress a growing resilience to everyday forms of discrimination and an increased reliance on their religion, culture and community as a means of coping. This finding of resilience is perhaps the study’s most original contribution to academic research in this field.

Regardless of how we might as a society analyse, explain and cope with everyday forms of discrimination (against any individual or group), what the study makes clear is that as the furore around Doyle’s crass foray on to Twitter begins to fade, encounters of this sort are happening all over Britain and continue to be for many British Muslims the unreported reality of daily life.

Julian Hargreaves, Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Julian Hargreaves (Centre of Islamic Studies) discusses the forms of discrimination faced by Muslim women in Britain.

Beth Rankin

Woman praying

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

“You need to ignore it, babe”: how mothers prepare young children for the reality of racism

amb206 — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 11:00:00 +0000

An in-depth study of mothers and young children living in multicultural areas of London found that many of the women interviewed had prepared children for coping with a social environment that might be likely to include elements of racism. Many parents advised their children to ignore racist barbs which were made by people who were “rude and ignorant”.

While at the Centre for Family Research, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Dr Humera Iqbal carried out a small-scale but intensive study of 36 British-born mothers – 12 British Indian, 12 British Pakistani and 12 White British – living in multicultural areas of the capital.This qualitative research into families from the UK’s three largest ethnic groups was part of a larger project on ethnicity and family life.

̽��ֱ��study, ‘Multicultural parenting: Preparation for bias socialisation in British South Asian and White families in the UK’, is published in the January 2015 issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations.

̽��ֱ��36 families studied in depth were all non-immigrant British citizens. ̽��ֱ��mothers interviewed were at least the second generation to live in the UK. All had one child or more aged between five and seven years old. ̽��ֱ��children, who came from a range of socioeconomic settings, attended state primary schools in areas of London with high proportions of each of the groups being studied.

Iqbal found that, overall, parents described positive experiences of diversity. However, mothers and children from all three groups also reported experiencing discrimination – sometimes on a daily basis. Mothers of children as young as five found themselves addressing topics related to racism, either as a result of prejudice or in anticipation of it, to help their youngsters cope with the discrimination they were likely to face.

A marked difference emerged in the use of these ‘preparation for bias’ strategies across the three groups studied with 75% of British Pakistani families reporting their use, compared with 50% of White British families and just 16% of British Indian families.

“It’s important to stress that my research looks at a small number of families. However, it is clear that increased diversity in the UK has encouraged families to adapt their parenting strategies.This is particularly the case for groups who are experiencing wider societal pressures. British Pakistani Muslims, for example, increasingly face Islamophobia,” said Iqbal.

“International political events, such as the rise of the Islamic state and local negative attitudes towards immigration and the corresponding rise of UKIP in Britain, have all heightened the current mistrust towards Muslims - a highly diverse and complex set of groups often described as a single entity which is seen to include British Pakistanis.”

̽��ֱ��research is notable for its inclusion of White British families who, as the dominant group, might not be expected to experience discrimination. “It was important to include White mothers and children because few studies have looked at the experiences of majority ethnic groups,” said Iqbal.

“A shift in the demographics of an area can mean that White British families find that, in their particular neighbourhood, they are no longer in the majority. One mother described this as ‘informal segregation’. She felt that many of the White families previously living in the community had chosen to move outwards leaving fewer White families behind and a predominance of families from one or two other ethnicities,” said Iqbal.

“Several of the White families interviewed reported feeling different and more vulnerable to experiencing both subtle and less subtle forms of discrimination as they now represented a group that was in smaller numbers.”

Previous research into similar issues has concentrated on older children, particularly teenagers. In concentrating on young children, who were just starting school, Iqbal shows that issues related to race and ethnicity begin to impact on children very early in their lives. Her study makes an important contribution to awareness of the potential implications of racism for child health and development.

“Previous research has found that stressful environments and ethnic inequalities are associated with unfavourable development profiles in children,” she said. “For example, a recent big study found that mothers who had experienced racism first-hand were more likely to have children at risk of obesity. Other research showed that mothers’ perception of racism was associated with socio-emotional difficulties in children such as being withdrawn or isolated.”

Iqbal looked at two types of ‘preparation for bias’ strategies: reactive and proactive. Her research showed that, while some parents downplayed race-related incidents and encouraged children to ignore such behaviour, other parents addressed incidents directly and urged their children to make a stand.

A White British mother told her son to ignore news reports and comments related to racism. “I’ll try to explain what’s going on, and, I just kind of say to him that you need to ignore it, babe… Don’t bite back if it happens, because…that’s what they want.”

How parents responded to discrimination depended on a range of factors – including their own experiences of racism. A study by researchers at New York ̽��ֱ�� found that parents who had been victims of discrimination were more likely to prepare their children to cope with similar problems. This concurred with findings from the present study. British Pakistani parents, in particular, anticipated that their child would encounter racial barriers and did their utmost to equip their child with tools for future success by stressing the importance of a good education.

Some mothers used a discussion about racism as an opportunity to promote the importance of equality and to bolster their children’s psychological resources. Also, talking about discrimination following an incident emerged as an important way of protecting the emotional state of the child.

A British Pakistani mother had experienced frequent racism about her niqab (head covering with veil) from a group of teenagers, and these incidents had made her young son increasingly distressed and angry. She worried that as a result he would have negative views of white people and explained that he shouldn’t “discriminate against a whole bunch of people because there’s a few idiots…”

A British White mother said that her child and his friends had been called “white rats” by some children visiting the same block of flats. “My attitude is… you’re no different, you’re a different colour but you are no different to us… I won’t have racism at all…”

However, a number of White parents did look for “people like us” when choosing a school. Some felt that a multicultural school intake was a good thing but should be a “healthy” mix – in other words not too diverse. Two White British mothers reported moving their children to schools with more White pupils as they were worried about their children being marginalised.

Mothers did not always agree with schools about the best way to handle questions relating to race and faith and gave examples of schools either being heavy-handed or lacking in awareness of children’s sensitivities about differences.

A White mother said that her son had asked for the halal dish being served to his Muslim friend in the school canteen.Told he couldn’t have it, because he was “clearly not a Muslim child”, he was upset and asked his mother if he was “only allowed to eat Christian food”. She said that the incident was “making him aware of differences between everyone when really there was no need for it or it could have been dealt with in a more positive way”.

Iqbal’s study gives a vivid, and valuable, snapshot of the topics navigated by many parents living in multicultural areas in talking to young children about issues of profound importance to their development. She emphasises that, while parents spoke of many positive encounters with diversity, discrimination remained an underlying problem in modern Britain. Experiences varied in intensity and severity between groups.

She concludes that parents are often instilling protective and positive messages about race and ethnicity. Researchers and policy-makers, she argues, need to acknowledge the way in which parents adapt to changing environments and, in particular, how interactions within these settings lead to discussions of race and ethnicity with children at an early age.

Humera Iqbal was a member of the Centre for Family Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge until 2014. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Education in London.

Research among mothers with young children living in multicultural London shows that racism is a reality for children as young as five – and that many mothers adopt parenting strategies to help their children deal with it.

It is clear that increased diversity in the UK has encouraged families to adapt their parenting strategies. This is particularly the case for groups who are experiencing wider societal pressures – British Pakistani Muslims, for example.

Humera Iqbal

A child's portrait of multiculturalism in the playground

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes