The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report states every year that no country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap. While gender inequality continues to be a strong feature of the workplace, my research which has just been published in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Science has shown that men and women find it increasingly difficult to talk about gender inequality. The research is based on a detailed qualitative analysis how people talked about and addressed gender inequality.
Employees from both companies claimed their organizations were gender neutral and that employees were evaluated based on merit. With further questioning, men and women interviewed could describe past situations where gender bias occurred against women, but limited it to happening 10 to 20 years ago, from contacts outside their own organizations (i.e. customer contacts), or to an isolated male colleague from another generation. Instead of denying gender discrimination, workers acknowledge it can happen but construct it as singular events that happened in the past, placing the onus on women to overcome such obstacles.
I have called this phenomenon ‘gender fatigue’ where individuals tire of acting upon gender discrimination in spite of the fact that incidents of gender bias either occurred at one time within their organization or could occur again. The problem with gender fatigue is that it prohibits productive discussion regarding inequalities between men and women, making gender bias difficult to address. If we believe that we work in gender neutral workplaces, seeing and acting upon gender inequality is becoming very difficult.
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