What's Being a Woman Got to Do With It?

Over the past couple of months I have become increasingly aware of the fact that sex discrimination in the workplace is still very much a problem. For some reason, call it wishful thinking, I thought that with all the anti-discrimination laws that are out there and the spiels that new employees get about sexual harassment and open door policies, that there would be fewer instances of women being discriminated against in the workplace.  I guess I was wrong.

I just recently read about a woman who was fired from her job at Citibank because she was too “curvaceous”. The woman, Debrahlee Lorenzana, says that while working for the bank she was told to wear makeup, not wear high heels because it caused her “shape” to be too distracting to her male co-workers, and was told that she should straighten her hair before coming to work. Lorenzana complained to Citibank HR officials about the unfair treatment, was transferred to another department, and then fired. In another case, a Hooters waitress came out saying that during her annual employee review she was told she had 30 days to lose a significant amount of weight or she would lose her job. Hooters was even so nice as to offer a free gym membership. Both of these cases are just examples of what happens all around the U.S.

In May, Wal-Mart was sued for sex discrimination. The class-action suit is the largest sex discrimination suit in U.S. history. The case began with 6 women in 2001 and by the time it was approved to move forward in April this year there were more than one million women suing the corporation, which could possibly mean billions in damages for the company. The women are saying that they were not paid as much as their male counterparts, denied advancement, and their sexual harassment complaints were ignored. Nothing has been decided yet.

There have been some wins lately against sex discrimination in the workplace, including a large settlement for women working at Novartis Pharmaceuticals who had filed a sex discrimination suit.  There was also the decision that the U.S. Navy would finally start allowing women to serve on submarines. So it definitely seems that more women are speaking up and changes are being made, but there are still concerns that these changes are not enough and that there is still a lot of work to be done. While more women are earning more advanced degrees than men these days, women still make 78 cents to the men’s dollar. Obviously, there is still sex discrimination going on and more work on this issue needs to be done, but hopefully with more women speaking up, things will continue to change for the better.