Former President's Views

Pressing his pay-equity crusade, President Barack Obama signed an executive order Tuesday making it easier for employees of federal contractors to get information about wages and find out how much their colleagues are making. He also directed the Labor Department to issue rules requiring federal contractors to provide aggregate compensation data by race and gender. The actions aim to reduce gender gaps in compensation that continue to favor men and were part of a concerted election-year effort with congressional Democrats to draw attention to women's pay. In his East Room remarks, Obama sharply criticized Republicans, saying they are obstacles to workplace fairness. The president's executive order and directive to the Labor Department dovetailed with the start of Senate debate on broader legislation that would make it easier for workers to sue companies for paying women less because of their gender. White the ctions affect only federal contractors, those directives can have a wide and direct impact. Federal contracting covers nearly one-quarter of the U.S. workforce and includes companies ranging from Boeing to small parts suppliers and service providers. Such actions also can be largely symbolic, designed to spur action in the broader economy. The Senate legislation, like Obama's narrower executive order, would forbid companies from punishing workers who share salary information and would allow punitive and compensatory damages in lawsuits.

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Comments

Feeling Outnumbered?

The borderline between discomfort and harassment and how women feeling uncomfortable and anxious or insecure in their workplace is just as prevalent and detrimental to the workplace environment and their level of performance as it would be for them to have been harassed. It is crucial for workplaces to focus on the overall comfort level of their employees even when times may be good, and the employees may not necessarily have been violently or verbally harassed. It’s just as feasible that the employees were still manipulated in some other form to feel weak or vulnerable at their job. “A long time has gone since women entered the workplace; and instead of discussing whether or not women should enter workplace, we must now investigate women's experiences, troubles and problems. Talking about sexual harassment and feeling of insecurity goes back to more than four decades ago, but the evidence show that little work has been down on sexual harassment and feeling of insecuri

Feeling Alone?

“Since the 1980s, scholars and managers have devoted considerable attention to explicit forms of mistreatment, such as sexual harassment and interpersonal violence (e.g., Gutek 1985; for a review, see Berdahl and Raver 2011). Work in U.S. settings shows that over half of women are subjected to behavioral forms of mistreatment (Ilies, Hauserman, Schwochau, and Stibal 2003), and most have observed some form of harassment in the workplace (Hitlan, Schneider, and Walsh 2006). More recently, theoretical and empirical attention has focused on subtle forms of interpersonal mistreatment, including incivility, deviant behaviors, and microaggressions, to name a few (for reviews, see Robinson, Wang, and Kiewitz 2014; Sue 2010).” (Cunningham 1) The research in this level was conducted in different organizations under different levels of attention, the micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. Any workplace or organization has these levels of hierarchy, the research, however, highlights

Not Speaking Out?

The reasons why sexual harassment cases are shrugged off by the victims or unreported may have something to do with the level of degradation the victims feel. This might sound silly, but if the woman or victim feels that they can handle the discomfort on their own, and that their health won't be affected, they don't see a reason to report. Considering the majority (85%) of women who have experienced sexual harassment claim their experiences were mostly of a verbal nature, they feel less obliged to report it, because it is not directly damaging their health, or so they believe. However, numerous studies show the effects of a women's mental health after being harassed and the effects these incidents have on her job performance thereafter, as she feels she is no longer in a safe environment. Another factor that may contribute to the women not reporting is due to the fact that in the majority of these cases the usual perpetrators are direct superiors, if not their im

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