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 what effects one level of harassment or mistreatment of women has on the other levels of the workplace- for instance an individual’s mistreatment and how the individual is personally affected at work (and consequently even affected in their home life) and how this individual’s affected operations now stem out towards a societal issue. In all aspects the research is proving that a safe and respectable environment for these women (and all employees) is more beneficial for the company as a whole, as it does affect the employees operations and their personal lives, which will of course negatively affect their performance.

“Macro-level factors operate at the societal or industry level of analysis. They represent, for example, the norms within a given profession that privilege men over women and cast men and masculinity as the standard through which others are compared (Acker 1990, 2006; Ely and Meyerson 2000; Martin 2003, 2006). In a related way, employee mistreatment—and particularly of women—might be so ingrained within a field that such practices have come to embody taken-for-granted qualities, and as such, become institutionalized in nature (see also Cunningham 2008).” (Cunningham 2)

“Law enforcement in the United States is characterized by activities and skills that are stereotypically masculine…demographically dominated in the ranks and command by men, and stereotyped as a job for which women are not qualified or successful” (this issue). They found that women’s sexual orientation and gender role orientations influenced the mentoring they received in this hyper-masculine environment. Specifically, lesbian and bisexual law enforcement officers who displayed little gendered role orientations received less mentoring than their peers. Heterosexual women who displayed both masculine and feminine orientations were similarly penalized.” (Cunningham 2)

What I would like to show next is how women in the workplace deal with these mistreatments and how these women have gone from completely disregarded or seen as less than among their peers to at the very least recognized by their peers.