Male vs. female in the workplace

For personal reasons, this is going to be a rushed post: apologies in advance. I also want to make clear that this is a generalisation, based on my experience across several decades, and the experience of others I have talked to, or whose accounts I have read, combined with social / political / spiritual activist practice and knowledge, although this does not fit into current practice around diversity and inclusion.

To begin with, this concept is a simplification (especially as it uses a bi-polar model of gender, and that is wrong - but, then, it is hard enough to get some people in workplaces to accept a 2nd gender in the workplace ☺ ), but it is possible to present the characteristics (or proportion of a gender with certain characteristics) using what is typically termed "a bell curve".

If we look at the above diagram (and apologies for the cropping), and say it is showing height, you could say some women are shorter than average (shown on the right - I've reversed the pattern of showing female on the left because that positioning is part of the building of discrimination against women in patriarchal societies, using a historically common association of left and evil [which also affects left-handed people]), most are around average (under the peak of the curve, that is), some are as tall as men (some are actually much taller than most men), some men are shorter than some women, and so on.

If we were to call it something that is stereotypically (and thus it is a misleading and quite possibly wrong simplification, in many cases) ascribed to men, such as aggression, you would see there is some overlap between the two genders, and a minority have an excess of aggression.

This is affected by things like social conditioning. This curve a few decades ago could have looked more like the following:

Note particularly the areas of unfulfilled lives (for both genders) and severe personal problems. Such still exist for many reasons - one of which is that we continue to condition (or socially engineer) people into bipolar gender stereotypes.

If we move to the modern workplace, which has changed (yes, for the better) in recent decades, and will continue to change, we could portray the current situation as being as follows:

That simplified diagram helps illustrate that workplaces have moved towards a more balanced position, but:

• the fact that some women have coped in a male-dominated workplace is sometimes incorrectly used (including by some of those women) to resist change; 
• some of the behaviours shown or expected in workplaces (such as a belief in competition at all costs, or resistance to changing language to be inclusive or, at the very least, gender neutral) are characteristic of male gender stereotypes that are out towards the edge of that bell curve of stereotypes.

All of the above helps to illustrate, in my opinion, the fact that we need to continue addressing gender bias, as well as discrimination, in the workplace. Whether the resisters (in "both" genders) like it or not, the predominant gender expressions (in terms of stereotypes) in any workplace will change as a result of human beings throughout most of the organisation change in order to properly, sustainably, address discrimination.

This, however, does not seem to fit into modern diversity and inclusion practice - at the moment, at least. (Here's hoping for a change there, as well ☺ )

As a final point, this also applies equally to female dominated workplaces - representatives of which I have heard within the last few years using exactly the same arguments and words as men did two or three decades ago.Sigh.