GEMA

Gender Equality Management Assessment

CERTIFICATION BENEFITS

Benefits GEMA offers to employees of certificate holders

BENEFITS

Benefits GEMA offers to employees of certificate holders

Research show that companies and organizations that achieve the highest results in gender equality have as much as 15 percent more potential for higher financial returns. Gender equality within a business or organization improves job satisfaction. As many as 96 percent of women reporting gender equality at work also report the highest level of job satisfaction. Believing that leadership supports gender equality also contributes to greater job satisfaction.

Non-bias employment

Situation testing, in which identical CVs were submitted to employers but signed by persons of different sex, showed that employers (even if inadvertently) still favour men. The study at Yale University involved 127 scientists and scholars who received applications for evaluating a candidate for the position of the Head of Laboratory in various disciplines. Even though the assessors received identical CVs, men were more often hired for the leadership position, and even a higher starting pay was offered to John than Jennifer. On average, a female job applicant was offered an annual salary of $ 26,507, while a male applicant with an identical CV was offered a starting annual salary of $ 30,238, which is a wage gap of 15 percent.

 

With this experiment, study leader Corinne A. Moss-Racusin also showed that gender does not really affect our bias – both (male) assessors and (female) assessors rated the male CV better, despite the fact that the latter was identical to the female. The bias is unintentional and unconscious, is caused by widespread social stereotypes and we are not aware of it. If sometimes we were only worried about job interviews, we now know that the problem begins with the submission of CVs.

 

This is called unconscious bias – it is a phenomenon that builds in our subconscious on the basis of gender stereotypes, the cultivation of socially attributed gender roles, the knowledge and experience of individuals, which can bear undesirable consequences for society and its members in certain contexts. On the basis of gender stereotypes, unconscious bias built on can significantly contribute to the employment opportunities of individuals.

Mentorship system

Defined by Kathy Kram (1985), the mentoring system is described as the relationship between an older and more experienced mentor and a younger and less experienced employee with the goal of helping to develop the career of the latter. The mentoring system enables both female and male employees of companies and organizations to learn tacit knowledge, which is crucial for effective action within the organizational structure of a company or an organization. As people in the workplace strive for mentoring relationships that reflect themselves and because of the increased presence of men in leadership positions, especially women are disadvantaged by access to professionals and high-level executives in their field. Research also shows that the progression of the mentored is faster if the mentor has a high position in the organizational structure. Thus, mentoring relationships should not be left to chance, as they can be of strategic importance in achieving the organization’s goals related to the diversity of the talent pool, retaining talent within the company, and planning for a company succession. Nevertheless, formal mentoring programs also need to be carefully designed and monitored.

Objective promotion

Research has shown that while men repeatedly ask for a promotion or a raise, women tend not to do that as often. Therefore, women’s career path is significantly hampered by non-objective advancement due to less pro-activeness in this field (which is proven to be a consequence of social expectations that women form during socialization). Emilio Castilla and Stephen Bernard, scientists at MIT and Indiana University, conducted a study in 2011 to test the meritocratic rewarding of performance bonuses within businesses and organizations. Participants in the study were presented with a fake ServiceOne company, and in the experiment they were asked to rate employees (a higher bonus was awarded to one or more contributors). On average, men received a bonus that was as much as $ 50 more than the bonus given to female employees with identical merit.

Equal pay for equal work or work of equal value

There is still an 8 percent gender pay gap in Slovenia in favour of men. This is often the result of structural inequalities (and certainly not in the interests of employers or employees), but it can be monitored and successfully remedied by appropriate measures.

Flexible working arrangements

Flexible working arrangements make it possible to reconcile work and private life, which increases the productivity of employees and their motivation to work. Research shows that flexible working arrangements cannot, of course, be introduced and implemented in a vacuum, but must arise within the framework of consensus among employees and management, which may include actions such as flexibility of work location, hours of work and work patterns. Work results are those that stimulate employee motivation, while at the same time flexibility again enhances employee satisfaction in the workplace by allowing more control over personal and business life responsibilities.

Harassment and sexual harassment in the workplace

Globalne raziskave kažejo, da ženske v 60 % izkušajo kakršnekoli oblike nezaželene seksualne pozornosti na delovnem mestu (vključno s seksističnimi komentarji), od tega jih 90 % nikdar ne vloži prijave, 75 % pa se niti ne potoži svojim sodelavkam in sodelavcem. Nadlegovanje in spolno nadlegovanje na delovnem mestu prav tako ni neznanka moškim.

Elimination of gender stereotypes

Gender stereotypes represent generalized characteristics and unjustifiably attributed characteristics of women and men that reflect gender perceptions and social roles. They are formed by generalizing conclusions about the behaviour, abilities, personal characteristics and interests of other persons solely on the basis of gender, although neither all women nor all men fit these attributes. The problem with gender equality, however, is that we begin to apply the built-in stereotypes to more than what they really are: an impulse, a simplified influence that we have built up in our childhood by observing the world around us, based on the current gender balance mentioned above. The stereotype that girls perform poorly in mathematics, for example, leads one to believe that there is an inherent difference between women and men, which is the cause of this discrepancy. But in reality, girls are just as capable of mathematics as boys – except that we live in a culture that, for the most part, allows girls to think about mathematics as difficult, boys are under greater pressure to excel in this field. The so called ‘stereotypical threat’, which has already been researched extensively by scientists, leads to the fact that when we hear that we should not (or do not need to) be good at something, often we really are not. Numerous studies show that female students performed worse on tests when told that men were usually better at this. When test subjects were told that men and women were equally successful in this test, the test results were even.

 

Gender stereotypes are most clearly reflected in women’s and men’s choices – educational choices, career paths, and caring responsibilities within the family. Such choices, of course, affect employment within companies and organizations, as they lead to segregation in the choice of occupations (e.g. fewer women in the natural sciences, fewer men in the caring professions). At the same time, the work process influences the belief that men and women have exclusive character traits (e.g. men are more independent at work while women prefer to work together), which has a negative impact on the assignment of teamwork roles and the organizational structure of the company or organization. Last but not least, gender stereotypes are also applied to the recruitment process and are projected onto the gender of the job applicant, thus creating an entry barrier to certain jobs, as discussed above.

 

The GEMA Certificate introduces processes into the company that affect the understanding of gender stereotypes, our own unconscious biases, and also the recruitment process itself through the implementation of new measures to improve employee satisfaction at work.

Start with the process today!