Utterly insensitive and grossly unprofessional. That is what I’d call someone who does not respect diversity at work-place. While there are many forms to this problem, the one that I’d like to post about is the one in which male colleagues take to crude, unpleasant, biased discussions about women, well before their women counterparts. Consider the man who chooses to discuss seriously the ‘injustice’ of the 3 month long maternity leave, referring to it as ‘they simply sit at home and get paid for nothing’. Believe it or not, some have the cheek to discuss this before a minor number of women colleagues at a lunch table or even during the non-work discussion at team meetings.
Is he doing this well-aware of how just the concept of maternity leave is, in terms of benefits given to someone with a health risk and as a duty towards society? Does he well-intentionally, mean to discuss this as a joke which will make every woman who is present around the table uncomfortable, regardless of whether she can voice out her discomfort or not? Or is he so unthinking, so careless, so casual, so immature, so uneducated that he does not realise the importance of maternity leave? Or, he probably thinks, ‘Come on man, a joke is a joke, she is supposed to take things in the right spirit!’!
That is just one instance, there are numerous little things, jokes, conversations, casual statements, which men unthinkingly make at work-place, completely disregarding how they might discomfort the women around. There can be something as nonchalant as a manager asking the male employees who work under him, to join him for a smoke outside. Am not sure his women employees will want to take that in the right spirit, after all, they do want to bond with the manager too! Why should your gender, or a smoking status, be the reason for your manager to know what kind of tasks you prefer, or what problems you’re facing interacting with others, or to know you better? Imagine the lady manager discussing the current project status and such-like with her employee in the ladies rest-room. Would you, as another in her team, like that?
Few of your smoking team-mates might do the consoling with ‘Oh, come on, we don’t really discuss work, we mostly gossip about foreign bosses’. That gets you all the more envious, you so want to know the inside story too. Why won’t the manager share it with you, simply because you donot smoke!? It kills the team spirit, do you realise? This is probably not something that can be voiced even, what do we do? Coo to the boss, ‘Please do call me when you go down to smoke, I want to come too!’!!?
Then this recent talk about the 8pm curfew for women. There were bunches of male colleagues discussing how men must work day and night while women are the ones who can enjoy the perks of the company and the state. They held up the joke Cyrus Broacha cracked, how it might be a better idea to draw a 8pm curfew for the men, instead of the women! Am not saying the law was right, it was rubbish. But discussing it in the vein of how it is unfair to men, instead of something along the lines of how this will undoubtedly rip apart all efforts towards an equality at the work-place, might have been much less unpleasant.
Some things are off course a joke, all of us love jokes, don’t we? But not when it gets unpleasant, hurts, or somehow seems to make a derogatory statement about ourselves. Tell me if this sounds like a nice joke, a colleague, after the news piece of Shanti Sounderajan who was stripped of her medal at the Asian games upon a failed gender test, goes ‘Somehow I feel, these south indian women are not very feminine and donot even look like female.’. It would get my blood boiling, even though I may not be south indian women. It is a grotesque statement. You are probably wondering if there are men like this at work places today. Oh yes, there are! Lots of them abound, just hear them speak!
There are diversity workshops held by the Human Resources departments of most companies these days. They attempt to motivate a healthy work environment, making people aware that there might be jokes which not everyone would enjoy, that there might be people with different points of view, different lifestyles, different people! Unfortunately, most such indelicate people look at workshops like this as a waste of time, or at best a good way to spend time in office and yet not have to put in work! What is sad is, this is not something that can be very strictly enforced, or checked for violation. This is something that people feel and not always voice, the discomfort of the minority.
There is probably a little exercise all of us can take. A very small thing to ensure that we are not on the wrong. Ask yourself the following, have your jokes ever caused someone to look away or not laugh along? Would your statements, though seemingly nonchalant, while with friends at work, cause anyone to not hang around with you? Does your treatment of team-mates bear any shades of a partiality? Lastly, do you really believe in the equality of men and women at work? If not, its about time you changed your beliefs, for your own good!
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i agree with a lot of the stuff said up there. however i think there is a line to be drawn for political correctness. we live in a world that has gone completely overboard with being PC.