In all kinds of workplaces, many females experience the misconduct directed toward them by their employers in the workplace. The Mesriani Law Group in Los Angeles, California says there are six basic kinds of employer misconduct: failure to follow wage and hour laws, discrimination of any kind, breach of contract, willful and serious misconduct, sexual harassment, and retaliation. Failure to comply with any of those examples, any employee may hold their liable in front of a court. The fourteenth amendment, prohibits states from contravening an individual's rights to equal protection. In the context of employment, the right to equal protection limits the state and employers to discriminate current employees, former employees, or people applying for jobs because of their race, gender, religion, sexuality, or social status. The Equal Pay Act, which was amended to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1963, forbids employers from paying different wages based on the employee’s sex. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that it is “unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex.” Sexual harassment can include unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal (and even physical) harassment of any sexual nature. The 1960s and 1970s were decades filled with multiple examples of wage gaps based on gender and harassment of any kind, mainly toward women in workplaces that had a majority of male employees. Many women, especially ones who are part of disenfranchised minorities, tend to be the main targets of employer misconduct in the work field.
The University of California, Berkeley in 1964 was the epicenter for a new radical movement called The Free Speech Movement. The students at UC Berkeley were inspired by the civil rights movement happening around the country. One day, graduate student Jack Weinberg set up shop on campus and shared information about politics in response to the university’s ban on on-campus political events. Weinberg was arrested but a group of 3,000 students or more protested his arrest by surrounding the police car and immobilizing it for 36 hours. The students demanded that their rights to free speech not be suppressed which then provoked a revolutionary campaign of activism on a national scale. The fight to gain free speech was ignited and soon made its way to southern states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. State governments in states like those listed, fought to penalize activists for their effort to change. Prominent civil rights activists, like Martin Luther King Jr., were criticized and accused of trying to start a war between races because of their radical ideals. When 1970 rolled around, the courts ruled in favor of the civil rights activists saying that the government could not ban citizens from speaking out about social injustices. Jackson, Mississippi was a battlefield for the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Segregation in the community was prominent along with hate speech among whites versus blacks. Verbal misconduct quickly became a regular occurrence and played a critical role in the relationship between African Americans and White people at this time. White employers would use slurs like those listed above as a technique to “control” the African American peoples they employed. The right to free speech is granted to us and protected by the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. It allows people who are U.S. citizens to speak their minds and feel safe while doing so. On the other hand, hate speech is protected under the First Amendment unless someone acts on the words they are saying. The University of California Berkeley Center for Educational Justice And Community Engagement say that hate speech includes but is not limited to written and verbal communication between people. Within the boundaries of employer misconduct, sexual harassment is one of the most common to occur. Sexual harassment can be divided up in three different ways including verbal harassment, physical harassment, and visual harassment. Females working at Newsweek understood these actions committed against them were illegal and had to be stopped but their complaints soon become suppressed by threats of being fired or a possibility of a raise in wage. Since women are considered a minority, most are afraid to speak out about social injustices happening against them, especially in the workplace in fear of being let go or fired. After the past 2016 election cycle, there was a rise in cases of employer misconduct happening predominantly with domestic workers. Ai-Jen Poo, who is the Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, says she has heard numerous stories of domestic workers who have been harassed on the street at their workplace, and on public transportation, being asked for their passport. From the 1960s to the 1970s and even to 2017, employer misconduct has run rampant in the workplace making females feel unsafe when they are just earning a living to help themselves and others.
The term “meninism” was coined mid 2000s as a way to describe males who disagreed with the traditional “feminist” and oppose the fight for social, political, and economical equality of the sexes. Men who identify as a meninist believed that women should stay in the home and that their only purpose was to be a wife and have children, which is opposite of the feminist agenda. People started encouraging females to stay at home once they became married and/or had children which created the stigma of females being unable to perform work well. The job pool for females became slimmer and slimmer by the months and soon they were lowering their standards and worked any job they could find because of the adamant gender discrimination happening in the work force. African American girls were cornered into being a maid usually because it was “passed down” to them like an heirloom of sorts. Most of them did not choose to be part of the domestic help and chose that route because of the very limited jobs that were offered to them. This culture of gender specific jobs carried through decades and well into the 1970s where Newsweek Magazine became notorious for their treatment of females in positions under them. When women went into Newsweek looking for a job, any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for the job was told, “If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else—women don’t write at Newsweek”. The lawsuit in 1970 stemmed from this environment of ‘women are lesser than men’ and encouraged sexism in the workplace and out of it. Women have been arbitrarily targeted due to their gender wherever they may be—in politics, homelife, and the workplace. Before the 2016 Oscars aired, the hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite” was trending worldwide because of the lack of diversity portrayed in the selections for the awards. In 2017, the Oscars were heavily criticized for their lack of another minority—women. At a glance into the stats of the award show, of the nine films nominated for Best Picture on Sunday’s Oscars, only two—Arrival and Hidden Figures—are about women, and that lack of opportunities to see women’s stories told on screen matters. Women need to see the representation of their gender to be proud in what their sisters have done and take pride in who they are. If they do not see themselves in positions they aspire to be in, then they will fall back down the social totem pole and have to restart an already elongated fight for equality. Seeing other females rise to the top in unique workplaces does inspired other females to yearn to be better than they were the day before in their personal workspaces.
Focusing on women who have jobs in the media will give insight into a workplace that vehemently discriminates by gender. Most of the women employed at Newsweek in 1970 had an education that ranked higher than most of the men who were simultaneously employed but they were still unable to write for the magazine. Jobs that are in media do not portray themselves as having equal opportunities for all genders because they do not. Dan Solomon reports that “…while there are plenty of women appearing in movies, the problem of representation exists on-screen as well as off”. Directors and producers who identify as female are becoming scarce because the movie industry wants more male oriented perspectives and makes the job search harder and harder. Looking at it from a statistical point of view in evening broadcast news, women are on-camera 32 percent of the time; in print news, women report 37 percent of the stories; on the internet, women write 42 percent of the news; and on the wires, women garner only 38 percent of the bylines. The blatant discrimination in the workplace against females of all religions, sexulaities, and races needs to stop because it is hurting our economy and society synonymously.
TIME Magazine recently released a list titled “The 25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century” and contains many influential ladies including people like Hillary Clinton, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, and many more. The females on the list are praised for the roles they have played in the history of women such as being women's rights activists, politicians, T.V. personalities, and humanitarians. So many of the important accomplishments completed by women have been swept under the rug and forgotten about in history classes because they are females. Barbara C. Jordan made history when she won the 1966 senate election in Houston, Texas. Jordan became the first African American female in Congress who was born in Texas. During Richard Nixon’s impeachment process in 1974, Jordan gave a speech lasting 15 minutes and ultimately led to Nixon’s infamous resignation. In her speech, she mentioned that the U.S. Constitution did not include the African American community in its first 3 words: “We, the people.” On a raging path of making waves as an African American female she broke down the barrier and became the first black woman to deliver the most important speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1967. The discrimination against females was obvious but it was soon joined by the race factor and racial gender discrimination became a hard wall to break through but the leading ladies in history quickly broke the glass ceiling.
When the United States was founded, women did not share the same equal rights as men did. The fight for gender equality was introduced around 1850 and has continued to be fought to present day. Though large strides for females in society have been made, there is still some paths that need to be traveled and beaten. The 1960s were a time of different social occurrences but fast forward to present day, a wage gap between genders existed and was even larger for women of color. The wage gap created a unique grouping of jobs for females. Due to being able to legally pay females less and less, companies offered their worst positions knowing women would take them. Girls looking for a job found themselves cornered into jobs filled by other females. After being slapped with a lawsuit for gender discrimination from 46 females employed at Newsweek, the magazine laid the blame on a tradition but the 46 females were determined to change that ‘tradition’ for future female employees. Many women have joined the fight to make drastic changes for other women, too. Speaking on the ranking of gender issues within the community, Ursula Mead of InHerSight, said equal pay issues directly affect all women..issues such as flexible hours or maternity benefits are seen as being central to a segment on women. Women’s issues deserve to be the top of the list when speaking about the fight for equality. Problems such as the wage gap, misconduct, and maternity leave are important to having gender equality. Adding race to the mix, the discrimination against anyone—male or female—becomes harder and harder to combat
34 out of 100. That is the number of females who are in TIME Magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People” list. 16 out of 100 is how many of those females on the list of women of color. The percent keeps getting smaller and smaller as filters are added to the people who are on that list. With gender discrimination aside, racial discrimination becomes the next problem to address. At the start of the 1890s, Jim Crow laws began to overtake the social scene and push the racist agenda on culture. The set of laws were in place to systematically segregate African Americans in public places and all over. It took decades to rid society of the Jim Crow laws but the racial discrimination still existed in the 1970s. Though Jim Crow had died out, the racial discrimination still existed but was not as noticeable or normal as it was a few years earlier. The Black Lives Matter movement has taken a spot on the totem poll for social issue movement and BLM has made strides in racial equality. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement know that there are people in our nation, black people, who are systematically being disenfranchised in a number of spheres in our lives. Jim Crow laws and the BLM movement have completely different views but both play a large part in African American history. Racial discrimination will never stop being a thing, same with discrimination in general. Overall discrimination of religion, sexuality, social status and many more characteristics have woven their way into social issues today.
On June 12, 2016, Orlando, FL. became the home for the deadliest mass shooting on U.S. soil. Early that morning, Omar Marteen walked into Pulse Nightclub with an assault rifle and murdered 50 innocent bystanders. That attack made it’s way into history as the largest mass shooting against the LGBT and Latino community. Survivors of the shooting describe the attack as “a life changing event”. This severely unfortunate event goes to prove that discrimination against all ways of life will always exists in different levels. Racial discrimination riddled the town like a catchy disease but so did homophobia, behind closed doors. Mostly anyone not straight and white was a popular target for attacks. The 1970s posed as a time for change but many people still hid in their closets because they lived in fear of being treated poorly. Many movement have shaped the past, present, and future of history. The most popular movement might possibly be the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was the defining moment of a generation. It’s powerful narrative, born from the legacy of slavery and generations of oppression, proclaims that all men, regardless of skin color, are created equal. The Civil Rights movement sort of blazed the trail for movements focused on equality for all.
History has a reputation for its eras of discrimination but focusing on the good, large strides have been made in that fight. We have made it unlawful to discriminate against someone’s race and sexuality, the marriage equality law has been passed, and gender discrimination is close to being obsolete. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election concession speech, she mentions “we have not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will know and hopefully sooner than we may think right now.” Clinton has inspired millions of people in hopes of aspiring to their highest dreams. Culture has gone backward but made very large strides forward, as well.