RACISM AND BIASNESS

Race, Ethnicity, Gender Identity Affecting the Working Environment

Race, Ethnicity, Gender Identity Affecting the Working Environment

Introduction

Racism represents an organized system of privilege and bias that systematically disadvantages a group of people perceived to belong to a specific race. When social categories are racialized, based most typically on their physical appearance, ethnicity, or religion, people attribute the observed characteristics of the group to genetically heritable qualities. There are three defining elements of racism. First, it reflects a culturally-shared belief that groups have distinguishing race-based characteristics that are common to their members. Second, the perceived inherent racial characteristics of another group make it inferior to one's own group. Third, racism involves not only negative attitudes and beliefs but also the social power that enables these to translate into disparate outcomes that disadvantage other groups or offer unique advantages to one's own at the expense of others.

Most gender scholars today agree that gender is a socially constructed category of identity. This means that gender is something that is created by discourse, roles, and norms that are agreed upon by a given society. In lay conversation, gender is often conflated with the term sex, which is said to be biological and based on a person's chromosomal makeup, DNA, and genitalia. The most common categories of sex are male, female, and intersex (individuals), but there are myriad other “sexes” out there, existing in liminal spaces and identity formations. Gender, which is not necessarily correlated to biological sex, is judged on a continuum of how a person identifies himself or herself on a spectrum of masculine-androgynous-feminine. Different schools of thought have produced different ways to think about gender and identity. This entry discusses several of these views.

Gender identity refers to gendered self-perception and comprises several components, including our sense of masculinity or femininity, self-perception of our activities, traits, interests, abilities and behavior. By the age of eight to nine years, children describe themselves as possessing gender-typed personality traits, with self-perceptions of instrumental traits and expressive traits becoming increasingly gender-typed until early adolescence. Cognitive theories of Gender development emphasize gender identity as being a key motivator for gender-typed behavior. By approximately two and a half years old, children identify correctly the sex of others and can identify their own sex. This knowledge is assumed to influence children's construction of gender schema. The different roles and identities of men and women have become so deeply embedded within society that these are conventionally naturalized. Women, for instance, are seen as being good carers by dint of their roles as mothers. This characteristic is extended to become part of the constructed gender identity for women. Thus, this has been naturalized within the workforce so that 'women's jobs' have traditionally grouped around caring professions such as nurses and teachers. Conversely, women have been regarded as being unsuited to dangerous jobs and those involving violence, so that, for example, there is debate in most countries, if not actual bans, on women serving on the front line of ...