One of the defining issues of the world today is the inequality of the treatment of women. While this is seen in every walk of life, perhaps it is no clearer than in the workplace, where inequality between genders has been well documented and is well known. Canisius’s own Dr. Rosanne Hartman worked to document just that, and she ended up winning an award for her work: the 2021 Emerald Literati Award for Outstanding Paper.
The paper which she wrote, “Women in the Workforce: The effect of gender on occupational self-efficacy, work engagement and career aspirations,” reflects her findings in a survey sent to peers through social media, and those who took the survey were asked to share it with five of their friends, and so on. This created a significant sample size.
Answers to the survey concluded the following: there is a correlation between occupational self-efficacy (the belief an individual has in their ability to carry out their job successfully) and career aspirations. Additionally, it proved that women and men both have similar levels of occupational self-efficacy. Also, it proved that men and women both have an equal work engagement.
Despite that, the survey also provided evidence that men have significantly higher career aspirations than women do. When provided with all this information, the study shows that women having lower career aspirations come not from laziness or a lack of self-confidence, but from something else.
Dr. Hartman concluded that “occupational self-efficacy for men and women are based around different occupations as well as different roles and tasks.” Women lack self-efficacy in traditionally male occupations, which have — as a result of a sexist past — been the positions of power, of higher career aspirations. Therefore, that is one of the primary reasons for the gap between the levels of male and female career aspirations.
That is the research done by Dr. Hartman that won her such a prestigious and widely known award as the Emerald Literati Award for Outstanding Paper. The paper is called “Women in the Workforce: The effect of gender on occupational self-efficacy, work engagement and career aspirations,” and it is available online for anyone interested. It is a solid piece of work on an important topic that will inevitably be one of the defining issues of the current and future generations.
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