Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-study-gender-equity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Only 24 executives are females out of the fortune 500 companies. To see why this is the case, Harvard School of Business came out with a 2-year study that tried to look deeper into why there was such an enormous gap between the number of men and women in business (in Harvard and America). The study showed the difficult time women had because they felt like society was judging them for things like being too “ambitious” or too focused on academics.
This reminded me of a book I read called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell that proves, through research, that our past experiences and our exposure to the media (like watching something that is degrading to women) has subconsciously formed our brains to make instant-and usually inaccurate-decisions about an individual; like thinking there is a relationship between a person’s qualifications and their gender.
This is where business ethics comes in. Corporations cannot allow negative experiences to deprive other stakeholders from the best candidate for a position! The world truly expects businesses to have impartial ways of selecting the top candidates for any job description. Let’s be real! It’s 2014! Unfortunately, even at the most elite and educated places we see discrimination. This means corporations have to focus on creating an equal platform for everyone, even if our “instincts” oppose it.