Traditional barriers are still stumbling blocks militating against women’s progress in business. This has caused women to lag behind their male counterparts.
In a conversation during the weekly Identities Umthlobo Zvatiri Show in Harare with Nyari Mashayamombe, Wild Geese General Manager, Amy Baumhoff, noted that women’s challenges did not only emanate from men but from other women who had internalized the patriarchy system.
She said women were hardly empowered by other women and it was common for women to look down on other women. Akbari[1975] said, “Men may not like each other, but they will promote each other. A woman will write off another woman because she doesn’t like her shoes.’’ One may pose a question, who then is going to elevate women when they feel jealous among themselves?
Apart from pulling each other apart, women encounter gender bias in businesses and at workplaces. Men have dominated the workplace thereby making it an obstacle for women to be in power.
Gender bias has made it difficult for career-oriented women by creating barriers such as stereotyping, power imbalance and unequal wages. Hymowits and Schellhardt[1986], described the challenges as invisible barriers, the glass ceiling that prevents women from advancing to certain levels in various institutions.
Furthermore, less mobility has become another challenge for women. Women’s mobility has been highly held back due to gender bias. In Zimbabwe, it is still difficult for many women to pursue employment outside the home or far from home. They have to work near their homes and avoid work that requires lots of travel due to social norms that have assigned such types of work to be for men. This has resulted in women giving up leadership positions for fear of travelling far from home.
Baumhoff notes that the double burden of balancing career and the primary caregivers’ responsibilities presents a significant challenge to women in leadership positions. This proves to be difficult for women since they almost take the lion’s share of domestic responsibilities. The situation is quite different to that of men who only focus on their careers since they are exempted from most domestic responsibilities that may hinder their focus on careers.
In addition whenever women are at work they are assigned soft roles unlike their male counterparts. Taking for instance in the news rooms, women are assigned to cover soft news while men are given more “difficult” tasks such as covering hard news, wars, economics and politics among others. This sidelining of women in the news rooms subsequently hinder their career growth.
These traditional challenges need to be confronted head-on if women are to realize their potential.
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