Workplace gender dilemmas: insights from women's narratives

Abstract

The phenomenon of workplace gender diversity has become a reality today even in India and across the globe (Budhwar, Saini and Bhatnagar, 2005). However, this diversity has triggered challenges both for management and the workforce given existing workplace structures and processes that have traditionally been set within pre existing social structures. Women have to contend with both gender centric social apprehensions in society (Parikh and Garg, 1989)and pre-existing gendered ideologies and practices at work creating ceilings on their interactions at work (Wharton, 2005). In addition, the experiences of exclusion and lack of receptivity at work trigger dilemmas related to their working. This has resulted in increasing concerns about the gender blind nature of employment relations and human resource development systems and processes (Monousava, 1996). Simultaneously there have been attempts both in the world of scholarship and in the world of practice to visualize industrial relations and human resource management at workplaces through the prism of gender sensitization (Dickens, 1998).