Week 8: Workplace

This week had me thinking a lot about discrimination in the workplace and how it happens all the time, but not only to women.  Yes, it is easy to point out all the times that women are not treated as fairly as men, but if you dig a little deeper you can also see some signs of men being treated unfairly in the workplace as well.  Immediately my brother came to mind.  TJ is two years older than me and is in college to get a degree in Elementary Physical Education.  In high school and in the summers during college, I have been a nanny for two little children.  I got the job through a website called care.com, where people post nannying and babysitting jobs.  I remember telling TJ that he should make an account on care.com, because he is great with kids and that would be a great job for him, it would even look good on his resume because of the career he wants to go into.  At that point, he laughed at me and said that families will not hire a boy nanny.  I was confused, because if anything he is the one who is better with kids than I am.  Also, his entire college education revolves around learning how to work with children, whereas my major doesn’t have much to do with children at all.  TJ then told me that it was because there is too many stereotypes around males being inappropriate with children.  I was shocked, so I decided to look into it a little more.  Right then I started noticing a couple of things in all of the advertisements.  What I noticed was in the descriptions on a lot of the advertisements it said looking for a female college aged student, not a male student.  That is just one of the many times in which males are discriminated in the workplace, it is not just females.  We often look past these little discriminations because we think that women’s being treated unfairly is the bigger issue, but that is not always the case.