Workplace Bias (I'm mostly talking about gendered bias)

Many professions are gendered, typically by how they are viewed and by educational pressures to follow a path to a profession of your gender rather than by law (at least in the United States of America in 2013.) In the hospital, people still call to men as doctors and women as nurses, even in hospitals where doctors and nurses have different uniforms and people can visibly tell that the woman is, in fact, a doctor if only they look. Engineers are assumed to be men. Primary and secondary school teachers are assumed to be women. College professors are often presumed to be men, especially in the sciences. Domestic workers almost always women (Lee and Shaw 393,) perhaps because such work is considered “women’s work” (Lee and Shaw 391,) is lower paid, and is often not really seen as work.  Many of the jobs worked primarily by women, such as maids (a gendered term!) childcare workers, and home care aids (US. Dept of Labor qtd. In Lee and Shaw) are considered pink collar, whereas manual and production jobs done primarily by men are considered blue collar (Lee and Shaw 403.) When women move into predominantly male, they have historically received lower wages (Hesse-Biber and Carter 418) and continue to do so, including at executive levels (Burk 437.) The divisions that we see, such as a lack of women, people of color, and disabled people at higher levels and a preponderance of marginalized people at lower levels are reinforced continuously, with it well known that managers hire others who are like them (Burk 436.) While it is possible for such biases to be changed over time and hopefully overcome, it takes an impressive amount of work, with disincentives for marginalized members of elite groups who attempt to bring fellow marginalized people up to their level (Burk 437.) The issue of loyalty to the source of power overcoming loyalty to other identities also contributes to the difficulty of overcoming such barriers (Burk 438,) with one recently prominent example being Goodwill paying disabled workers less than minimum wage (as low as 22 cents per hour in at least one case) despite their CEO being blind himself (Lewis.)

Burk, Martha. "Six Ways the Male Corporate Elite Keeps Women Out." 2005. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011. 436-438. Print.
Hesse-Biber, Sharlene and Gregg Lee. "A Brief History of Working Women." 1999. Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. By Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011. 417-429. Print.
Lewis, Anil. "The Sin of Omission: A Rebuttal of Goodwill's Policy Statement on Subminimum Wage Payments to Workers with Disabilities." NFB.org. National Federation of the Blind, 21 June 2013. Web. 05 July 2013. [This article on the National Federation of the Blind website details some of the issues with paying disabled workers subminimum wage, explains how we know the “but they can’t afford to pay disabled workers minimum wage” and “it’s training!” arguments for subminimum wage are baloney, and mentions the fact that the CEO of Goodwill, one of the major offenders, is himself blind. It’s also on the first page of Google results about Goodwill, subminimum wage, and the CEO being blind, which is how I found it- I knew about the issue and needed a citation.]
Shaw, Susan M., and Janet Lee. "Women’s Work Inside and Outside the Home" Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011. 392-413. Print.