Gender Discrimination At Work

Sudanese Women and Gender Discrimination at Work

“Leadership is the act of serving others and has no gender preference”. (Farshad Asl, N.D.) Gender inequality has become a major problem in our day and age especially in third world countries. Women are not given the same opportunities as men yet; expectations of them are very high. Sudanese women in specific face a lot of discrimination in many different aspects of their lives. Mertz states that many of Sudan’s female population is uneducated and are not even given the chance to attend schools and colleges if the family’s financial situation does not allow it. On the other hand, the case is exactly the opposite if a male family member is involved. This is mainly due to the country’s traditions

This is usally because fathers do not want their daughters to go to school. They believe that the female’s place is at home until she is old enough to move to her husband’s house and she is not expected to work and mix with the outside world under any circumstance. As Calderbank states, due to the culture of Sudan, the son gets education because women have certain roles according to them to help support the family such as early marriage (Calderbank, 2013). They believe that a woman should always stay in her home raising her children and taking care of the needs of her family rather than being able to practice her rights freely and working to help her husband or father provide for the family. In the rare instance where the woman does eventually start working she faces discrimination at her place of employment as well. Education levels and the cultural perspective of women in Sudan are contributing factors to the discrimination that women face at work. Surely not all women deserve to be promoted but some very hard working ones are oppressed due to those factors. No one is likely to hirea person for a job if they lack an education whether they were a male or a female. However, due to the fact that most women are not educated to begin with it makes finding a job for them much more difficult. If a woman does get a job then she is not likely to hold a high managerial

When a woman is not allowed to go out and follow her dreams she would feel like a prisoner in her own life. This type of discrimination is bound to have a psychological effect on the women of Sudan as even the hard working ones would end up believing that what they are trying to achieve is not attainable and are likely to give up on it without trying hard enough because they can see that they will not be able to take this dream anywhere. This is nicely explained by Malik in a research done by her where she calls this problem the glass-ceiling. The glass ceiling is a metaphor for a glass barrier that blocks the path of success for women and is defined as “The invisible barrier that one, read women, can see through but not easily get through.” (Malik, 2012, p.70) Because of this glass-ceiling women in Sudan (amongst other places in the world) are giving up. The research found that women experience gender inequality at work and that their chances of climbing up positions are very slim. Additionally, Sudanese women have culturally been looked at as mothers/wives, with no potential to have a professional job which might be a reason for the gender disparity they experience at work. The fact that women are being treated as an inferior gender is ridiculous and needs to be stopped, as legally women are to be equal to men. To be able to achieve such