Page 200 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

7. GENDER DISCRIMINATION
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little research in the applied work psychology or management literatures
has addressed the plights of women of color or the situations of older, poor,
or rural women. Although there are good reasons to think that gender dif­
ferences in the experience of work may be affected by ethnicity (cf. Mellor,
Barnes-Farrell, & Stanton, 1999), the intersection of ethnicity and gender
is not well understood. Likewise, the dearth of research that examines
how gender affects the experiences of men and women in low-income and
noncareer-oriented jobs leaves significant gaps in our knowledge of gender
discrimination at work.
In many cases, the working poor are single women with children or
women in part-time or multiple part-time employment involving mini­
mum wages. The need to understand this growing segment of workers is
increasingly critical because the welfare to work programs of the 1990s are
now having an impact on the working poor and their children. Further, it
is our contention that the most blatant, serious forms of gender discrim­
ination are likely to occur in part-time jobs occupied largely by women,
where equal pay for full-time equal work is nonexistent, and where most
women hold minimum wage jobs, and nonmanagerial jobs.
We also need to address women's work cycles, careers, and work­
nonwork interfaces. For example, one way that women have attempted to
balance work and family needs is to take time off from work briefly when
starting a family. Although this may not be an option for many women
(for economic reasons), some dual-earner families make great sacrifices to
make this possible. However, there is both sociological and economic evi­
dence that once this brief gap occurs, a woman's income never catches up
to her female peers (Budig & England, 2001; Waldfogel, 1998).
In addition, there is little research with older women on important work
outcomes such as job performance, organizational commitment, or orga­
nizational citizenship. We know little about the preretirement behavior of
older women or the extent to which discrimination occurs in retirement
outcomes. It may be that although some women have employment gaps in
order to adapt to incredibly rigid work structures for family care, women
in general may continue to work longer and more productively than their
male counterparts, with greater physical and mental health.

Methodological Considerations

The methodological limitations of research on gender discrimination mir­
ror the issues that we have raised with respect to our knowledge of gender
discrimination outside the professional and managerial ranks. First, more
research that examines gender discrimination by race, ethnicity, culture,
socioeconomic status, and family structure is needed. Our current dis­
cussion is woefully biased toward samples comparing White males and