Diversity and Inclusion in Corporate HR Addressing the Challenges Faced by Incarcerated Women Reentering the Workforce
Dr. Negus Rudison-Imhotep | Contributor on topics related to memory and memory building
A significant challenge for corporations in addressing diversity and cultural issues is overcoming personal and societal mindsets. Corporate leadership, through their policies and procedures, signal to the rest of the organization their commitment to fairness and ethical programs that address sexism, racism, gender, and cultural equality.
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A gender issue now becoming a recurring policy concern with HR management is women coming from a correctional institute who want to be a part of a major corporation. The mindset of corporate officers and their commitment to the HR program is crucial for having employees who represent their community.
Women Going To Prison In The US
When women go to prison, in most cases, the impact of incarceration has devastating consequences. From the perspective of a Human Services professional, female convicts who are also mothers suffer a double dose of heartache.
Not only is the woman removed from the daily care of the children, but now the children have the loss of the person they depend on the most – their mother. Once the female convict is released from the correctional facility, she must focus on the building blocks of a structured life.
The HR management team must consider the harsh reality of women who have been incarcerated and are now returning to the workforce and the shock of returning to society after leaving the structured environment of prison life.
With the proper HR programs in place at the organizational level, a miraculous transition can occur. Women willing to fight to restore a positive relationship with society and dispel the societal mindset that relegates them to second-class citizenship must continue to work for advancements within the workplace.
With a positive HR mindset, women who make up their minds to reenter society as productive, fibrate employees have a chance to succeed. This is the ongoing struggle of the female who has paid her debt to society – and now is ready to show that one mistake does not determine their ability to grow and become a productive member of society.
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With the help of the HR management team, these women can be exposed to the outstanding resources that are available to help them attain their goals.
The societal barriers to employment of women start with the level of poverty they are born. Women who lack the fundamental qualities needed for a good job, quality education, proficiency in English, and clear life goals will continue to strive for the essentials to achieve their objectives.
“Women enter prison with fewer job skills and opportunities than men and commit more crimes for economic survival. Women’s family caregiving responsibilities may hamper their ability to get job training or higher education that would improve their employment possibilities, increasing the chance that they will return to crime to make ends meet.
Women reenter the community and resume their family caregiving activities with the same low job skills they had before prison, with the added stigma of being an ex-convict, making it even harder to find gainful employment” (Fellet, 2013).
The Need For Support System
Women who do not have a support system in place that will encourage and promote them in the employment process; have a tough time getting the type of job that will sustain them and keep them from looking to criminal activities to survive.
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The lack of education is an imperative ingredient in why women are incarcerated. If the level of education a woman attains is well below that of her more educated peers, then trouble is just around the corner. When proper education is not obtained, the results can be devastating.
McDonald’s requires potential employees to have a high school diploma. Women without a high school diploma often struggle to find sustainable employment. Additionally, some women who end up in jail have dropped out of school before learning the fundamentals of education.
Modern HR management must tackle workplace discrimination, especially as it impacts women under male supervision. Discrimination occurs when employees face unfair or unfavorable treatment based on race, gender, religion, caste, nationality, or other factors.
Women Coming From Dysfunctional Families
Women coming from dysfunctional families have an uphill battle in life. The family support structure can help a woman make a smooth transition from school to a job to help the family member get a good head start in a successful entry into society.
Family structure and the advantage of being around people, who have your best interests at heart, can make the difference between success or failure in obtaining a good job and changing society’s perception of what an ex-convict can achieve when given the proper environment for success.
Increasingly prison officials recognize that there are special needs to be addressed at women’s correctional facilities. “There is a tendency to treat women as though they were from a homogeneous group and to ignore differences between women who are the ‘keepers’ and the ‘kept,’ not the least of which is freedom” (Fellet, 2013). Women were sent to prison, leaving behind family, friends, and in some cases, a job.
The reality of women being incarcerated, the most dramatic impact falls on the children of the woman in prison. “Their children must come to terms with the reality of an absent parent, the stigma of parental imprisonment, and an altered support system that may include grandparents, foster care, or a new adult in the home.
And in those communities where incarceration rates are high, the experience of parental incarceration is now quite commonplace, with untold consequences for foster care systems, social services delivery, community norms, childhood development, and parenting patterns” (Wright, 2014).
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In the United States’ outstanding history of scientific development, women have been marginalized for their contributions. Societal mindsets have fostered challenges facing women in colleges of medicine, showing that women had a hard time being accepted as peers with their male counterparts.
Some colleges would not let women take credit for their medical achievements just because they were women.
Efforts to address the gender imbalance include bias awareness education by qualified instructors as a form of sensitivity classes for male administrators in colleges and businesses across the country.
“U.S. federal policies requiring bias reduction in the research grant process, and promoting women role models and mentors” (Fellet, 2013). Progressive HR programs define how identities are produced in women’s educational experiences and the results suggest that they further the ability of women in dealing with the realities of inequality in their workplaces.
Women Proactively Pursuing Their Educational Development
Women have proactively pursued their educational development by enrolling in college courses that enhance their measurable standards of achievement and academic excellence.
In working with HR management on the impact of policies that affect female employment, sociologists found that many workplace characteristics, economic trends, and personal values converge to influence decisions related to career, family, and other life roles.
Women are increasingly becoming the primary breadwinners in many American households. It is crucial to bring together management and supervisory staff to raise awareness about these workplace realities.
“Much of the existing literature addressing work-family interface has been conducted in the United States and may not generalize to international populations” (Wright, 2014).
Examining personal and societal mindsets in the U.S. highlights the psychological stress women face in the workplace Studies show that for women, the highest odds of psychological distress were found in traditionally gender-unequal workplaces.
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After an intense research process, the results from this study support the convergence hypothesis as gender equality at the workplace does not only relate to better mental health for women.
Recent studies look into the importance of utilizing a multidimensional view of gender equality to understand its association with positive employment outcomes. With the need to provide a safe and constructive work environment for women to accomplish their assigned tasks, corporate executives, through their HR management strategies, must respect women and their abilities.
“Health policies need to consider gender equality at the workplace level as a social determinant of health that is of importance for reducing differences in health outcomes for women and men” (Harryson, 2013). Additional studies have seen a need to explore the job-related, physical outcomes, and psychological stress of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Using a meta-analytic approach, the author examined 49 primary studies, with a total sample size of 89,382, to obtain estimates of the population mean effect size of the association between sexual harassment and job-related outcomes. These included organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and employment records.
Expressing Common Denominators To Stress
While expressing common denominators to stress, the Meta-analytic results confirm that sexual harassment experiences are negatively associated with job-related outcomes, psychological health, and physical health conditions. “In addition, our moderator analyses reveal that the strength of these associations was moderated by the mean age of the samples and the type of measure used in the primary studies.
Conceptual and applied implications of these findings are discussed” (Chan, 2008). To increase the number of women who retain their councilor seats, the author suggests policy changes that enlarge the wages councilors receive and set term limits.
In both cases, more effort needs to be made to increase the viability and attractiveness of the councilor’s role in ways that will lead the broadest range of people possible to consider themselves eligible and also to remain in a situation once elected.
“Examples of possible policy interventions to achieve this include making the councilor role a fully-fledged part-time job, paying councilors an above-average wage whilst offering them and their employer’s special provisions to ensure they can perform their elected duties effectively” (Allen, 2012).
The article looks at Registered nurses who have been the recipients of an alarming increase in workplace violence. In the medical profession, the thought that nurses would be the subject of sexual harassment and violence by men is disturbing.
The Need To Address Workplace Discrimination
Today’s HR management must address workplace discrimination, particularly as it affects women under male supervision. Workplace discrimination occurs when an employee experiences unfair or unfavorable treatment based on race, gender, religion, caste, nationality, or other factors.
Studies show that women in the workplace who report discrimination include those employees who suffer reprisals on account of opposing workplace discrimination or even reporting violations to the authorities.
Unfair treatment based on protected characteristics, rather than an employee’s performance or personality, is considered an infringement of individual rights under Equal Employment Opportunity laws.
“The United States has the following legislation and acts related to gender discrimination at work –
- The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (part of the Fair Labor Standards Act) – prohibits wage discrimination by employers and labor organizations based on sex.
- Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – broadly prohibits discrimination in the workplace, including hiring, firing, workforce reduction, benefits, and sexually harassing conduct.
- Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – covers discrimination based on pregnancy in the workplace.
The article uses as an example, “Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist, and writer opined, Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being, she is said to imitate the male” (Fiedler & Timmer, 2014).
This scholarly paper maintains that in the 21st century, Gender discrimination in the workplace is an important issue affecting many women globally.
For decades the United States Congress has introduced bills to address the unequal pay situation in America. The unfair, unequal pay and compensation among women in the workplace is a largely political issue that has landed on the agenda of some of America’s top leaders. In 2009, a major piece of legislation sparked the discussion on gender discrimination in the workplace.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act
This legislation resulted in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act (2009). This Act addressed discrimination from a historical and contemporary perspective, discrimination in retail, the gender wage gap, and much more.
Bringing about awareness and understanding of the harsh outcomes and realities that these inequities and inequalities bring upon women and their families may sway others to take action against discrimination in the workplace.
“It is within this chain of communication that society can diminish the harsh realities women in the workplace face today and hopefully alleviate the problem for women of the future” (Childs, 2012). Racism has made a devastating impact on the African American community in America.
The 400-year struggle for equality has destroyed individuals, families, and cities and has had an extraordinary impact on our youth. For young minority adults to find a way to combat racism, it is important to understand the psychological collision that racism has had on the young black adults of the United States.
It is important to look back at how racism became a disease in the world in general and the United States of America in particular.
Despite intense and almost desperate efforts to eliminate ethnic intolerance and discrimination, racism appears to be every bit as bad at the beginning of the 21st century as it was in the days of Ishmael and Isaac. Why Race Prejudice, discrimination, and its resulting manifestation – crime among Black Youth.
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Emile Durkheim, a great sociologist, and author has written about the breakdown of societal controls. “One of Emile Durkheim’s arguments was that rapid social change was associated with increases in crime due to the breakdown of social controls.
This idea was one of several used by members of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s in their attempt to pinpoint the environmental factors associated with crime and to determine the relationship among those factors.
However, instead of focusing on rapid change in entire societies, they absorbed rapid change in neighborhoods” (George B. Vold, 2002).
The term ecology in the social setting suggests that society is a web of life in which each part depends on almost every other part for some aspect of its existence. “Human communities, particularly those organized around a free-market economy and a laissez-faire government, could be seen as this biotic state.
The Struggle For Survival
Each struggle for survival in an interrelated, mutually dependent community” (George B. Vold, 2002). You would think that after the horrors of the civil rights movement and the struggle for justice and equality, we would be more respectful of each other.
“Where behaviorists argue that we acquire habits through the association of stimuli with responses, cognitive theorists argue that we acquire factual knowledge through the association of memories, ideas, or expectations.
Behaviorists argue that learning occurs primarily through trial and error, while cognitive theorists describe learning as taking place through insight into problem-solving” (George B. Vold, 2002).
As a result of the compensation review, there was the assumption of the inequality between skilled and unskilled workers and the fact that many of these unskilled workers were being fired and subsequently put on welfare; it is important to examine the relationship between economic openness and welfare policies.
A study was conducted to investigate the conditions with which governments may compensate domestic labor to save jobs for their citizens.
“To explicitly address the issue of instrument choice, we examine the relative salience of social welfare expenditures to industrial subsidies in a panel of 16 OECD countries from 1980 to 1995.
Our results suggest that the relative budgetary salience of social welfare to industrial subsidies is influenced by the interplay between governmental partisan gravity and changes in imports.
Unlike Right governments, left governments tend to favor indirect compensation via industrial subsidies in the wake of negative, zero, or moderate increases in imports” (Cao, 2007). The problem experienced by governments trying to strike a balance between budgetary restrictions and the need for compensation pay systems is their ability to pay the salaries of the workers.
Professor Michael Spence’s research project explored the impact of globalization on jobs and wealth in the international arena.
“As they have become more affluent, developing countries have manufactured products of increasingly greater value. This structural change in the global economy has undermined the long-held notion in the U.S. that higher economic growth produces more jobs domestically.
Job Opportunities Moving Away
As job opportunities have moved away from fast-growing sectors to slower-growing ones, a gap has emerged in which well-educated U.S. workers have fared well economically while those with less education have seen their employment prospects dim and earnings decline” (Spence, The Impact of Globalization on Income and Employment, 2011).
As Emile Durkheim envisioned, “There cannot be a society in which individuals do not differ more or less from the collective type” (George B. Vold, 2002); modern society suffers from those same dilemmas articulated by Durkheim.
For the United States to call itself a democracy, the reality of the American culture is anything but that. “Traditional approaches to the study of prejudice and discrimination with social psychology and sociology have viewed sexism and racism largely within the same broad conceptual framework and essentially as different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
In contrast, we will argue that while these two forms of discrimination are related, they are also qualitatively and dynamically distinct” (Zhang, 2010). Racism in America has been a two-edged sword for the person perpetrating the racism; it has caused that hatred to eat away at their spiritual soul and for those who feel the white heat of racism, the lack of self-esteem and compassion for their fellow man.
Ethical pay systems that address compensation practices and policies of companies in the United States and globally have challenged organizational procedures that put quality on fairness. The global marketplace, in this new environment, finds the reality of corporations competing against corporations.
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In the past, the competitive advantage of a company’s ethical compensation practices and policies was undervalued. Companies competed on products and services, not ethical processes. However, the intensity of global competition and the increased globalization of business are forcing companies to compete on the strength of their ethical compensation policies.
In short, having the greatest product at the lowest price is only valuable if it gets to the intended customer before the competition. Studies show that a company with satisfied employees who feel properly compensated will work harder than a company where the perception of inequality in pay and compensation is prevalent in the workforce.
With the consolidation trends in the financial services business, management has been confronted by the need to develop strategies for globalization and compensation equality for the multinational corporations that dominate the business world today.
In this context, an international debate emerged on how productivity and compensation could synergize to enhance business profits and job satisfaction.
“Most sociological writings on pay allow no role for productivity but, rather, assert the importance of power in the production of labor market outcomes. We examine the effects of three forms of globalization — exporting, foreign ownership, and outsourcing — and include in our institutional analysis features of organizations typically associated with worker power of globalization and theories of pay” (Zhang, 2010).
Professor Heather Zhang and her team developed the Workplace and Employee Survey to look at productivity in the marketplace.
“Using the rich data available in the Workplace and Employee Survey, we find: i) pay tends to be higher in workplaces that export and are foreign-owned; ii) employees in more productive workplaces are paid more; iii) pay is higher where internal labor markets are present; and iv) treating productivity and power as alternative explanations for pay differentials is a mistake” (Zhang, 2010).
The stakeholders in this analysis are corporate management, the government, and the employees who provide the products and services that keep them in business.
As a result of compensation inequality between skilled and unskilled workers and the fact that many of these unskilled workers were being fired and subsequently put on welfare, it is important to examine the relationship between economic openness and welfare policies.
A study was conducted to probe the conditions with which governments may compensate domestic labor to save jobs for their citizens. The day-to-day challenge in Human Resource Management is that there are always questions that must be answered. “HR management requires an orderly approach.
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Organized files, strong time management skills, and personal efficiency are key to HR effectiveness. You’re dealing with people’s lives and careers here, and when a manager requests help with a termination or a compensation recommendation or recognition program, it won’t do to say, “I’ll try to get to that if I have time” (Schleifer, 2006).
Corporate Policy And Procedures
Corporate policy and procedure changes and business needs move fast and change fast. The diplomatic skill of an HR manager is necessary for dealing with the grey areas and their effect on organizational policies and procedures. “A surprisingly large percentage of the issues HR managers face is in “the grey area.” Is it discrimination? Is it harassment?
What’s “reasonable” accommodation? How far back do you have to learn to approve intermittent leave? HR managers must be able to act with incomplete and “best available” information, and they must know when to seek the professional help of colleagues, attorneys, and others” (Schleifer, 2006).
In the 21st century, the challenges of strategic human resource management, as it involves personal and societal mindsets to be effective, will use the behaviors, employee skills, and attitudes that are a part of the human experience to implement a comprehensive plan in creating an environment of trust and respect.
Personal and societal mindsets cannot be changed by philosophical conjecture. The change must occur in the personal and professional mindsets of corporate executives who have vision and courage.
References
Allen, P. (2012). Falling Off the Ladder: Gendered Experiences of. The Political Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4, October–December 2012, 711-712.
Cao, X. (2007, June). Protecting Jobs in the Age of Globalization. International Studies Quarterly, pp. Vol 51, Issue 2, p. 301-327.
Chan, D. K.-S. (2008). Examining The Job-Related, Psychological, And Physical Outcomes of Workplace Sexual Harassment. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 362-376.
Childs, S. (2012). Gender discrimination in the workplace. State University of New York Empire State College, 1-35.
Fellet, M. (2013). Equal Measures. The New Scientist, 50-51.
Fiedler & Timmer, P. (2014). Discrimination Against Women in the Workplace. Iowa Employment Attorneys Harassment, Discrimination, FMLA, 1-3.
George B. Vold, a. T. (2002). Theoretical Criminology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Harryson, S. E. (2013). Patterns of Gender Equality at Workplace and Psychological Distress. PLoS ONE, 1-10.
Schleifer, J. (2006, July 18). The Nine Essential Skills of Human Resources Management. HR Daily Advisor.
Wright, K. M.-M. (2014). Contextual Influences on Work and Family Roles. Career Development Quarterly, 21-28.
Zhang, H. (2010). Exposure to Global Markets, Internal Labor Markets, and Worker Compensation. Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 35 Issue 3, p371-398.
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