A new interesting study...

Diminishing and ultimately eliminating gender and racial disadvantage in the workplace and labor market is a worthy goal of any policy maker, businessman or civil rights advocate. However, fixing it requires understanding the underlying causes of this persistent problem. One major theory is that certain institutional or organizational mechanisms are inadvertently promoting discrimination. A recent study by researchers at the University of Arizona titled “Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work” examined the various structural changes that could help to erode the existing gender and racial disadvantages. To determine these best practices, the researchers used data from over 800 American organizations over the last 20 years.
Major Findings:
• As of 2002 approximately 60% of American workplaces had incorporated team work into some aspect of their staff interactions, this is important because it gives women and minorities a chance to gain visibility which is often a major obstacle.
• Provision of further job training for workers to encourage management skills grew from being present in only 45% of jobs in 1980 to nearly 80% in 2002.
• Increased diversity in managerial positions may be a cause of the above two improvements, the ratio of white male managers fell from 75% in 1980 to 62% in 2002, while the ratio of white females rose from 19% to 26%, black female’s from less than 1% to 2%, and black male’s from 2.4% to 3.1%
• The introduction of self-directed team work was associated with a decline in the probability of white male managers by 8% and an increase of probability of a white female by 9%, a black female 3.5% and a black male by 5%
• The adoption of cross-training improved the probability of white women, black women and black men of being a manager by 4% and decreases the probability for white men by 7.5%.
The researchers concluded that their evidence “provides strong support for the argument that restructuring work to weaken job segregation improves the access of women and minorities to management.”

Brief History of UNSCR 1325

During the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, powerful developed countries drastically increased their involvement in conflict prevention, intervention and recovery throughout the developing world. While progress on international humanitarian efforts had remained largely stagnant throughout the Cold War, the war’s ending heralded an expansion of humanitarian international norms through conventions, establishment of international courts, and increased influence of interventionist ideologies in foreign policy. No longer focused on the sole objective of fighting to prevent the spread of Communism, there was a resurgence of the multilateral spirit that produced the United Nations and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in the 1940s following the end of World War Two. From Bosnia to Haiti and from Cambodia to Somalia, both successes and failures revealed a number of key factors to sustainable peace. A group of NGOs, predominantly U.S.-based, identified female involvement as one of these key factors.
These NGOs, with support of various governments (including the U.S.), began a campaign to formalize gender mainstreaming in peace and conflict processes. This campaign resulted in the successful passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) calling for members states to involve women at all levels of every aspect of national security and foreign policy that influenced peace processes. Subsequent revisions over the ten years after passage of UNSCR 1325 encouraged each member state to create a National Action Plan (NAP) for the implementation of 1325 to lay out a strategy of how to achieve gender mainstreaming in peace and security sectors.
Since the passage, ten years ago, of UNSCR 1325, there has been widespread debate about the actual impact of its call for greater inclusion of female perspectives in the peace and security sectors of all countries. While many believe is that adding women to the equation more often than not aids in the creation of a sustainable peace, only 25 countries have signaled their commitment to inclusive security with passage of NAPs. Addressing the domestic aspects, countries such as the U.K., Sweden, Belgium and Finland have purposefully set strategies through the adoption of a NAP to increase gender inclusiveness in their peace and security ministries, which have been successful in increasing the ratio of females in government employment.