Examples of the micro-inequities that are endured by women working in the UK today are:
- Being called by the wrong name repeatedly by the same person
- Having your emails ignored
- Not being invited to important meetings where you clearly have a right to access
- Not having your ideas, suggestions or comments heard in a meeting, but hearing a male colleague state them moments later, and getting recognition for them
- Not getting a ‘good morning’ from a colleague or manager on repeated occasions
Tectre Micro-inequity Blog
Welcome to the Tectre Micro-inequity Blog. The team at Tectre have been closely involved with the movements to increase the numbers of women in the STEM workforce since the late 1990s. One of the issues that we believe makes the culture of the technology or STEM workplace worse for women is the impact of the MICRO-INEQUITY.
A term was coined many decades ago (first mentioned in 1973 in fact) by Mary P. Rowe from MIT in 1973. She said that Micro-inequities are ‘apparently small events which are often ephemera and hard to prove….covert, often unintentional and frequently unrecognised by the perpetrator’. We show some examples here on the left hand side but know that you will have lots more examples to share.
Dr. Karen Petrie at University of Dundee proposed that where women make up a minority in the workplace, but where everyone (males and females) are equally making sexist remarks at one another, the difference in the ratio of men:women means that women will receive many times more incidences of sexism. We think this is also true of micro-inequities. We are all capable of inflicting them, but, where females are in the minority, they will experience far more hits than the males! The Petrie Multiplier can be seen at this link to Wikipedia.
Add your example of a micro-inequity here. That way we can encourage employers to understand the breadth of the issue within the Technology workplace culture and help us to challenge them to make change.