Case 10 - Madison, Jones and Conklin

Questions:
1. What forms of gender discrimination did Laura experience?

Laura experienced different behaviors that were related to gender discrimination, such as:

• Managers were often inattentive when she spoke.
• Managers seemed unreceptive to her suggestions for improvements.
• Laura’s proposals were ignored and later on someone else received the credit for them.
• Laura was never assigned a mentor to help her advance in her career.
• She did not feel accepted into the informal network of relationships that provided opportunities to interact with senior managers.
• She was not invited to most of the social activities hosted by senior managers for friends and select members of the company.
• Laura was never assigned a high-project because those were always given to the male managers.
• When Laura asked her boss for more challenging projects, she was told that the older clients usually preferred to deal with men.
• Male co-workers who got hired at the same time as her got promoted ahead of her.

2. What could Laura have done to overcome the obstacles she encountered?

Even though she spoke to the president she did not seem insist more. She should have called for a meeting with more people and speak openly about how she felt and make a point in saying that discrimination was an ethical issue and say how interested she was in her working place being an ethical place.

She could also have approached to the Human Resources department to expose the situation and her feelings and suggest them to implement an ethical culture in the workplace. She should have made the point that gender discrimination is a very old belief.

She should always show her confidence, task-oriented, competitive, objective, decisive and assertive behaviors, but also her supportive, team building, inclusiveness and interpersonal skills proper of a woman.

3. What could the president have done to create equal opportunity in this company?

He should have called for a meeting with all managers to explain the current situation of the company as for gender discrimination and foster an ethical working culture. He should have followed-up her case and made sure her case was progressing. He showed have showed his supportive leadership by making her feel accepted, valued and mentored or get her a personal mentor. He should have given orders to her direct boss so he gave her the challenging projects to her. He should have given her the choice of belonging to the golfing country club. He should have made sure that she got invited to the social activities.

Bibliography

Yukl, Gary (2006). Leadership In Organizations (6ht edition). Pearson Prentice Hall.

Bibliography: Yukl, Gary (2006). Leadership In Organizations (6ht edition). Pearson Prentice Hall.