The Conflicts of Gender Diversity

1. Introduction

To achieve liberation from religious, legal, sexual and economic oppression, women have been fighting for their rights throughout the 20th century. In fact, it took tremendous efforts and a long struggle to achieve sexual equality. Finally, the image of women in our society has changed. While women are no longer considered to be housewives who support her hard working husbands and raise the children they are now seeking for career opportunities. Moreover they are even entering jobs traditionally dominated by men. This development implies some serious issues for today's economy and its corporations. To deal with gender diversity conflicts, companies are seeking for solutions in order to achieve sexual equality in terms of payment and to reduce discrimination.

In fact, throughout the last decades diversity management has become a significant issue within Human Resource Management. Diversity management includes ethical, cultural and religious differences, age conflicts and the role of disabilities.

As one of the main issues of diversity management in our group research project we put an emphasis on gender diversity conflicts within the company Mercedes Benz. During his apprenticeship one of our group members made the experience that women felt disadvantaged in terms of salary, career opportunities and acceptance although they considered their performance equal to their male colleagues.

This paper outlines the importance and conflicts of today's diversity management and offers solutions to companies dealing with this issue. The first step is to give an overview of current developments in the field of human resource management. The next step is to illustrate conflicts that appear with gender diversity by using particular

1

examples from our group's experiences in the world of business. Finally we focus on potential solutions to those conflicts by addressing a female quota in senior management positions, improvements of work-life-balance, equality of payment and proposals to decrease discrimination in professions considered to be typical female.

2. Gender conflicts between men and women

2.1 Unequal payment of men and women

This part of the paper outlines one of the biggest problems within a company in Germany, the unequal payment between men and women in management positions as well as in normal jobs. This big human resource issue is called „Gender Pay Gap". There is almost no other European country where the pay gap is as big as in Germany. In fact, many women carry on the same profession as their male colleagues but earn less money for the same performance. In Germany women earn averaged 21 percent less money than men (Park 2012). One reason for the lower salary is, that women are traditionally considered as secondary wage earner. Strongly linked with this problem is the fact, that women are still often seen as housewives. Women also have more family responsibilities. Furthermore women are more defensive in negotiations of their salary and do not urge offensively for more money as their male colleagues do. Besides women do not have the same opportunities to promote as men have. All those facts cause significant differences in payment between men and women (Holst 2006). During his apprenticeship at the German car manufacturer Mercedes Benz Christian Koeck, one of our group members, had exactly these experiences. Women working in his and other divisions always complained about their lower payment and the missing opportunities to promote as fast as men, although they performed at the same level or sometimes even better. These conditions caused significant conflicts within the

2

divisions' working atmosphere and performance. Therefore several crisis talks were scheduled, but did not lead to the required success. Furthermore different scenarios to solve the problems and to improve the atmosphere and the performance of the division failed.

In