Gender discrimination still prevalent at workplace?

Researchers have said that even in today's times, gender discrimination at workplace is still very much alive and kicking.

Men and women in jobs that are generally associated with the other sex are judged more harshly when they make mistakes and are constantly in danger of falling off a "glass cliff" in the workplace, experts said.

Yale University scientist Dr Victoria Brescoll said, "In the 2008 presidential election, a woman came close to getting a nomination, and an African-American man ended up president of the United States, a job formerly reserved for white men," reports the Telegraph.

"The reason I got interested is there was so much talk about race and gender barriers being broken, but just getting a job with high status isn't enough, you have to keep it.

"Any mistakes that they make, even very minor ones, could be magnified and seen as even greater mistakes."

200 volunteers read a scenario in which either a police chief or a women's college president made a mistake, sending not enough police officers (or campus security officers) to respond to a protest.

The team found that those who were the non-stereotypical gender were judged more harshly. The same was true in other tests with a female CEO of an aerospace engineering firm and a chief judge.

"There is an effect called the glass cliff. Like the glass ceiling that keeps women from rising higher, the glass cliff is what counter-stereotypical individuals (such as female police chiefs) are in danger of falling from," said Brescoll.

"You don't really know, when you're a woman in a high status leadership role, how long you're going to hang onto it. You might just fall off at any point. Our study points to one way that this may happen for women in high-powered male roles," she said.

The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.