Intersectionality

An area that I would like to discuss is how people are treated in the work place.  With this I have two different workplace, personal experiences that I will focus on.  The first experience will be a female in a retail job and the second will be a male in an office job. The point of this is to show that both females and males bring up important issues of how a person can be treated because of who they are.

Having a retail job for a female can be difficult.  Especially if you are working in a store that is dominantly shopped by men.  So right off the back, just because you are female you are seen as less knowledgeable about the products.  Then, if you are petite, or attractive that raises more flags to customers and they start to think that you can't know anything you're too pretty to know about manly things.  And who is to say it even gets that far, customers may even avoid you.  It can be frustrating and it is a major problem because they are judging a book by its cover. 

Being a male in an office job isn't really necessarily bad, right?  Well what if you're the only man out of 50 employees working there.  Then that would raise some problems wouldn't it.  Usually men don't take office jobs, if they do it's usually a CEO position, not a book keeper.  It's seen as not manly enough or too relaxed.  Some may even say it doesn't pay what a man should be making to support a family.  No one really looks at the positives that he has a job and is contributing to his family.  They only see the one man out of 50 employees who is only a book keeper. 

The overall issue here is workplace inequality.  For both men and women it can be an everyday struggle, which is why I wanted to discuss it for this topic. 

People should think about the person they are judging based off of intersectionality, before they act upon it.  That girl working retail, could be one of the most intelligent employees there, but you won't go to her for help because of her gender and looks.  That man working as a book keeper, probably is happy and content with the job he has and doesn't want the stress of being a CEO.  Because not only would stress effect him but it would effect his relationship with his family as well. 

We have to think deeper and stop judging people based off of gender, looks, race, social class and social standards.  There is more to a person than those things.  Yes it is easy to just judge/assume right away but if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, there can be a bigger and better understanding of what someone is going through or why they chose to do the things they do.