Gender-based inequalities and discrimination in professional careers: An overview

The unbalanced gender-specific division of labour emerged as early as the end of the nineteenth century, when women work was exploited and underpaid in the wage market. The gendered professional inequalities between women and men continue to persist even today. The present paper aims to provide an outline of the main concepts used for analysing gendered inequalities in professional careers and to delineate the most significant explanations regarding this phenomenon. Besides gender stereotypes and gender roles, other terms which conceptualize the gender-based inequalities and discrimination in professional careers are addressed, such as gender pay gap, horizontal segregation, evaluative discrimination, vertical segregation, glass ceiling, sticky floor, and gender status beliefs. Furthermore, there are discussed both theoretical economic approaches, which emphasize the role of human capital and explain discrimination of women in the labour market by the expectations on their lower productivity, and theoretical sociological approaches, which highlight other aspects, such as differences in power, social and cultural norms and values, and take into consideration the importance of social capital, social interactions and networks, and social closure in professional career and ascension. In the last part of the paper the key aspects of the debate are emphasized and some remarks about the necessity of larger, more integrative and practice-oriented researches in this regard are made.