Discrimination against women in the workplace is alive and well. It's not showing up, though, as blatant gender discrimination. Those cases are rare today--thanks to laws and increased awareness over the last 25 years.

Today it's subtle--nearly invisible. How else do you account for the low number of women in top levels of businesses? They only comprise 10% of senior managers in Fortune 500 companies, less than 4% of the uppermost ranks of CEO, president executive vice president and COO and less then 3% of top corporate earners, according to Debra E. Meyerson and Joyce K. Fletcher in an article in Harvard Business Review.

It's discrimination so woven into the fabric of an organization's status quo, that even women who feel the impact of these insidious, indiscernible barriers are often hard-pressed to know what hit them, say the writers and professors at the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons Graduate School of Management.

They attribute it to a "plethora of work practices and cultural norms" that are so common and mundane that most people don't notice them, let alone question them. But they create a subtle pattern of systemic disadvantage.

Take the investment firm they researched which shows how this invisible and unintentional gender discrimination thrives. The company sincerely wanted to increase the number of women it hired from business schools and reasoned that if it screened more women it would be able to hire more women, so it increased the number of women interviewed during recruiting visits. But the numbers didn't increase.

They found that the standard 30 minutes they allotted to each interview was not long enough for the middle aged male managers conducting most of the interviews "to connect with young female candidates sufficiently to see beyond their directly relevant technical abilities."

The interviewers acknowledged that these short interviews might have forced them to rely on first impressions and how well they related to or bonded with the person. They also questioned candidates primarily about their "deal experience" which allowed only those who worked on Wall Street to shine (most investment bankers are men.) And since it was mostly men doing the interviewing and men tend to naturally bond with other men, the firm developed a practice of screening out women. "In other words, organizational practices mirror societal norms."

If you don't give two hoots about this kind of inequality, you should. It affects personal performance and overall productivity in a company, and as this case showed, it can create a recruitment nightmare.

When the firm became aware of the "invisible problem," it launched small initiatives that made a world of difference:

• It lengthened interviews to 45 minutes allowing interviewers to focus more on valuable skills, ideas and experience.
• Interviewers asked candidates to share how they'd contribute to the firm's mission. "The interviews shifted radically in tone and substance. Instead of boasting from former Wall Street stars, they heard many nontraditional candidates describe a panoply of managerial skills, creative experiences and diverse work styles."

  These people have not only energized the firm and improved performance, but the next year the company discovered they had earned the reputation as a great place to work.

  Until now, the solutions that may have helped advance women's equity in the workplace include:

• Assimilation. This includes encouraging women to adopt more masculine attributes, learning to play golf, and taking "tough guy" assignments in factories or abroad.
• Accommodating the unique needs of women including mentoring programs to compensate for women's exclusion from informal networks, flexible work arrangements or alternative career tracks.
• Emphasizing the differences of women by instituting sensitivity training to help male managers appreciate traditional "feminine styles."

But these solutions have gone as far as they can, they say, dealing with the symptoms not the sources of inequity. The investment company story shows how small, incremental changes can bring about systemic change. It's a solution that gets to the core of the issue: that gender inequity at work is rooted in our culture.

© by Andrea Kay