Women's Status in Workplace and Employees Turnover

Introduction

This literature review will be described about the women’s status in workplace and how this issue will have impact on employees’ turnover. Employees’ turnover is the ratio of the number of employees that had to be replaced in a given time period to the average number of employees. This can be happened when employees or workers exit the workforce or exit to move to another job. Quitting the workforce is usually larger for females and quit to move to another job is larger for males (Barnes and Jones, 1974).

Women’s Status

Women’s status has been known to be lower than men since past decades ago and it is common in many countries such as western countries and Asia countries. For example, the favouring of boys is still implanted in Taiwan people’s mind that only males are heir and females children are seen as only a temporary part of family until the are married (Chieh, 2003). But as the western influences increase, many females have started to receive higher education, join the workforce and become more financial independent (Yearbook, 1999 cited by Chieh, 2003).

Women in Workplace

According to the researches gained, men are most likely get to be employed in managerial positions in organizations which require leadership skills, technical skills and professional training skills such as supervisor, managers and executive directors. Where as women do not much opportunity to get hired in top managerial positions.

According to the article of Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, there were hardly had a woman in five managers in labor market in the early 1970s. As so, they only have the chances to get employed in administrative position, clerical job and secretarial occupations. Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn had also stated in their article that there were 55 percent of females were in such occupations as compared to only 15 percent of males in the early 1970s.

Also, women are sometime reserved to some jobs because they are more skillful to perform in certain blue-collar work such as jobs which require finger dexterity and craft work than men.

Women’s Earnings

As women have lower chances to be employed in managerial positions as compared to men, they will definitely have lower pay than men. Furthermore, women who hold the same job as men will still receive lower pay. This can be proved in the work of Chieh (2003), women in US who work full-time holding the same job as men earn only 76 percent of each dollar earned by men (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1999). It seems that this issue can cause wages discrimination in the workplace and women are the obvious victim in the labour market.

This is because women tend to work lesser weeks per year and hours per month than men (Blau and Kahn, 2000; Holmes, 1976). It is understandable by every woman that they would need to take leave for maternity or monthly period. However, in some countries like Taiwan, the labour law provides maternity leave but the employers do not always grant it (Chieh, 2003).

Employees Turnover

When women get lower pay for jobs than men, they will have the intention to quit the jobs. However, this is not the only reason. Once a woman gets married and pregnant, her work life will be interrupted because of family responsibilities. She will either work until she is married or until she gives birth to her first child. As a result, women are seemed to be contributed in workforce temporary and will not have career. Besides, they income is likely to be supplied as second income to the family.

Moreover, women will be forced