Many efforts have been made over recent years to remove the impact of discrimination in all aspects of our daily lives; many laws have been created, updated and then publicised to raise our awareness of what is acceptable behaviour in our culture / society. They provide those who have been discriminated against some recourse through the legal system and provide a stick with which individuals and organisations may be hit if they fail to observe.
However data collected over the last six years through the Project Management Benchmark surveys suggest that for all this effort there are many in the project management community who still feel that discrimination is still real and impacting their lives. Areas of equality don’t seem to be holding up! Remuneration by gender, unemployment and employment opportunity according to age and restrictions on career opportunity have all been regular themes amongst the respondents of the UK’s leading survey in project management trends.
Project managers worldwide might be getting pushed around for things that mean little to their ability to do the job well.
Here’s a sampling of what our respondents had to say through the LinkedIn discussion…
Peter Taylor, author of The Lazy Project Manager, believes he has been lucky; “Maybe I have been blind and lucky but I can’t say I have seen discrimination within my industry (software) and my profession (project management). I have to say that I was concerned a few years ago when I found myself a free agent unexpectedly that ageism might be a factor in finding a new role. But I was fortunate that my network and experience led me quickly to a great new opportunity.”
So far, so good from a male point of view; but how about views from the female contingent of project management? Anne Workman, a Project Manager at IBM, also reports no personal setbacks…yet! “I have seen a lot of discussion on this topic, but I have to admit to never actually feeling that I am being held back, or treated differently, because I am female (I work as a technical project manager now, having moved from software engineering). I am sure there used to be a lot of discrimination – but it is not something I have seen evidence of in over 7 years since university, and 4 yrs previous to that working part time while at university.” …
If you want to read the full article by John & Dan, check out last month’s edition of Project Management Tipoffs, which dealt with a series of workplace-related challenges for project & programme managers to handle in the course of the careers. The May edition is out Thursday, so be sure to subscribe and have it in your inbox first!
