Social Justice for Equality and Diversity in the 21st Century Workplace

Social Justice for Equality and Diversity in the 21st Century Workplace
Student's Name
Institution Affiliation
Course
Date
Understanding diversity's philosophy and psychology is complicated and involves thinking about various perspectives, namely disability rights, sexual orientation, skin color, and the role of race. Also, it includes cultural competence, women's status, disproportionality in the justice system, and policy, among others. The 21st-century workplace features greater diversity than it was in previous generations. An individual who could not secure employment because of ability differences or religious differences now regularly joins others in interviews and jobs. The organization appreciates that each individual brings a new outlook and information, enhancing its decision-making and overall performance. However, evidence shows that regardless of the numerous benefits of diversity, equality still exists in the workplace, just as the social justice perspective on diversity maintains (Jacob et al., 2020). For instance, the U.K reports show that the gender pay gap prevents women's progression. Generally, the social justice perspective argues that inequality and power issues are always at play whenever there is diversity. Therefore, more evidence of what works to help guide organizations' equality in such a diverse world is needed. Discussing a topic such as diversity outcomes, factors keeping inequality in the workplace, and factors supporting diversity in the workplace, entailed in this paper, is an evaluation of the social justice case for equality and diversity in the 21st century.
Bringing diversity in the workplace is neither a trend an organization should follow nor a quote it has to meet. It is more than a social responsibility with immense benefits to the organization and the society at large. A diverse workforce consists of people of ages, gender, ethnicity, race, and suchlike. Such a force increases creativity and innovation. People with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives bring new ideas to the table, which improves the invention of an organization's workforce. Research shows that inclusive organizations are 1.7 times likely to be innovation leaders in the market (Brooks, Normore & Wilkinson, 2017). This is crucial in the modern world as it helps the organization be at par with its competitors. Also, diversity in the workplace improves productivity. The employers, employees, and the entire organization become more effective and efficient. Everyone in the organization is willing to keep learning and to better themselves by investing in skills. Besides, maintaining a diverse workplace helps in retaining employees. Glassdoor reports that more than 50% of employees want their organizations to be diverse (Leong, Pickren & Vasquez, 2017; Lopez-Littleton, Blessett & Burr, 2018). Many companies practice blind hiring as it helps to cut out the biases based on race, gender, religion, culture, and age of the candidates. Therefore, ensuring diversity helps improve an organization's brand and reputation globally.
Additionally, a diverse workforce improves a company's culture. A variety of statistics show that people enjoy working in a diverse workplace as it keeps them at ease and builds healthy workplace relationships without fear of unwelcome biases. Before evaluating job offers and companies, people weigh diversity as a factor (Cunningham et al., 2019; Thompson, 2016). A diverse workforce will improve not only an organization's culture but also its hiring results. In general, actively supporting diversity at the workplace benefits both the organization and society. Therefore, most organizations strive to recognize and accommodate employees' unique needs and show respect to their sexual orientation, gender identification, and religious beliefs without prejudice. However, it is easier said than done as there are still some factors that keep inequality in the workplace as the social justice perspective maintains that issues of inequality and power are always at play whenever there is diversity.
In all its forms, inequality is the defining global problem of this age, 21st century, as it results in two powerful forces, political imbalance and prejudice on particular groups of people. Arguably, power imbalance and social differences cause bias, or prejudice causes power imbalance and social differences. What is clear is that inequality causes problems for all people on both sides of the power divide resulting in treatment based on gender, class, race, ethnicity, and suchlike in human beings lives. In any case, inequity and inequality are often used interchangeably. However, in this case, I presume a difference with inequality being descriptive and inequality normative. That is to mean inequity going beyond favoring one group at the other's expense, which is unjust and unfair (Leong, Pickren & Vasquez, 2017; Lopez-Littleton, Blessett & Burr, 2018). For example, a storm hitting a given community in the country resulting in some people losing electric power cannot be termed inequitable since no one controls the storm; the inequality results from a natural phenomenon. If a power company intentionally restores power using the criterion of race, political influence, among others, that is inequitable as they are blamed on the discriminated against. Similarly, defining Black workers as less human as science suggests they are intellectually inferior is inequity, mostly when one neglects their effort (Byrd & Scott, 2018). Blaming structural inequalities on those with less power is one of the major factors that keeps inequality at the workplace, as described above.
As stated before, power inequalities are a problem for both the low-power and high-power groups, causing more problems to the former than the latter. In an organization, imbalance results in justice conflicts where some workers feel they are denied fundamental rights. For example, if a manager promotes employees without merit, performance, or experience but on color and relationship, conflicts may arise. Again, inequity results in humiliation characterizing violence and conflicts in the workplace. Exemplary, if one is humiliated in the workplace based on their difference, they may seek revenge, resulting in eternal war and crimes. Inequity may also result in discrimination, prejudice, racial conflicts, and violation of how rights. For the high-power group, unfairness may cause conflict threatening the security and status of those groups. This may result from the people feeling that their way of thinking, opinions, needs, and feelings are of more excellent value th...