International Women’s Day. It is a time to celebrate the trailblazers, the allies and the badass women in our lives. It is a time to reflect on how far we’ve come. It is also time for a reality check: gender-based discrimination, and sexism, exist in your workplace.

The majority of businesses no longer see sexism overtly expressed within their walls, so you might be forgiven for believing your company doesn’t have an issue. Perhaps your company considers itself ‘progressive’, pursuing trendy, gender-neutral policies, and so you too, might be forgiven for feeling sexism has been erased from your workplace. Your company has women in senior roles – or more likely one woman prominently placed in a highly-visible, quasi-senior role, so your organization has proven itself to be a gender-parity champion!  The uncomfortable truth is that discrimination, like a virus, can be active and go unnoticed for months, even years. You need only look beneath the outer layers with the right tools to find evidence of its existence.

Let’s start on the surface, where the evidence of an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities is easier to examine.

The glass ceiling, so named due to its supposed invisibility, is actually one of the most highly visible signs of inequity in an organization.

Look at the gender distribution in your company overall. Hopefully, you are starting off with a relatively equal mix. Now, work your way up through the layers of leadership. Did you notice your leadership team skew highly male once it moved past the level of middle management?  That is the not-so-invisible barrier women’s careers stall at. If you are seeing this in your organization, have you ever wondered why so few of the female middle managers advance further inside your company?  Do they only successfully advance into more senior roles by leaving? You might already have found your evidence. If you have parity at all levels of leadership including the C-suite, your organization is truly a member of an exclusive club. Even so, we shouldn’t take everything at face value.

Most gender-based discrimination occurs in isolation. In fact, it could be happening to you in your present role and you may never find out. Much of the critical components in our career exist in a vacuum (think salary, bonuses, performance reviews, mentoring). Imagine that your manager issued annual bonuses to your male colleagues and that each of their bonuses was higher than what their equivalent female counterparts received. How many years might pass by before anyone noticed? How would any of the recipients know they were receiving more or less? Does anyone at your company examine this process? If so, do they have the authority to actually do anything about it? (Considering pay inequity is still a very real thing…I won’t hold my breath.) The same applies to performance reviews. Females receive less constructive verbal feedback, even when explicitly asking for specific, actionable steps to take to pursue opportunities. This valuable feedback can mean the difference between advancement or stagnation in a role.

Deeper below the surface, what you are bound to never notice is the hyper-awareness women have of how we are being perceived. Our behaviours and our voices are seen through a fun-house mirror. Assertiveness is viewed as ‘aggression’. Investment in a topic is labelled ‘emotional’. Being supportive reinforces nurturing stereotypes that pigeonhole us as ‘soft’, and therefore unable to cope with the more rigid demands of senior positions. Being directive prompts cautionary reviews where we are described as ‘cold’ and ‘unlikeable’ and therefore unsuitable for the approachability required of senior positions. We spend a lot of energy threading the needle:

Ask a direct question. ‘She’s difficult’.

Cushion the question indirectly. ‘She lacks clarity’.

It is a mentally exhausting exercise simply figuring out how to speak in a manner that won’t trigger a negative response – and I’m not even adding the extra fun anxiety of whether our attire is too stuffy, too manly, too girlish, too casual, too uptight. It remains unseen. It would be comical if the outcomes were not so damaging.

I am tired of reading about women being paid less than men for the same work. Tired of the studies and statistics surrounding gender inequality in the workplace – and the token responses that pretend to address them. Tired of people questioning why a woman remains publicly silent about sexist behaviour at work when the repercussions for speaking out are still very real and decidedly not in her favour. Tired that we have our own shadow recruitment process, where we steer candidates away from companies and bosses who are enabled to continue discriminating on the basis of gender.

This is a tiny glimpse of our reality. Knowing many of us will never realize we were on the receiving end of sexist practices until years later. Knowing that the compound negative impact on our careers is rarely appreciated. Knowing that good people in the business community, people such as yourself, who genuinely want to see progress, may still refuse to believe what they cannot see.