Gender and Age Discrimination in the Workplace in Canada

Recently, many countries are attempting to enhance their both economies and living standards. However, they are also facing many serious problems related to environment and human rights that inhibit the development of society. In particular, discrimination in the workplace is one of the major issues that has existed for many decades. Despite many remarkable efforts made with a purpose to diminish the issue, workplace discrimination is still presented in the contemporary Canadian society. Therefore, in order to approach a general comprehension about the discrimination in the workplace, this paper will examines on two prevalent issues that are gender and age discrimination.
When mentioning the workplace discrimination, it is assumed to do with gender. That is, however, only one type of workplace discrimination. Besides that, a more prevalent type of discrimination tends to be age discrimination. The term of discrimination in workplace is defined that an employee or a group of employees are treated differently, unfairly or negatively because of their personal characteristics such as gender, religion, nationality and age (Race, Color, National or Ethnic Origin, 2001).
First of all, although the progress and advances have been made in the last few decades, the gender discrimination is still an obstacle and block for many women. They have found for equal paid and equal rights in the labor market for a long period. In addition, Levine and Dale explain the difficulty women in the work force often face:
Primary sector employers will want to hire stable workers so that they have some assurance of recouping their training cost. Since women historically have tend to move in and out of the labor force more often than men risk adverse employers who reply on their impressions of the relative job turnover of all men and women when deciding about hiring individual men and women would prefer men over women for primary sector jobs (2003, p. 10) Many married women still assume greater responsibility for child rearing and other energy intensive household than men. Therefor, these responsibilities impact the extend and the continuity of market work as well as choice of occupation and preferences for working conditions that alleviate the combination of work in the labor force and household (O’Neill & O’Neil, 2012, p. 223). Furthermore, gender discrimination is still an ongoing problem in wage gap between men and women. In 2011, for instance, women who are full time workers only earn approximate 76 cent for every dollar earned by men (Race, Color, National or Ethnic Origin, 2001).
Another major discrimination occurring in the workplace is the age discrimination. Age discrimination in the workplace could often be hard to prove because it mostly depends on the special requirement of different jobs. For example, in fast paced occupations such as marketing and computer technology, a youthful appearance is considered an asset because they quickly adapt with the draconic business environment. In order to solve this problem, recent amendments to the Canada Human rights Act banning mandatory retirement has made a positive effort. Federally regulated organizations, which include many Canada’s biggest employers, are encouraged to continue hiring employees 65 or older. Ironically, the changes to the act, which was made in late 2011, were destined to empower older workers to serve longer. Nevertheless, these amendments do not benefit until December 2012, and the delay appears to be motivating employers to get rid of retirement age employees en masse (2012, Whitten). Even though the old employees have experience and knowledge, employers tend to hire young labors and spend a huge amount of money for new technologies and satisfy the impatient aspirations of these younger employees for increasing productivity and promotional opportunities.
However, there are many debate around