Reflection On The Boundaries Of Application Boxes

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The Boundaries of Application Boxes While I was filling out my application to The University of Charleston’s School of Pharmacy summer program for undergraduate students I was stopped abruptly when reaching the biographical information section. The speedy pace with which I was writing in my emergency contact information, such as my address and telephone number was disrupted when I reached the gender identification section. The gender ID section contained more than the two ordinary male and female boxes to be filled in. The sight of three boxes alone was enough to throw off my focus from the application. The third box, which was on a separate line that the other two boxes, read “transgender”. This was the first time I had seen more than two options available for gender selection. After my initial excitement that this was a step toward inclusivity, I began to question whether or not this gender identification section was appropriately accommodating to the transgendered community. The difficult question of what to label transgendered people is a problem that bears numerous implications for the acceptance of transgendered people. For example, this question represents the logic necessary to decide how to determine the structure of public. This difficult topic is something that I have further discussed in my previous portfolio work. Deciding what to call a bathroom designated for transgendered people is the physical embodiment of this issue. While I think that including the transgendered box on the University of Charleston School of Pharmacy’s application was attempt at inclusivity, this designation is far from appropriate. A more appropriate and accommodating term for this box could have utilized a term such as “genderqueer”, which encompasses all gender identities that are not strictly under the realm of male or female. This term is also not entirely appropriate because some transgendered people prefer to identify and a transgendered male or transgendered female. Throwing both of them into one category would be the equivalent of combing male and female into the same gender box, perhaps it could be called nongenderqueer. The ultimate form of equality for cis and transgendered people regarding job application’s gender identification sections would be the standard two-box system. This would include one box is labeled male and the other which would be labeled female. This would require the acceptance of transgendered people as the gender that they identify with, an ideal that will unfortunately take time to be accepted by the general public. While the presence of either the transgender box or the genderqueer box on an application may seem accommodating, it actually allows for the discrimination of applicants applying to all sorts of programs and job opportunities. This would exposes a transgendered person’s application review to be biased by potential discrimination from the reviewers. This discrimination can either be personal or take the form of institutional discrimination. Individual reviewers may put an application into the discard or not qualified pile simply because they have some personal biases toward transgendered people. Institutions might also influence the reviewer’s decision as they may not want to put forth the effort and time necessary to make those with non traditional gender identifications feel comfortable. There are laws set forth and enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to prevent discrimination against applicants and employees based on demographic factors, such as race, gender identity, religion age or disability, among other factors. …show more content…
Also, employers are prohibited from advertising jobs that target certain genders, races, or socioeconomic statuses, among other demographical data. Despite these laws discrimination has been seen based on a number of these factors. Similar to the gender box the race box on job applications provides another opportunity for discrimination. Statistically significant data continues to accumulate with regard to discrimination against African American’s applying to jobs. Specifically, applications with stereotypically “black sounding” names are far less likely to be called back for interviews or hired then “nonblack sounding” names. An experiment conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) faculty research fellows Marianne Betrard and Sendhil Mullianathan measured this discrimination. Their study was called “ Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field experiment on Labor Market Discrimination”. This fascinating study

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