Ann Hopkins Case Write Up

Stereotyping Sex – NO MORE

Abhilash Sikenpore

"When God created man and woman, he was thinking, 'Who shall I give the power to, to give birth to the next human being?' And God chose woman. And this is the big evidence that women are powerful."

— Malala Yousafzai

The Issue in the Ann Hopkins case is “Social Justice”. This has been one of the oldest and hardest problem of the society. Thomas Jefferson tried his best to make this world realize the importance of individual rights and the social justice which we are still lacking . Justice requires that everyone should be treated equal and everyone should get their due, these are one of the core principles of Ethics. This is about the fairness and the way people are discriminated because of their gender. Price Waterhouse firm is one of those which discriminated Ann Hopkins on the basis of her gender. Everyone is a human and everyone is different but we cannot judge people on the basis of their gender and discriminate them in the society. There has to be some principle of justice which guides us while making decisions in a fair and balanced manner. In this case, Price Waterhouse had a very biased and sexist partnership evaluation system. Being such a big firm, it still made a decision which shows that people have a very narrow minded and conservative approach when they look at a successful woman like Ann Hopkins. Even though she was one of the brightest and the most hard working woman with a zeal of getting things done in that company, she was deprived of the promotion just because she was a woman but not too feminine. It was very unethical on Price Waterhouse part to do such a thing.

Ann Hopkins might be not a perfect looking lady with the qualities of a typical woman but stereotyping a person on her gender was absolutely wrong. Of all the people from her batch she was one of the best candidates to become a partner because of her hard work, dedication, achievements, perseverance and success rate in the past. Where did the principle of fairness and equality go? Where were the company’s ethics? It’s more like the Michael Walzer concept of “social sphere of interest” where for some job you be all fair and for other job you get partial. She was given the hardest jobs for a woman to do which she did very successfully but when it came to the promotion she was not considered to be a right fit. I personally think that it was absolutely not fair and justified that she was put on hold for the promotion because she was not too feminine. I think a highly professional environment should judge your performance by your work and not your looks. They should have given her the post because she was an asset to the company as it is very much evident from her work and she did pretty well when it came to getting profitable results for the company. Not