The world has become a smaller place I once heard said. This simply means that we are now able to interact with more cultures than ever before. Travel and computers have enabled us to work directly with people from diverse cultures. Knowing cultural mores can be very helpful in the workforce.
When I attended college in Germany I had an Arabic teacher. I was taking Algebra. He would never look me in the eye, and he never responded to my questions. There were only two females in the class and the rest were men. He always responded to them. We became very upset and went to the administrative staff. They explained to me that he was an excellent math teacher but he did not culturally believe that women should be in college and especially not in math or science classes.
The response in Germany was to change my classmate and I to a different teacher. Had this happened in America he would have had to learn about our culture and known that to keep his job he needed to work with females as well.
The problem goes both ways though. My freind is a Muslim and very devout. He was hired at a factory and certain times each day he would go in the yard to pray. He always tried to find a private place so as not to appear as a spectacle or make a statement. He moved to America to escape discrimination.
People on his job thought that he was anti-social and just never wanted to hang-out with them. He was raised that when one works, one works, when one prays, one prays, and when one socializes, one socializes. Once the workers learned more about his culture they began to find out what a nice guy he was, but it would have helped had they been better prepared and him be better prepared.
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