The Still-Gaping Gender Gap
Last week The New York Times wrote a story about the New Gender Gap highlighting the point that things really haven’t gotten much better for women in the workplace.
When looking back at the history of women in the workplace it seems as if things have been getting better and better and women have been moving up in the world. Now instead of just expecting to be a secretary women can hope to become the CEO. Women have transformed the face of work and caused workplaces to become more flexible. Women now hold almost 50% of the jobs in the U.S. The NYT story points this out is because what is happening to men, 78% of the jobs lost during the recession were by men. To quote the article,
‘ So not only is it unseemly to rejoice over a larger share of a smaller pie, it is also unsettling to face the fact that so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men. ‘
Why is this happening now? Women are still cheaper. A woman earns 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man. In an economy like this employers see this as an attractive quality. Women just returning to the workforce after years of staying home to care for a family are particularly inexpensive. Also, women work in traditional “women’s work” type of industries like healthcare and education that haven’t been hit as hard by the recession.
Even more disturbing is that employers believe that women will settle so they are comfortable hiring a woman for a “step down job”.
The biggest reason to believe that that the current increase in jobs isn’t good for women is this (from the NYT article):
‘ The point that the increase of women in the workplace is not somehow a victory for women is driven home by the fact that the most successful and highly paid women are losing their jobs at the same rates as successful and highly paid men. ‘
More from Just JudyJudyJudy
- The Crazypants Bra That Solves “Cleavage Wrinkles”
- The Awesome Secret Menu Item From McDonalds: Behold The Mc10:35
- Mad Women: The Office Experiment
- The Crazypants Thing That Is The “Cheddar Explosion”
- McDonalds: Opening Soon At The Louvre
Just JudyJudyJudy Recommends
- The case against nofollow (Millarian)
- STUDY: Women still primary breadwinners (Blogged Down by The Economy)
- Out of the Darkness and Into the Light: Appreciating Coffee for What it is (Arizona Coffee)
