On the surface, women tended to fare better during the Great Recession than men did.

Fourth quarter data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that over the past two years, the wages of women rose 3.2 percent when adjusted for inflation.  Men’s wages rose 2 percent.  More telling, perhaps, is the unemployment rate.  The jobless rate for men is 11 percent, and 8.4 percent for women.  Many of the lost jobs in this recession have been men’s jobs, in construction and manufacturing.

Why is this important?  According to the Shriver Report, published in October 2009, 50 percent of all workers are women.  And mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of all American households.  Half of all families rely on the earnings of two parents, and in more than 20 percent of families, a single mother is the breadwinner.

Interesting fact:  Most workers under 40 have never known a workplace without women bosses and colleagues.

However, women still make less than men.  In 2007, women were paid 77 cents for every dollar a man made. Many jobs are dominated by either men or women.

While these changes have been occurring, business and government have not kept up with these societal changes.

While Moms are paying less today for food, cars, clothing and appliances than they did a generation ago, the new normal has seen increases in home, health, education and child care.  So while Moms have fared better with jobs, they are as stressed and stretched as they have ever been.

Because of the enormous spending power of Moms, the recovery will continue to be slower than desired as Moms work their way out of this Great Recession.

By the way, if you are interested in how the Great Recession got its name, here’s a great piece from the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/cecqqo

For more information on the Shriver report: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/10/womans_nation.html

Working on Fifth Avenue at New York City is nothing short of glamorous. Every day, I walk to work on one of NYC’s most famous streets, cutting through Central park, walking by the Plaza, passing Saks and finally entering the headquarters of one of the largest beauty companies in the world to work on photoshoots and press kits while bumping into celebs (and their stylists) in the process.<

Finally being dropped into the “9-5” has me thinking a lot more about my future. What if I want to be the chief executive one day? How feasible is that? What would my income be?

Although it is possible for a woman to become a CEO, out of the “Fortune 500” (the USA’s 500 biggest publicly traded companies), only thirteen of those CEOs are female. That’s only 2.6%.

We’ve had our first female presidential and vice-presidential candidate in the past year and higher education for women is on the rise, yet women are still not holding top positions in companies. The cherry on top of all of this? Even the women who have managed to make their way to the top are still the worst paid out of all CEOs.

Aside from the incredible income disparities, the issue we should be focusing on is why women CEOs are such a rare commodity, not necessarily the size of the paychecks. In 2005, Sheila Wellington was interviewed by Anne Fisher (CNN Money) on this exact issue. Wellington was no stranger to gender discrimination; she was forced to sign an agreement when she accepted her first position after graduating from Radcliffe that stated that she must not get pregnant for at least her first two years.

Wellington went on to become the president of Catalyst, a non-profit research group and is now a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. When confronted with the question of the lack of female executives, Wellington stated, “I think we are in the midst of a cycle right now where there is a widespread perception that women aren’t fully committed to their careers. It tends to happen every time the spotlight is on a high-ranking woman who flames out, like [former Hewlett-Packard CEO] Carly Fiorina. You start hearing all kinds of people analyzing ‘what women are doing wrong.’”

Wellington goes on to say that the corporate perception of women must alter before women can reach high levels. She blames sexist perceptions such as, “women don’t like to travel” or “women don’t take risks” as platitudes that cloud judgment when hiring female executives. The antiquated mindset that females won’t succeed because of familial obligations, emotional reactions, high drama and lack of critical thinking hinders women from succeeding. Don’t think those perceptions are still out there? Just ask Neil French who resigned as WPP Group worldwide creative director after saying women in advertising “don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to.” This sentiment is common according to Wellington.

Does this mean that I can’t become a CEO one day? Working for a Fortune 500 has pushed my desire to do just that. But when I do get that position, do I have to give up my femininity, desire to have a family in the future, penchant for emotional outbursts once in a while, and indulging in guilty pleasures like Gossip Girl? I think not. The mentality around females in executive positions needs to be changed, not the female executives themselves.

Once the archaic stereotypes of women have left the workplace, then companies will realize that women are valuable assets in executive positions. It’s up to Gen Y to break those stereotypes, put much more than just cracks in the glass ceiling and finally finish construction on that bridge to somewhere.

This video – an interview with Michelle Masse about gender and higher education – popped up on a feminist economics mailing list, but didn’t inspire any discussion, which surprised me.

I am not, honestly, a huge defender of the humanities. I don’t think we should dismiss “rigour” as gendered and therefore not a useful goal. But quite aside from that, if it’s true that contract teaching is being feminized, I’d like to talk about the structural factors that make this happen. For example, it’s pretty hard to schedule pregnancy into an academic life. I haven’t found similar stats for all disciplines, but as an example, according to this 2003 US study, the average history professor was hired into a tenure-track position at almost 39.

If female PhDs decide not to delay childbirth until after hiring or tenure – probably a good idea, if they won’t be hired until almost 40 – they increase the chances that they will end up stuck as sessional instructors, which is a terrible waste of human capital, among other things. Research shouldn’t be incompatible with having a family.

Economix, which is becoming a consistent source of news about gender and economics, has a post up about income and job satisfaction by gender. Their data is from a website called PayScale, where users share their salary and related information. In other words, the workers that make up this data set had to seek out PayScale and then fill out a survey. Most survey research suffers from low response rates, but this is a decidedly non-random sample. Among other things, we are only learning about people concerned enough with their salary to discover a site like PayScale. So this isn’t an ideal research environment.

That said, the Times economics editor, Catherine Rampell, makes a couple interesting observations.

Men and women are about equally likely to say that they are satisfied with their jobs; about 65 percent of both sexes say they are satisfied. Plus, for both sexes higher job satisfaction is associated with higher job pay. But it typically takes a lot less money to get women to say they are satisfied with their work than it does to get men to say it. [...] Bumping men into a higher-satisfaction group requires a bigger increase in pay than women would need to in order to go up a ’satisfaction’ level.

One of Rampell’s suggested explanations rings particularly true for me:

Perhaps this difference is reflective of the men’s and women’s divergent priorities in their career choices. After all, much of the overall gap between men’s and women’s earnings can be explained by the types of careers they choose (or others might argue, the types of careers available to them). Women are more disproportionately represented in industries like health care and education, for example, that are less lucrative than some male-dominated fields but that are — as public subsidies might indicate — generally viewed as contributing to the public good. Supporting this theory is another PayScale statistic: Women were more likely to tell PayScale that say they find their jobs “very meaningful” than men were, with 35 percent of women and 27 percent of men describing their jobs this way.

But the commenters are even cleverer. Cathy A. reminds us that a better study would correct for occupation categories:

At 40,000 a year, a woman may have the same job as a man making 60,000 a year (or close to that). Your simple analysis fails to account for the type of job a person is doing. For 40,000 a year, a man may be a laborer. But a woman making 40,000 a year (or even less) may be helping to manage a research project at a university.

And “Another View” points out that men and women face different substitutes:

Women are accustomed to doing a considerable amount of unpaid work at home; that is, time away from the office is not necessarily time off.

Beautiful. Read the comments, folks.

Contributed to herstoryworld.com by Caroline Coan

There has been a lot of buzz in the news lately regarding the happiness of the modern woman. Surveys suggest that women today are less happy than they were prior to the feminist movement. So the question becomes, how could women who were tied to their roles as homemakers, with little opportunity in the workplace and less authority to make decisions for themselves and their families be happier than women today?

It isn’t that as women we’re not grateful for our newfound opportunities. And it isn’t that now that we have so many choices about how we live our lives that we feel overwhelmed by our options. It is the fact that many of us feel pressure from society and our significant others to play an equal (or greater) role to a man in the workplace with little to no break from our traditional responsibilities. Many women who have put in the hours to become top earners at their companies or business owners themselves are still held responsible for managing the household and being the primary caretaker for their children as well.

While taking on the business world and playing house at home, women are also now held to higher and more unrealistic ideals for their physical appearance. We live in a world where the thinnest of models are digitally altered because they just aren’t thin enough. And there are plenty of studies that demonstrate a direct relationship between a person’s weight and appearance and their pay rates. In the world of the modern women, a typical day’s work may include chauffeuring children to school and extracurricular activities, cleaning the house, cooking family meals, putting in 8+ hours at the office and if there is any time left over, mustering up the strength for a trip to the gym. We have to take care of the house and the children, earn a great living and try to look as good as possible while we do it all. It is a schedule that would test anyone’s limits.

It is, of course, not fair to assume that all women feel this way or that all families operate in this way. In some households, the traditional responsibilities are shifting to let the man hold more weight at home. Some families have even completely reversed the traditional roles and the man stays home with the children and manages the household while the woman financially supports the family. I would argue, however, that in large part, the shift in traditional responsibilities hasn’t kept up with the shift in workplace or earning responsibilities. And that leads to a lot of new weight on a woman’s shoulders.

This shift in responsibilities has consequences for women at all stages of their lives and relationships. Mothers who are either married or single with full time jobs likely bear the biggest burden. The expectation that women should be able to do it all, however, can weigh on even those women in earlier life stages. Those who are just dating or are married without children aren’t immune to this type of stress. Just contemplating that such a life likely lies ahead is stressful and can weigh heavily on relationship decisions much before children become part of the picture.

There are likely many who would find fault in my concern about the issue and admittedly, it would only be fair to at some point also consider Men’s happiness during the same time periods. As I’ve already conceded, there are (or must be!) many relationships in which responsibilities are divided in a way that is equal and manageable for both parties. There are also likely women who really, truly feel like they can do it all and find doing so to be a great source of pride. For the rest of us who feel that doing it all is a little more than we can manage (or want to do) in the 24 hours we’re given in a day, we may need to see a further balance in responsibilities before we can be totally satisfied with and take full advantage of our modern day opportunities.

The NAWMBA conference in Disneyland was a huge hit! There were many insightful presentations and speakers and the career fair was not as scary as some of us thought.

One of the most impressive sessions at the conference was Commanding Communications by Rebecca Cooke of RoundTableau, LLC. As women in the workplace, we often struggle to maintain a balance of being liked and being respected by our colleagues. Rebecca honed in on some examples of this and provided clear strategies on how to be more successful communicators. Here are the highlights from her presentation for those of you that missed it:

Issues of Equality and Respect

• In general, women tend to focus on making everyone feel equal and respected. When managing women, they expect this. When managing men, this sets you up to give away too much power.
• The question is: “How do you maintain your personal style and still manage/lead effectively?”

Negotiation

• Women are normally indirect when they want something. First, state the objectives of the negotiation. Express each perspective, then negotiate.

Conversational rituals

• Women should avoid ritual apologies and ritual thanks. This always leaves you in One-down unless someone reciprocates.
• Don’t work so hard to soften criticism.
• Don’t overdo praise. Praise only when it’s real. It will be more impactful.
• Know when not to say anything.

Being liked vs. Being respected

• Women focus more on being liked while men focus on being respected. This issue is about expectations of behavior and speech.
• Men talk with certainty, make bold statements, interrupt others, dominate conversations, etc. All of these are disliked in women, yet they are part of the strongest “message” that sets men in the management role.
• Balance of being true to yourself and being respected, not liked.
• Understand that as a manager, you are not there to be liked. In fact, many of your decisions are not capable of being liked.
• Women need to work at being more decisive.
• Stop trying to soften the blows.

Authority

• There is a fine line between exercising authority and appearing authoritarian. There are some negative stereotypes with women managers. Are you giving directions or just being bossy?
• Focus on positioning: speak in terms of I/you rather than we/us.
• Be cognizant of when you raise your voice. Speak up with information/ideas rather than with issues/uncertainty.

Strategy for Meeting with High Level Executives:

• Make your conversation purposeful.
• Express interest in their career.
• Explore opportunities.
• Ask for advice.
• Focus on opportunities, not issues.

Night Witches: Russia\'s Three All Female Air Regiments

I’m not a proponent of war but I hadn’t heard of these, Stalin’s Falcon’s before.

A major function of public relations is internal communication and employee engagement. But without fully understanding who your audience is you will be unable to communicate efficiently with them. Two recent studies have been eye-opening for me and I am sure have been eye-opening for organizations as well.

Women in the Workplace

In an interview between Marcus Buckingham and four successful businesswomen, Business Week helped to uncover myths about the lives of women. Against common beliefs, women are not happier in the workplace, do not prefer to work for a woman boss and do not hold less managerial positions then men (37% of women hold managerial positions versus only 31% of men).

What is more, many working women view situations differently than men in the workplace. It is important as an internal public relations practitioner to understand these differences. For example, Susan Peters, chief learning officer at General Electric states, “I have found that when men are going to leave the company, they go in and say: ‘I’ve got this other offer,’ and they really are expecting that there will be a counteroffer. When women decide to resign, they’ve decided to resign.”

I believe that as someone who must engage employees, it is important to uncover myths and find the true differences between stakeholders. Similar to external audiences, not all employees will be the same. It is important to see where the differences lie and then communicate and engage each group in a way that they will relate to.

Gen Y and Social Media

A second interesting study by The Participatory Marketing Network found that members of Generation Y are actually more reluctant to give up emailing and texting than social networking even though, on average, Generation Y spends more time on social networks than any other online web sites. There have been a number of studies conducted and articles written about how to manage Generation Y. It is important that managers who may be unfamiliar with this generation read up in order to understand their needs, desires and habits. Again, it is impossible to engage someone without first coming to terms with who they are and what they are at your organization to achieve.

Oftentimes, public relations professionals separate audiences into groups based on need states. That is, in most public relations plans, the entire American public is not one audience. Instead, audience members are broken up by age, geography, state in life (relationship status, education level, parent, level in career, etc.), or any other means. It is also critical that internal public relations practitioners do not see all employees as one succinct group. Indeed, these two studies show that myths and stereotypes are not necessarily the case. And, just like the example from Susan Peters, an internal public relations practitioner may be in over their head if they cannot understand where an employee is coming from.

What other myths can you think of regarding people in the workplace? What mistakes will public relations practitioners make if they are unaware of these falsehoods?

    I used to hate those really sweet, nice, women you’d meet with the sincere smile and the warm handshake.  You know the type.  She bakes cupcakes from scratch, she’s attractive, well-dressed and helpful.   Something in that stereotype always just rubbed me the wrong way!   Behind her back other women always would say, “oh Janie, Susie, Kelly” since they ALWAYS seemed to have a name like that, “She’s so nice, so sweet.” And I’d shake my head and half-heartedly agree, but inside I’d think, “ugh,  just another Stepford bitch.”  I was the woman who reveled in being bitchy.  No one was going to take advantage of me. I was savvy and progressive and the world was my oyster.

    As I’ve aged though, I’ve learned that most of us are just juggling kids, jobs, household duties, hobbies, church, and responsibilities with or for our partners in different ways.  Some stuff fits, some doesn’t.  Some stuff gets done better than other stuff, and some of us have figured out that box cakes make pretty good cupcakes and that calling ahead to the bakery is sometimes even better.

    Most women are, like me, really are just figuring it out as they go along. So I’ve learned to be nicer, less judgemental, more accepting.  But I’ve noticed that not all women are doing that.  In fact, I am noticing that where women may have pulled together in the past, there is a competitive, “every woman for herself” attitude in a lot of areas.  Ladies what are we doing to ourselves?

    I read a recent poll that both men and women agree that it is harder to work with other women in the workplace.  So that means we can probably assume that if a fully qualified man and a woman apply for a job, all things being relatively equal, the man is likely going to get the job no matter whether the hiring manager is male or female because no one wants to work with us.  Thank stinks.  Especially for all of the single moms out there.

    I propose something crazy, different and completely off the wall.  I propose we do what men do.  We help each other and we even take it a step further, we are nice to one another.  The fact is women require more validation than men. If you see your female co-worker in a new outfit or shoes that are sharp compliment her!  She doesn’t have to be your best friend.  Be nice!  Being nice isn’t inauthentic or unprofessional or hypocritical.  I see women out there barely civil to co-workers. “I am not going to be a hypocrite they say, I don’t like her.”  Well, being professional means being civil at the very, very least. And being pleasant is so much easier than being sour, or is it just me?

    As for helping one another. Network, Network, Network with every woman you meet. Everyone needs babysitters. Women are married to plumbers needing work or you may need your roof replaced, your driveway paved.  As a woman you should never have to use the yellow pages.  I joke that in my hometown area if they don’t know my sister, they know my mother.  But it’s probably true.  And this is a population in an area in the hundreds of thousands.  If you do have a conflict in the workplace,  try to deal with it in as productive a manner as possible, and keep it between as few people as possible.  If you let it polarize your office, the polarization is likely to outlive the original disagreement.  

    I worked in an extremely large corporate environment where I managed the secretarial pool who happened to be all women.  They sniped and complained about each other constantly.  The men of the office found it hilarious and made jokes about the group.  And while it might have only been about ten percent of the group who was doing the sniping, the entire group  of women had the reputation and I am sure it was a reputation that would have followed any of the women had any of those men been asked for a reference.

My grandmother was a huge influence on me growing up, and one of the best pieces of advice she ever imparted to me was to always “act like a lady.”  That may mean a lot of different things to a lot of people, and in the past I don’t think I hit the mark.  But today I can tell you that I am closer to what I think it means than ever.  I am mostly nice. I am polite.  I am assertive but I don’t strive for the bitch tag anymore.  I lift up other women whenever I can. I compliment strangers, I network relentlessly, I give a helping hand whenever I can and I am grateful.

By Paola Salwan, Programme Assistant for Africa, Middle East and Europe at the World YWCA and Co-Founder of the blog Café Thawra

Everyone remembers Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, wearing her sharp suit, trading sneakers for high heels as she enters her office, struggling to reach the top in the corporate jungle.

With her determination to defend her idea and her position, she became the symbol of women, women that dared to venture in the male-dominated area of the workplace, and even fight back when attacked by abusive bosses.

Oh, how bad we all wanted to become high-powered women, women passionate about their work, who are not belittled, whose ideas are take into account. Women paid as much as men, and who do not have fits pf panic if they get pregnant, for fear of being fired or “replaced”.

I guess my generation grew up being spoilt by all the statements we heard while growing. All this Spice Girls thing and Girl Power could not be good for us. It mislead us into thinking that women, and what’s more, young women, were the newly appointed darlings of the workplace, and that the only thing we had to do was to study and work hard to be able to be competitive on the work market and be hired and promoted based on our merits.

Allow me here to quote one of my favourite author, Irish author Marian Keyes, when speaking on the subject of feminism and women in the workplace:

“It took a mortifyingly long time for it to dawn on me that actually all the hard work had not been done, and that now everyone was not lovely and equal. Not even slightly. It happened one afternoon when I was fighting through a throng of grey suits in the business-class section of a plane. Suddenly I wondered: where are all the women in their red lipstick and sheer tights? Nowhere to be seen. (Because they were stuck in the office, providing secretarial back up, drinking cup-a-soup, painting the run in their sheer tights with nail varnish because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones.”

The message Keyes conveys with such wit and humour is that no, sadly, women are still not equal in the workplace to their male counterparts. According to the observer of the Organisation for the Economical Cooperation and Development, inequalities happen both in terms of salary ranges, but also in terms of opportunities of work. This means that, all other things being equal (experience, studies etc), a male will still earn more than a female worker. This also means that some work fields are completely male-oriented, with no or little room made for women. Women, however much qualified, seem to still be confined to certain areas, with little perspective of crossing bridges.

In its publication Global Employment Trends for Women, the International Labour Organisation looks at the impact of the economic and financial crisis on the situation of women with regards to access to jobs and gender inequalities. The study explains the difference in wages between men and women by the overcrowding of women in low paying industries, differences in skills and competences, but also, discrimination. The study also emphasizes the unemployment gender gap, with women enduring a higher unemployment rate than men, and having more difficulties to access the work market. The female adult employment-to-population rate is the lowest (below 30%) in the Middle East North Africa region, even though it is worth mentioning that it has been increasing over the last 10 years or so. Women are also more prone to having vulnerable employment, meaning low-wage employment, with no job security or guarantees of any kind.

An important thing to keep in mind is that this is a global trend: from the overqualified underpaid secretary in France, to the vulnerable agricultural worker in Africa, to the underpaid female worker in the Bangladesh, women from all over the world have to face discrimination.

For decades, men have come up with excuses not to promote or even let women have access to jobs they’d like: women are less competitive than men, they prompt the company the lose money because of their pregnancies, they’re less qualified, they’re more likely to quit because of family life, their place is at home anyway, etc etc…Nothing new under the sun, discrimination rears its ugly head beneath the most distinguished excuses and pretext.

Men executives should start looking at the reality: studies have shown that girls do better at school than boys, women are more resilient, more patient, have better communications skills than men and are used to multitasking (what with juggling with babies, partners, friends, family, housework and work). They are as competitive and as much of assets to the workplace than men, and they deserve to be paid as much, simply because the principle of non-discrimination is enshrined in both international and national laws.

If only women were let in more often.

But it is not our job as women to wait for people to come and save us. Our fate belongs to us. We have to speak up to force government to vote for gender friendly working laws, to give job security to women who still want to have children while working (May I remind male readers that we’re just keeping our species alive by doing so?) and most important of all, to change mentalities towards women in the workplace.

Advocacy is a weapon we should dare to use for ourselves, if we’re to change anything to our situation.

…and I’m a Martian.  No no, I don’t want to be a man.  But, I’ve come to the conclusion that I generally prefer the company of men.  And a few special gals who don’t fit the typical mold.

I realize that I’m taking the liberty of drastically generalizing here, but why is it that women seem to be so threatened by each other?  We are constantly measuring our self-worth by the yardstick of other women’s attributes and achievements.  And we care so dratted much about how we measure up to these other women’s standards.

Women are masters of the subtle jab, and they take plenty at each other.  We are naturally suspicious creatures, prone to imagining other women harboring secret grudges….oh but wait, but perhaps it’s not always our imagination.  Often, the grudges are real enough.

If you are a woman, you never really know how you stand with most other women.  And their opinion of you could change as quickly as you can do something–anything–to become a perceived threat to them.

I’m still generalizing…but, women can be so damn catty in the workplace.  Put your typical man and your typical woman in the same confrontational situation with a coworker of equal rank and of the same sex, and you get two completely different scenarios.  Your typical man will confront said coworker directly and to-the-point.  Confrontation will occur.  Confrontation will then come to completion.  Thirty seconds later, confrontation is forgotten and life is back to normal.  Insert your typical woman into this equation, and the scenario is far different.  The woman will dance around the issue, sugar-coating it to the coworker.  Then she will let the argument fester, silently.  She will discuss the issue to death with anyone who will lend her an ear, save for that person with whom she has the disagreement.  However, her subtle rudenesses and strategic comments to this person will ensure that they are aware that all is not well.

Don’t get me wrong, men have their faults, too.  Many have an internal enemy known as EGO.  However, at least men’s faults are usually fairly straightforward.  I get men.  Women are just too damn complicated.

And so, I’ve decided that I’ve been in workplaces with predominantly female coworkers for too many jobs, too many years.  It’s time for a change.  Nothing personal ladies, I promise!