Somehow I missed this one, but apparently a new Congressional study was release in January that found salaries for female managers declined from 1995 to 2000 in seven of the ten industries the study surveyed. In addition, only 12 percent of corporate officers were women, although women make up 50 percent of the workforce.
But writing in National Review, Anne Marlowe notices what the Government Accounting Office study actually revealed — that women tend to make far different career choices than men and, as a result, “self-select” themselves out of the highest levels of government.
In fact women and men in this study actually earned exactly the same amount until they reached their early 30s when women as a group began to lose ground to the men. Why? Almost certainly different patterns in child rearing. Women tend to take time off and look for less demanding jobs after having children, while men do not, on average.
As Marlowe puts it,
Three is a significant amount of self-selection by women away from the stressful, time-consuming, demanding careers that are the most lucrative, both because these careers are difficult to reconcile with significant involvement in child-rearing and far harder to pin down cultural reasons.
As for the cultural reasons Marlowe claims hold women back, she argues that women in managerial positions assume that a glass ceiling is holding them from succeeding, and as a result they do not succeed largely through nobody’s fault but their own.
She cites a survey of job satisfaction among Wall Street professionals to make her point. Women and men in the survey she cites had very similar job satisfaction levels. But when asked whether they agreed with the statement, “I believe that if I work hard I can make it to the top of my firm,” only 44 percent of men and 28 percent of women either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement.
Meanwhile, even though only 63 percent of women said they lacked mentors compared to 73 percent of men, 50 percent of the women said they were dissatisfied with the availability of mentors compared to 36 percent of the men surveyed.
Marlowe interprets this to mean that, “Men accept the game as offered and play it without attributing its difficulty to their gender. Women decide that if there are bad things about their work environment, it must because of their gender.”
An alternative view might be that women more accurately appraise their opportunities for job advancement than men. On the other hand, having an realistic view of your job opportunities might not make one ideal CEO material (having an irrational faith in one’s own abilities might be an important ingredient in climbing to the top of an organization given all of the obstacles).
Source:
Pride and Prejudice: Women’s career achievement and individual choice. Ann Marlowe, National Review, January 28, 2002.