This question keeps coming back to mind again and again but I haven’t really found anything that’s really close to an answer. A lot of my politically engaged friends on Facebook like to post different videos about how women are thought of as the caregivers in the family and that there is pretty much a cultural thought process that most women are thought of as mothers above all else. I also enjoy a lot of stuff about how a lot of women are discouraged from the STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) fields because it’s a boys club and they “shouldn’t even try.” And lord, don’t even get these ladies started on the glass ceiling or the gender pay gap. “Did you know only 21 CEOs out of all Fortune 500 companies are women?” (If anyone’s keeping score at home, there are only 6 black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies at the time of writing)
Their complaints make sense, but they also don’t seem to really hit the mark. Yes, I would like to see a society without cultural norms where it is completely normal for a woman to do whatever the hell job she wants, but I don’t think that’ll ever be the case. Is there a certain point where it’s no longer society’s fault or the glass ceiling’s fault? At what point do you just need to look at yourself and say “Maybe the reason I’m not a woman CEO is my fault.” I don’t want to poison the well before the conversation even starts, but I feel that there’s some Appalachian coal miners or black inner city kids who have more of a bone to pick about society determining the course of their life than most feminists do.
Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a total asshole who doesn’t understand women’s struggles because I’m a white heterosexual male. I’d like to find some answers either which way, though.
This isn’t a valid comparison - women make up 50% of the population. Blacks, only 12.5. So, very roughly, women are proportionally just as shit upon, by those figures, or even a little worse-off (4x6=24) . Not that it’s a competition.
And IMO, no, we’re not there yet. Some previously-oppressed groups can no longer rightly claim to be oppressed in the modern world (in the US, I’d say Italians, Jews and Irish would fall under this heading) and for others, this is definitely not the case. Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Women, gays, all fall under the latter still.
You can talk about equality when there’s an ERA passed.
In some ways you are comparing apples and oranges. There is a difference in the genders, particularly pregnancy. And while some women can work through it, some can not. So there will be a disparity between male and female in the work force. So the percentages do not speak to all.
What is troubling is that you stated that blacks were only a small percentage of CEO’s, also I believe they are a much larger percent of the incarcerated. That is a apples to apples comparison. Why is that in this day and age?
I’m not saying the gender divide is not caused by some form of unfairness, but it is ‘muddy’ as to how much is based on biological differences and how much is based on cultural oppression and unfairness.
Perhaps working on the easier case we will get better understanding on the more complex issue, and help the gender divide by knowing what is attributed to sexism and what is attributed to gender based differences.
It’s impossible to know how many women or black men tried and failed to be CEOs. Without this number, your question doesn’t really have an answer. All we can do is speculate. One workaround is implementing affirmative action policies for long enough that things become more equal. How equal is equal enough? I don’t know, but we’re not there yet.
Do you not understand that men and women face different roadblocks in the work place? I read a comment somewhere, maybe on this board or maybe on another, about how a company was looking for a new IT person, and it came down to two candidates, one male and one female. According to the commenter the female candidate had a slightly better resume, but both were qualified for the job. The commenter sat in on the interviews, which had several male interviewers conducting them. The interview with the female candidate was an hour and a half long with the interviewers throwing out a lot of tough questions. The interview with the male candidate was 30 minutes long, with a lot of general small talk and joking. The male candidate ended up getting the job.
I’m sure potential CEOs go through the same thing, except at a lot more steps as they rise up through the organization. Women will have to prove themselves and men will be greeted as part of the club.
Also, I don’t want to participate in the Oppression Olympics. Just because someone is concerned about women’s struggles in the workplace doesn’t mean that other people’s struggles are inconsequential.
More to the point, where is the line drawn between “I didn’t get this job because the person hiring was racist/sexist etc” and “I didn’t get this job because I suck.” I know there will obviously be some variance and that some of these white male CEOs or politicians might be there because of discrimination, but what if they’re in the position they’re in just because they did a good job and are awesome at what they do? I think it’s more irrational to think that the majority of these people in power don’t deserve to be there. They may be white men, but most of them are actually doing a good job. It’s not like they were simply handed down the office and just sitting around all day.
Why is the number of CEOs of F500 companies the measure of equality? Perhaps we should use another metric: the number of NBA players. Or, the number of people who are able to take a year or more off work in order to raise children and actually do so. Or, the number of people enrolled in Law School or Med School.
I think this speaks to a lot of different forms of discrimination. Some people are ‘in’ and some people have to be allowed ‘in’. This is not just a gender based issue.
Eh, I can half-way see it. It’s the measure of the top people in business who have had the most successful companies. These are the business people on top of the world. To have that mostly be white men may be troubling to a lot of people
It represents about .0003% of the jobs in the US. It’s a ridiculously small sample size. I would expect that metric to be one of the most lagging indicators of equality. But how does the US compare to, say, the UK, Germany, South Africa, or France with that metric?
I think the number of female NBA players is a pretty good measure of the lack of gender equality in the NBA. Similarly, the number of female F500 CEOs is a good measure of the lack of gender equality among top corporate management. It may also surprise you* to know that women are still underrepresented among medical school and law school enrollees.
*since we’ve had several years of women making up the majority of undergraduate degree seekers.
Isn’t that basic tribalism, though? I mean, it’s always been my experience that people identify themselves with labels and then, by default, exclude those without those labels. Is this a solvable problem through attitude/cultural change or will it merely shift the labels people adopt?
Like I said, I expect that to be a lagging, not a leading indicator.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. I’d say the difference is minimal, and more likely to be indicative of the simple fact that women get pregnant and men don’t, and probably reflects the shifting emphasis women of a given cohort place on family life vs career. I would not expect to find exact proportions of women and men in time-demanding jobs like those.
Ordinarily I would say that a ~5% disparity probably reflects the fact that women are more likely to opt for a family, but the constant upward trend in female enrollment in both fields suggests that the number of women doing so is insignificant (at least among those who actually qualify for admission.) In other words, the upward trend shows no sign of leveling off, so it’s still not at its “natural” level.
Given that men and women have different likes and dislikes you aren’t ever going to see men and women in equal numbers in all jobs short of some authoritarian government literally forcing people to take jobs they don’t want to make the numbers match. Equality of opportunity won’t get you equal numbers if the opportunity is for something unwanted.
So, I think it’s more important to try to stamp out sexist practices than it is to worry about the exact relative numbers of which gender has a particular job.
The percent of women who are in the workforce is less than the percent of men. 46.8% of the workforce is female and 53.2% is male. Of parents who work 61% of women would rather work part time versus 19% for men. pdf
Amoung younger women only 15% want to be a CEO. So the acutal population of women who could be CEOs is much smaller than that of men.
I’m not sure how much that means since it only includes women 35 and younger. Then there’s the question of whether it means women don’t want to be CEOs at all, or if it means their priorities are different because they don’t expect to become CEOs in the first place.
(Bolding mine). Oh puh-leez. I have conducted job interviews and if they end up grilling you that deeply, there is something wrong…with you. Moreover, being able to put people in a relaxed frame of mind and connecting with them is part of most skilled jobs.
The fact of the matter is that women are inherently inferior to men in most jobs, for reasons of biology. And the reason, their biology (i.e pregnancy) makes them inferior? Because the working world is (mostly) designed for a certain type of individual, specifically young to middle aged men. I don’t see too many octogenarians working jobs either.
To build on that, take an example. Lets take two candidates. Nick and Nicky. Nick is male, Nicky is female. They work in a competitive industry, lets say Oil and Gas, as say engineers. They have the exact same qualifications and experience. Both mid 20’s and married (not to each other). Now a job comes up which requires them to stay onsite for say 4 months. Before the selection is made, both of them are told that they are expecting a child (not with each other!) Tell me who is going to get selected. Of course its going to be Nick. And say, 1 year later another job gets offered and this time Nicky is not pregnant? Who gets selected? Nick, of course, since he is now objectively more qualified due to having experience. Now this is going to repeat itself, until Nick is in a management job and Nicky is…not
The fact is that woman are not a good fit the way it is currently is. The reason is that the same years which most people bear and rear children, 25-40 are also the prime years where you make your career. And women are at a disadvantage at that.
All I can say is that I find it unacceptable. I really hope that the way they working and social worlds are set up are altered so women can compete evenly. I will be the first to say, I do not have the foggiest how it will occur.
Similarly, the number of female F500 CEOs is a good measure of the lack of gender equality among top corporate management. It may also surprise you* to know that women are still underrepresented among