Women fight for same chances as male co-workers possess

by Jenna-Leigh Tracy TRA99010@BYUI.EDU Scroll Staff

“Any manager needs to earn the respect and trust of their workers, whether male or female,” Larry Nadler, a Miami University professor of communication, said. “Is it the case that women managers have to work harder to earn that respect? Yes. Is that fair or right? No, it is the reality.”

Nadler is currently researching gender and its impact on salary negotiations. He has seen through his research that women have great qualities to offer in the workplace.

“Women are typically better listeners,” he said. “They are often more empathetic toward others. Women in our culture on the whole have very good relational skills.”

Helen Fisher, author of The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World, thinks that growing older will help women in the workplace.

“With [women’s] natural talent for web thinking, their mental flexibility, their intuition, their broad, contextual long-term perspective and their imagination, women have the innate talents to transform the business world,” Fisher said. “In some important parts of the economy, they will even predominate, becoming the first sex.”

Fisher attributes the change of women in the workplace to hormones associated with menopause.

“Menopause causes levels of estrogen to decline, unmasking women’s natural levels of testosterone — a hormone regularly associated with assertiveness and a drive for rank,” she wrote.

Fisher, however, does not believe that women will start acting like men.

“Women’s natural talents, which began evolving in prehistory, will carry them forward toward success in the modern workplace,” she said.

Susan Wilson Solovic, author and speaker on women’s career issues, agrees with Fisher on gender issues in the workplace.

“Many women may not realize ... they have the power and the knowledge to change work for the better. The key? Hanging on to some of the uniquely female skills while letting others go,” Solovic said in an interview with the Gannett News Service. “Men are like Teflon. Nothing sticks to them. Women are constantly apologizing. And at the same time, women can’t take a compliment. They’ll point out their weaknesses, while men will brag about them.”

There are six female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies and 11 female CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies, according to the United Nations statistics report.

“The lack of women at the top of big companies might be explained in part by lingering gender bias in Corporate America,” Del Jones wrote in an article published in USA Today.

In 2002, a report was released by the Census Bureau that revealed “the wage gap between male and female managers has actually been growing wider,” Richard Goldstein, writer for Village Voice, part of a corporate watch group, said. “The Census Bureau data collected between 1995 and 2000 found that publicly funded professions such as education and health services narrowed the management wage gap. But in industries less subject to government regulation, it broadened.”

The wage gap varies greatly from the largest in Wyoming, according to the Center for Policy Alternatives in Washington, D.C., where women are only paid 63 cents for every dollar a man is paid, to the District of Columbia where women take home 88 cents for every dollar a male employee brings home, the smallest gap in the nation.

Iin Idaho the gender-wage gap is one of the highest in the nation, according to www.bradyforidaho.com

“Idaho women are the lowest paid in the nation,” Jerry Brady, of the Idaho Democrat Party, said. “[They] earn less than $6 an hour on average; they make half as much as Idaho men.”

Brady explains the cause is due to “divorce, which consistently leaves women worse off, more women working part-time and the consequences of women being the primary care-givers to children.”

Though Idaho is not the highest level of gender-wage gap in the country, Brady said he feels there are things to be done that will improve the conditions.

“Idaho is a low-wage, fight-to-work state built on the sweat of an uncomplaining majority who just get by, particularly in rural countries,” he said. “But women bear the greatest burden of this structure and they need to be heard from — if it is ever going to change.”