women’s economic empowerment

Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, a sociologist at Ohio State University, set the world a buzz when word got out of her research on the wage gap over a twenty year span:

The good news for women is that during the time period studied, their average salary increased from 78 cents for every male dollar earned to 83 cents. But when Bobbitt-Zeher controlled for various factors, she found that the share of that gap attributable to selection of major had increased…When controlling for all available factors, [she] found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999, nearly twice as much of an impact as could be documented for the class that graduated 20 years earlier. (emphasis mine)

This wasn’t a shock to me as it was something that many of us who work to increase the number of women in science and engineering already suspected. So when Kate Harding from Salon Broadsheet emailed me for a response I wanted to make sure that people know that it’s not just as simple as English versus Chemistry.  “Harder,” male-dominated science and engineering fields, such as computer science, are paid more than female-dominated biological sciences, a “softer” science.

The real question that this wage gap research leads us to is whether or not the increase of women in a career leads to lower wages or not. In 2006, Paula England et al appear (I admit, I only read the abstract) to prove that there is no direct correlation between the increase in women entering a field and the lowering of that field’s wages. But a gendered wage gap is there. England showed it and now Bobbitt-Zeher shows it.

The AAUW also showed this wage gap difference based on major earned 2005 in their “Public Perceptions of the Pay Gap” report, but with a twist:

Ironically, the biggest wage gap is in science and engineering! But even with a 24% gap, women are still earning more than almost any other career field. *shaking head*

So what does this all mean?

There isn’t one reason for the wage gap. We can’t wave it away with one explanation (women’s choices) or correct it with one solution, even comparable work legislation.

For me there is an economic justice reason for women to look to science and engineering for a career. Wage gap or not, they will be earning more money. For women who have a gift for math and science and find joy in the work, go for it. But I would never say do it for the money.

Is it gender? Is it how much society respects the vocation? Is it unionization (teachers have smallest gap)?

Again, further research is needed. But whatever it is, women are getting the short end of the pay stick and all of these numbers are about the average man compared to the average woman. I can only imagine what the gap looks like for people of color!

Well now isn’t this interesting: Just as we learn that the world’s wealthy are losing faith in their fund managers, we are also learning that the VAST MAJORITY of fund managers are…guess what, surprise surprise…white and male.  Perhaps it’s time to shake things up with a little (say it with me) di-ver-sity on Wall Street?  You think?  Come on boys, why not just give it a try.

According to a new report covered yesterday in the Times Online (UK), almost half of the world’s 8.6 million wealthiest investors have lost confidence in their fund manager.  The report itself lays bare how the credit crunch has damaged people’s personal fortunes.  According to the article, “Investors’ lack of faith prompted a quarter of those with financial assets of more $1 million to pull funds from a manager or dismiss their adviser last year…”

Ouch.  But wait!  Here’s the good news:

Yesterday, nearly 300 people gathered at the Bloomberg headquarters here in NYC for the release of a report by my ladies at the National Council for Research on Women, aptly titled “Women in Fund Management: A Road Map to Achieving Critical Mass—And Why it Matters.”

To learn more about the report’s important findings, and the splashy launch, check out Kyla Bender-Baird’s live-blogging from the event, NCRW President Linda Basch’s oped yesterday over at the Christian Science Monitor, and the report’s very own website, right here.

My heartfelt kudos to all involved in the creation of this timely piece of research, and especially to Purse Pundit, aka Jacki Zehner, for making it happen, being a role model and postergirl for the advancement of women on Wall Street, and keeping it real.  Jacki’s latest on this all is up at Huffington Post, “Shattering the Ceilings for Good.”

And more importantly, what can be done?

Come hear the answers this Wednesday at the launch of a new report by The National Council for Research on Women.

From the release:

In the last year, we have all been stunned by stories of financial crises, of the sudden demise of long established institutions, and the failures of leading investment professionals. In this report, The National Council for Research on Women calls for fundamental change in the systems, oversight, and leadership of our financial services sector to ensure that the talent pool for the industry includes a diversity of perspectives, including moderating and cautionary approaches, to ensure a stable, healthy, and sustainable financial system. Specifically, they call for a critical mass of women in financial institutions, resulting in greater size and quality of the talent pool and decreasing potential for group-think. They examine the proven benefits of greater diversity in business; the historical and cultural barriers for underrepresented groups; and offer solutions to overcome those barriers.

With crisis comes opportunity – in this case, an opportunity to bring greater diversity to the rarified realms of finance and to infuse the global marketplace with new thinking, broader perspectives, greater transparency, and more sustainable solutions. A panel of experts will discuss how we can take this opportunity to promote women’s leadership in fund management and throughout the corporate space.

Speakers:
Melinda Wolfe, Head of Professional Development, Bloomberg L.P. — Welcome
Linda Basch, President, National Council for Research on Women
Jacki Zehner, Founding Partner, Circle Financial Group and
Board Member Emerita, National Council for Research on Women

Additional speakers to be announced.

Please RSVP to ncrw@ncrw.org

A simply-must-read over at American Prospect, “When Opting Out Isn’t an Option”, offers a four-part look at the under-explored side of the current recession:  How is recession affecting women who have to balance caregiving with wage-earning, and who make up an immense but largely invisible workforce, including nannies, maids and retail clerks?

Contributors include Heather Boushey, Ann Friedman, Dana Goldstein, Janet C. Gornick, Harriet B. Presser, Caroline Batzdorf and Elissa Strauss. Need I say more?

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up)

Was Wall Street’s crash due, in part, to an overload of testosterone?

More and more, people are saying YES.  And on Tuesday, The Financial Times connected the dots and called for 30% women on all corporate boards.  Says the FT, “If there is ever a time for women to make a decisive breakthrough in corporate boardrooms, it is surely now. Many boards, especially in financial services, are in flux after the testosterone-fueled excesses that led to financial disaster. There is a desperate need to rebuild trust, more easily achieved if boards better reflect customers and the public.”

On June 24 over at Bloomberg here in NYC, the National Council for Research on Women will be launching a new piece of research looking at reasons and solutions for why there are so few women managing money.  The report (which I’ve seen, and believe me, it’s GOOD) puts the issue in a broader context to look at on the lack of women in positions of leadership and power at financial services firms more generally.  (Read more about the forthcoming paper–which Purse Pundit is at the center of–here.)

Testosterone may have been just one cause among many for the massive failures wrought by the financial industry.  But is sure is nice to see this issue getting some serious play.

I am SO late to posting this today, but here goes.  Today is (still!) Equal Pay Day.  And this morning, the National Women’s Law Center released some new state-by-state data on the wage gap.  Seems we’re doing a little better here in New York (where women make 82% of what men do) than in my homestate of Illinois (where women make 73%).  But it’s all really quite pathetic.  I mean, this is 2009, for christsake!  Didn’t we all think we’d be a little further along by now?  I mean, seriously, if you want to talk about ways to stimulate the economy, how bout investing in women by paying us what we’re worth!  Jeesh.

For more blogging, raging, ranting, and informative discourse on the subject, go here. For some particularly great posts, check out the one at The REAL Deal, by Kyla Bender-Baird and the one over at Gloria Feldt’s blog.

If you’re like me, after getting all fired up about this issue, you’re gonna want to take action.  You can write to your Senators in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act, by clicking here.

(And thanks to the National Women’s Law Center — and in particular Robin Reed — for spearheading Blog for Equal Pay Day!)

Travels and graduations behind us, we’re back! This month foremost on our minds is the issue of budget cuts. How many times will history have to repeat itself before we get it right?

Question: What do cuts in services for disabled and vulnerable people, shoddy food regulation practices that are making people in some states very sick, the recent rise in crime and simultaneous reductions in police resources, and even Nebraska’s inability to provide adequate services for troubled children and their families have in common?

Answer: These recent phenomena can be traced in some part to the reduction in social services that is common in national, state, and local budgets when trying to prevent the onset of a deep fiscal crisis. While these phenomena are all deeply troubling, even more troubling is the fact that there is historic evidence that such cuts do not work and, in many cases, actually have the opposite effect. That is, when the state no longer pays for things like health care, education, and even local security, there are extremely negative consequences for everyday people, especially for vulnerable groups such as the elderly, the disabled, and children, who depend on such services for daily survival.

In the 1980s, the world saw the effect of these policies writ large in the international arena, with so-called “Structural Adjustment Plans”, or plans put in place by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which laid out various conditions that had to be met by countries in order to get a loan from both establishments. Most of these conditions involved the opening of markets, “free” trade conditions, and extreme reductions in state provisions of social services like health care and education; it was argued that such services should instead be privatized. In short, the prevailing sentiment was this: let the markets take over and we’ll see what happens.

What happened was that structural adjustment plans had disastrous effects, particularly in many parts of Latin America (where the period of heavy structural adjustment has led many to refer to the 1980s as the “lost decade”) and Africa (where 34 countries implemented some form of a structural adjustment plan in the 1980s). Further, women were the ones to bear the brunt of many of the negative effects of these policies. According to Dzodzi Tsikata of the Third World Network, this is because such policies “assume the unlimited availability of women’s unpaid labour and time and… have tended to see women as a resource to be tapped to promote the efficiency of free market policies and to deal with the short-fall in access to social services.” In many instances, this leads to an increase in women’s working burdens and social responsibilities. In other words, women are expected to shoulder the majority of the burden of reductions in state provided services. And this phenomenon is not limited to developing countries (and surely not when the developing countries in question are following the economic prescriptions of their Western donors and lenders) – critics in the US have also argued that domestic budget cuts have a disproportionate effect on women and children.

The USA’s neighbor up north hasn’t done much better. Kathleen Lahley, a Law professor at Queen’s University in Canada outlined in her gender analysis of the 2009 budget, key ways in which the Canadian government has missed the mark. Not only does her analysis make for good reading, it also demonstrates how women in Canada will not directly benefit as much as men will from the $64 billion in spending and tax cuts. Gender equity requirements have not been included in the spending programs – the result is a gender-skewed stimulus.

With so much evidence on the negative effects of cuts to social services, one wonders why this model is still pursued in such a fashion and, further, whether there are any movements (policy or otherwise) to reverse the ongoing trend, particularly as global leaders consider changes to international economic frameworks in light of the recent crisis.

As we can see, leaders in North America don’t seem to be the fastest learners, but what about the rest of the world? The World Bank and the IMF? In 2007 Elaine Zuckerman, a former World Bank economist, challenged the Bretton Woods institutions to improve their track record of short-changing women. For all intents and purposes, it seems that World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, is trying to rise to the challenge. At last month’s G20 meeting in London, he spoke of the Bank’s plan to develop a Vulnerability Framework. The fund would provide support infrastructure, agriculture, small- to medium- size businesses and micro-finance. Past lessons may just be paving the way to a more gender-balanced future for the World Bank. This plan would benefit not only men through infrastructure jobs, but also women who are heavily involved in agriculture, are the majority of small business owners, and represent 85% of the poorest 93 million clients of Microfinance Institutions. This effort would require a contribution of 0.7% of more “developed” countries’ stimulus packages. Maybe this is their way of making up for the gaping holes left at home through budget cuts…nice but gender equality should happen at home too.

Who would have thought that the G20 would bring us even more good news?! We were a bit skeptical at first; the official documents that come out of these meetings rarely mention gender equality. Oh, we of little faith! The G20 countries pledged to support the World Bank’s Vulnerability Framework AND addressed the human dimension to the crisis and the pledge to “build a fair and family-friendly labour market for both women and men.” Steps in the right direction. Let’s hope this will manifest itself in thoughtful gender-conscious budget cuts across the board. The entire Official Communique can be seen here.

Finally, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner called for a “new starting point” in hemispheric relations at the recent Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago (the country that gave you Blogger TAB 🙂 ). While much attention has been given to Presidents Obama, Castro and Chavez, we recommend you take a look at President Fernandez’s speech, which was in our opinion one of the, if not the, best (though we haven’t been able to find any links to it). Further, the Summit’s Declaration of Commitment’s preamble Point 6 is calypso music to our ears: “We recognize the importance of considering the differentiated needs of women and men in promoting and ensuring the integration of the gender perspective as a cross cutting issue in national and hemispheric policies, plans and programmes to be implemented in the political, economic labour, social and cultural spheres…’’

At the very least, countries globally have demonstrated a rhetorical commitment to gender-balanced recovery and development. It remains to be seen how these plans will be put into action. Judging from past experiences, the best way to ensure that these rhetorical commitments are implemented in practice is through the work of gender researchers, advocates and practitioners, who must hold governments and international organizations accountable for the commitments that they make in these international forums. So, please, join us in reminding local, state, and national leaders to stick to their commitments to build a more gender-inclusive world. Let the fiscal crisis be used as an opportunity to strengthen gender equitable programs – not an excuse to cut much-needed services for women, men, and children.

Image Credit

For a great summary of last week’s panel, Women’s Economic Equality: The Next Frontier in Women’s Rights, hosted by Legal Momentum (and starring Heather Boushey, Linda Hirshman, Mimi Abramowitz, and Irasema Garza), check out Kyla Bender-Baird over at The REAL Deal.

Check out this article in the LA Times, Recession Hits Male Workers More, which offers all sorts of theories about the big gender split we’re seeing:

A bona fide “man-cession” invites all sorts of social theories: Maybe women are cheaper to keep on the payroll because they tend to make less. Maybe women are better communicators, which helps shield them from the ax. Maybe women feel they have more to prove, so they get retained for trying harder.

To hear economist [Mark] Perry tell it, two factors far outweigh those theories.

This recession started with a crash in the housing market, and construction is about as male-dominated as it gets: 88%, Perry says. Manufacturing also took a dive: It’s 70% male. The male bastions of the financial-service sector got whacked too: Testosterone-heavy trading desks ain’t what they used to be, post credit crunch.

Meanwhile, practically the only major sectors holding their own are education and healthcare, which run 77% female combined. “Those differences account for quite a bit of it,” Perry said.

The other big difference: higher education.

Since 1981, women have earned far more bachelor’s degrees, collecting 135 for every 100 awarded to men, Perry said. At the master’s level, the “degree gap” is an even wider 150 to 100. Because unemployment among college graduates stands at 4.1%, less than half the rate of high-school grads, those sheepskins count.

And with so many more men getting pink slips — a misnomer, these days — women will make up a rising share of the labor force.

The article goes on to cite our friends Catalyst and others, noting that even with women making such dramatic gains, their numbers in business leadership are hardly skyrocketing.  Turns out neither higher education nor the economic devastation of traditional male strongholds are making all that much difference when it comes to cracking the glass ceiling.  Yet.

(Thanks to Catalyst for the heads up!)

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My latest at Recessionwire.com is now up: A Security of Her Own. In this one, I unveil my current plans for dreaming big…and face up to the fact that, given our respective industries,  if financial stability is going to happen any time soon, it might be up to me.