Cross-posted at Compassionate Societies.
This week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a series of new gender indicators, covering the presence of women in top corporate jobs and parliaments, the gender wage gap, and entrepreneurship.
Despite efforts in many countries to promote their participation on boards, women are still under-represented in top corporate jobs. On average, women make up 10% of board members. The United States is only 2% higher at 12%. Quite a few countries do better. The highest is highest is Norway, at close to 40%, due to a mandatory quota introduced in 2006. In Sweden, France, Slovak Republic and Finland the proportion of women on boards is between 15% and 20%, while in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands, it is less than 5%.
The percent of women in the U.S. congress and senate is 17%, which is about 10% lower than the average of OCED countries parliaments. In the past ten years, the average proportions have increased slightly, but significantly.
The overall wage gap in the U.S. has been declining, but at 19%, it is three times greater than it is in Hungary. And it is about twice as large as most European countries. Overall, the gap has been declining:
Entrepreneurship is still highly gendered. The percent of women has been rising, but this is largely due to an overall decline in male entrepreneurs during the past 11 years.
If one considers lack of participation in power positions of business as well as government to be indicators of injustice due to social processes like glass ceilings that prohibit advancement, then the U.S., as well as the rest of the OECD countries analyzed here, have a long way to go to reach gender justice, both informal and formal.
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Ron Anderson, PhD, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, has written many books and hundreds of articles, mostly on technology. In his retirement, he is doing research and writing on compassion and suffering and maintains the website CompassionateSocieties.org.
Comments 2
Yrro Simyarin — March 9, 2012
I wonder how much we will see this change in the future due to simply generational effects.
A quick google search has the average age of a board member right around sixty years of age.
In 1970, there were two thirds as many women as men in colleges for any reason. How many of those were going into a high-stress career of business management with the intent of climbing the ladder?
The inflection point for that enrollment was right around 1990... but again, assuming that an equal number of women chose that career path, almost none of those women are yet of an age where they would be considered for a board position.
I'm not saying that this isn't because of discrimination - I'm just saying that any gains made in equality may not show very strongly in the board members metric for another twenty years, as it is a position that requires a lifetime and specific decisions early on in that lifetime to achieve. I guess, it's really hard to tell just from the numbers whether we are looking at current discrimination or the aftereffects of previous discrimination.
SLOW PROGRESS FOR WOMEN IN OECD COUNTRIES « Welcome to the Doctor's Office — March 9, 2012
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