Lisa Belkin had a recent piece in The New York Times Magazine titled The New Gender Gap. The piece compares the historic and current trend where women's status in the workplace is a reflection of men's situations.
The article notes that women will soon be the majority of workers because some are opting back in, and many others who never left are more likely to find and keep jobs than men. But Belkin theorizes that the reasons for this are not a function of the clout of women, but of the predicament of men. Gains by women actually display how far women have to go:
Primarily, women are still cheaper. They earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and in a flailing economy employers see that as an attractive quality. Women who are returning to the work force after several years at home raising children are particularly cheap. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has estimated that the penalty is 10 percent of income for every two years out of the job market, a loss that is never recouped. From the hiring side of the table, that may be a good bargain.
In addition, women are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted. Why this is true has long been an economic chicken-and-egg question — are these professions less lucrative and prestigious because they are predominantly held by women, or are they predominantly held by women because men are less likely to take them given their lower pay and status? But whatever the cause, the end result is that the “female” professions have not suffered as much this past year.
Makes one wonder if we'll ever be able to truly gauge when women are making grounds in the workforce. Even when things seem to be going well, this article reminds us of all the factors at play.
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