Is it still a man's world? Not for long

International Women's Day

(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Years ago it wasn't uncommon to hear someone say, "It's a man's world." Not so much anymore. It even felt strange writing the headline. And yet, despite our enlightened culture, there's still a glass ceiling for women executives, especially in certain countries, industries and companies.

International Women's Day is a good time to note that lots of boardrooms still resemble good old boy's clubs. Too many executive management team photos look like GQ ads.

But then change this big doesn't happen overnight. Careers, companies, certainly trends of this magnitude don't go straight up and to the right. They tend to resemble a bull stock market chart with high frequency ups and downs and a long-term upward trend.

Slowly but surely, this man's world is becoming a human world. The signs are there, both quantitatively and anecdotally.

In 1987 I made my first trip to Japan, along with six other U.S.-based managers from NEC, for two weeks of technical and business meetings. When Japanese executives presented the agenda, they cautioned that women would be presenting a few sessions. That was a really big deal for them.

While Japan still ranks dead last among 39 countries surveyed by Grant Thornton with just eight percent of senior management positions held by women, the culture is slowly changing. Japan aside, Asian countries grabbed four of the top 10 spots, with Thailand leading all nations with women taking nearly half of all top executive positions.

Interestingly, America is near the bottom of the list with just 15 percent of senior management positions held by women. I'm not at all surprised. Some time ago I did my own informal investigation of some big technology firms and found that 22 of the top 147 executives were women. That's right, 15 percent.

It bears mentioning that the survey actually showed a drop in women executives from 2009 to 2011. Yes, there are always bumps in the road, that's for sure.

Is there still a glass ceiling for women in business?
Is the gender pay gap a myth?

On the plus side, the Forbes list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women includes three U.S. executives in the top 10: Pepsi (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Kraft Foods chief executive Irene Rosenfeld. I bet you'll find IBM's (IBM) new CEO, Ginni Romnetty, somewhere near the top of the list next year.

And while more women advance to the C-Level, they're also starting more small businesses. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, women owned 7.8 million or nearly 30 percent of non-farm small businesses, accounting for $1.2 trillion in revenue in 2007. That's a 44 percent increase over 1977, twice the growth rate for men-owned businesses.

Meanwhile, myths abound, especially when it comes to the much talked about pay gap between the genders. Carrie Lukas, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, wrote a Wall Street Journal article entitled "There is no male-female wage gap." I wrote a similar article a few weeks prior to that called "The gender pay gap is a complete myth."

As it turns out, much of the gap is now attributed to the difference in employment choices men and women make. According to a U.S. Department of Labor report "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women":

This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

And yet, some people aren't happy about the changes in society.

When I lived in L.A. I used to listen to a radio talk show called Love Line with Dr. Drew Pinsky and a young guy named Adam Carolla. Who would have thought that 20 years later, Carolla would write the bestseller "In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks" where he decries the loss of America's masculinity with quips like "What we used to settle with common sense or a fist, we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers."

Now, I don't know if that's a bad thing. I don't even know if it's a thing at all. But when I read Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code," the one thing that really resonated with me was the premise that, in many ways, male leaders have sort of let their testosterone run the planet (my paraphrasing). Well, I don't know about you, but I'd like to see the women take a stab at it. Slowly but surely, their time has come.

[MaleMatters]

No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://*******.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.

That's because pay-equity advocates continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years," he says in a CNN report at http://*******.com/6reowj, "many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home." ("Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier...." at http://*******.com/qqkaka. If indeed more women are staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman. Yet, if "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers could get away with paying women less than men for the same work, they would not hire a man - ever.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an "employer" who pays them to stay at home.

Feminists, government, and the media ignore what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to:

-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, pay second — men tend to do the opposite
-work part-time instead of full-time ("According to a 2009 UK study for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 percent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time": http://******/ihc0tl See also an Australian report at http://*******.com/862kzes)
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://*******.com/3a5nlay)

All of which LOWER WOMEN'S AVERAGE PAY.

Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

Afterword: The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in The Myth of Male Power at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.) "A recent research study revealed that the average woman spends eight years of her life shopping [spending] -- over 300 shopping trips per year. Men, only a fraction of that." -
http://www.terryoreilly.ca/blog/show/id/78

Excerpted from "Will the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Help Women?" at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/

[ice444]

If your not straight, white and male you still come up against some barriers. (I wonder if it's easier to be a women or a gay male?).

I find that most companies are still "boys clubs" who are afraid to promote a women!

I still find it strange that people think someone is better at a job because their male/female - it should go to the best candidate (it is getting better, but there still is a glass ceiling at some companies!).

[jp3smiles]

Forgive me if I remain skeptical of the Bush administration conclusion that no corrective action is needed to address the wage gap of 21.5%.

But, the credentials of the top three execs at CONSAD appear to be very solid, so I'll need to read the full 95 page report by Bush's Labor Department more carefully before I can comment more fully.

[daffy64]

I'd be more inclined to agree with equality if women were to roof houses and take out the garbage once in a while.