Metro

Half of women feel more successful than their man

Looks like the glass ceiling just got a swift kick.

Nearly half of all American women think they are doing much better in their career than the man in their life, according to a new poll.

Forty-nine percent of women say that they feel more successful than their significant other, and 78 percent feel they are doing well in their chosen field, according to the March issue of Women’s Health magazine, which hit newsstands this week.

“It’s great to see a finding like this,” said Lisa Bain, the magazine’s executive editor. “It’s a measure of how confident women are feeling these days, and how many more opportunities they feel they have in their careers.

“It’s also evidence of what we’ve all been hearing, that women have fared better during the economic downturn than men have, and that they tend to be better educated and more financially secure than the men in their lives.”

While there is still a wage gap in, which women make about 80 percent of what a men make, among young women under 30 the gap is gone. Women in that age bracket are making about 8 percent more than their male peers across the country, according to study released last year.

Bain sees the tide as turning toward women.

“Though there’s still a gender disparity, significantly more women attend college these days and they earn graduate degrees at higher rates, so that wage gap should eventually narrow even more,” she said.

Women also have high ambitions these days. The magazine poll of 900 women showed that women today don’t feel they’ve made it until they are making at least $100,000 a year.

Bain says that now that women are bringing home the bacon men aren’t feeling inferior.

“The feedback we get . . . is that the guys in their lives don’t feel threatened by their success—they’re more likely to get a kick out of it,” she said. “Maybe that’s because the women themselves are comfortable with it, as our poll showed—70 percent of them say they don’t need for their partner to have more career success than they do.”

Fifty-six percent of women also think they are more successful than their friends, and 51 percent think they are more successful than their siblings.

And women have one secret for their success – wear black. Fifty percent of women say they wear the basic color when they need to perform their best at work.