No matter how well women are doing relative to men, it doesn’t matter. They’re still the victims of discrimination — or so they think.
This, when women today earn more college degrees and advanced degrees than men, and have lower rates of unemployment. How are the decks are still stacked against them?
The new Pew Social Trends survey reports that “Millennial women . . . are just as likely as older generations to believe that women face an uphill climb in terms of being treated equally by society and by employers.” Indeed, “Fully three-quarters of Millennial women compared with 57 percent of Millennial men say the country needs to do more in order to bring about workplace equality.”
On the other hand, Pew found that among workers between the ages of 25 and 34, women’s hourly wages are 93 percent of men’s. And Kay Hymowitz, author of “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” says that she suspects that gap would disappear completely were the data disaggregated between women who had children and women who did not. In fact, a 2010 study by Reach Advisors found that young, single, childless women earned more than their male counterparts in most metro US areas.
Having children clearly makes all the difference. Hymowitz says the “whole way the conversation is framed is wrong.” Feminists and policy makers, she notes, say that they want “absolute parity and that anything less represents real discrimination and injustice.” In fact, though, the lack of parity is largely the result of the choices so many women make for the sake of the next generation — working part time, taking time off to raise kids, asking for less demanding assignments, etc.
For instance, 34 percent of Millennial women told Pew they’re not interested in becoming a boss or a top manager, compared to only 25 percent of men. The reason seems obvious: Some of the Millennial women may already be parents, and many of the rest are still thinking about how to balance these issues down the line.
Hannah Seligson, the author of “Mission Adulthood,” says that “the 20s present a unique opportunity: For all intents and purposes women and men are equal,” because they don’t have the demands of family yet. But women are already thinking about these demands before they have kids. Seligson believes that men worry too, but “it’s not keeping them up at night.”
Like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who is concerned that women are “leaving before they leave” — not putting their hands up for promotions because they are worried about balancing family later on — Seligson fears that the constant media drumbeat on the “mommy track” is pushing women to worry about balancing work and family long before they really have to.
Maybe, but it’s the constant media drumbeat about supposed unfairness that’s making women think the decks are stacked against them at all. Consider, even though many women seem to believe the playing field isn’t level when it comes to wages and hiring, Pew finds that “relatively few working adults report these types of gender biases at their own workplace.”
In other words, the impression isn’t driven by what we actually experience, but by what we’re constantly told by others.
College faculty and administrators are among the most zealous marketers of the message that sex discrimination is alive and well in America, so it’s no surprise that, asked whether it is easier for men to get top executive jobs, 71 percent of college-graduate women said yes, compared to only 47 percent of women who were not college graduates.
The New York Times recently reported on the small number of women who hold powerful positions in the world of finance and how their success has been made possible by stay-at-home-fathers. These dads take care of everything around the house, allowing the moms to travel frequently, work late and not have to worry about whether a sick kid will keep them home that day.
The next time a Millennial woman demands complete parity in the workplace — even in the corner suites — ask if she is willing to become one of those women.
Are you OK with not being the first person school calls when your child is sick? Are you willing to leave home before the kids are up and come home after they are asleep? Would you travel two weeks out of every month even when your kids are young?
Until women say yes to those questions at the same rate as men, the goal of workplace parity is both silly and impossible.