Gender inequality in the American workplace is still a pressing issue. Whether it is the gender wage gap or occupational segregation, women still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. As President Obama said in his 2014 State of the Union speech, “…I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds.”
After the civil rights movement in the 1960s, women gained much success in the labor market because there was more pressure to reform discrimatory attitudes and beliefs. It seemed as if gender equality was finally going to come — and quite speedily too.
However, it seems that the movement has been stalled.
In 1994, the labor force was 46% female; this percentage hasn’t changed significantly in the past decade. The United States was the 23rd country out of 136 countries in a 2013 report released by The World Economic Forum that placed countries in order of having the least gender gap to the most.
Why is the U.S. so behind? Well, there are still many restrictions in the United States that limit the success of women:
First, women are still expected to be able to perform domestic work, even if they have careers. In addition, employers can be reluctant to hire women or further their careers because they are aware of the various disruptions that can occur during a woman’s career such as giving birth and subsequently going on maternity leave. Joshua Gans, an economic researcher, reasoned that, “This creates spousal income disparities and reinforces household bargains with unequal duties.”
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
One solution is to promote paternity leave. Aon Hewitt, a management consulting service, found that a mere 13% of employers give employees paid paternity leave. Many men claim to feel emasculated or worry that their dedication to their job will be called to question if they take a long leave from work. Scott Coltrane, who is sociologist from the University of Oregon, pointed out, “There’s still a stigma associated with men who put parenting on an equal footing with their jobs. Most employers still assume that work comes first for men, while women do all the child care.”
There are various progressive countries to look at as models for extended paternity leave. In The World Economic Forum’s report, the Nordic countries, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, came in as the top four countries for having the smallest gender gap.
So, why have these countries been so successful? Let’s look at Sweden. Sweden has implemented many parental leave policies to change the old, outdated stereotype that says that men are the breadwinners, while women must remain at home to care for the children. “This occurred partly through respecting a long-standing practice of long maternity leaves for women combined with affordable, accessible and high-quality child care; to this, they added parental leave policies designed to encourage men to be involved in early child care,” Andrea Doucet wrote in an article for The New York Times‘ Room for Debate.
Douet added, “In 1980, only 5 percent of Swedish fathers took parental leave; 10 years later, it was just 7 percent. It was only when nontransferable and well-paid leave for fathers (also referred to as the ‘daddy month’) was introduced in 1996 that uptake quickly rose to 77 percent. A second ‘daddy month’ was implemented in 2002 and the numbers have risen to above 90 percent.”
Finding ways for men to still stay connected to the office will help promote paternity leave. This way, men do not feel isolated from their jobs, and they can still have time to spend with their newborns. An example of preserving the connection would be having male employees agree to do a certain amount of work from home during the leave.
Rachael Hannah ’17 said, “I think men and women are equal, and their sex is an insignificant contributor to who should stay home. I believe that…the situation and the people involved determine who should stay home. For example, if a family is having financial difficulties and one of the parents needs to stay home, the partner with the lower income or the partner who is able to work part time should make the choice in staying home.”
As previously mentioned, a woman earns a disappointingly low 77 cents for each dollar a man makes on average in America. Meghan Casserly breaks this statistic down even further in an article for Forbes. In 2012, the state of Nevada had the highest earning rate for women at 84 cents, while the lowest earning rate would be in Wyoming. A female employee in Wyoming could expect to earn 64 cents for every dollar a male employee earns. It is important to keep in mind that there are various factors that can influence the numbers. For example, there are certain levels of wealth in certain areas, which can affect both genders receiving an adequate education. Schools might not always have proper funding, and families might not have enough money to provide necessary educational tools to children, especially girls.
Promoting paternity leave is just one solution. “We cannot, of course, ‘sanitize’ the artifacts and media transporting traditional gender roles,” Ute Frevert wrote in The New York Times‘ Room for Debate. However, we can take it upon ourselves, both men and women, to teach the upcoming generations that the old beliefs and values do not translate to the modern world. We must become the leaders of this change.
Frevert added, “Mentalities generally change much more slowly than legal codifications and institutional policies.” Thus, we cannot expect that the people and the media will quickly stop displaying and believing in traditional gender roles but expect it to slowly take time as the next generations are born.
Mrs. Gallin, Chair of Hewitt’s History and Social Sciences Department, had a personal experience with gender inequality while attending graduate school:
“I met my husband on the first day of graduate school class at Columbia, on September 30, 1966. I had had a Fulbright Fellowship in France (studying at Sciences Po in Paris and teaching at the Université de Lille once a week). We both had fellowships at Columbia, mine a Woodrow Wilson. We were both enrolled in the European history department and both did well. We became engaged on February 4, and a little later I came into class with an engagement ring on (my husband-to-be wasn’t wearing one), whereupon my professor and advisor, John Mundy, said, “Oh you’re going to get married and have children! I guess that’s the end of graduate school!” (He was 60 then, which seemed quite old to me at the time, and born in London. At Columbia, he was a renowned medievalist, and he had been very encouraging to me in my work on the redistribution of land and spreading acquisition of yeoman status after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.)
To speed up the story, Columbia was verbally obligated to take on the scholarship responsibility for several students after the first year of the Wilson. Neither mine nor most of the women’s scholarships were picked up by Columbia, and when I asked Professor Mundy why, he said something to the effect of I wouldn’t need it anyway because I was going to get married and have children. No one said that to my future husband. There was conversation among some of us women bemoaning our situation; there was anger, disbelief, and disappointment. We took no action; however, the following year, in the midst of the student “revolutions” of 1968, a class action suit was successfully brought.
There have been many changes in the work world, although gender equality is far from a fait accompli. This brief story is an example of past gender inequities in the academic world. Much of that past is also now erased, but again, not totally – far from it.
This collapsed version of my graduate school story (I got my master’s degree from Columbia that spring, got married, taught at Dalton, and indeed did have many children). The ‘ending’ of my graduate school story is a very happy one, not regretted at all, but it shouldn’t have happened that way.”
Growing up in the 2000’s and in the United States, I’ve been sheltered from gender inequality for most of my life by protective parents and by my attendance at an all-girls school. I’ve never tasted the bitterness of gender inequality or faced discrimination on the basis of my gender. However, this is not true for everyone; my reality is far from that of many others, both locally and globally. It is alarming and unacceptable that the U.S., one of the most developed countries in the world, is still struggling to banish major gender disparities. We need to start setting an example for the rest of the world by acknowledging this problem and working against it.