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Advocates not ready to sing about women’s gains

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By Terry Morris, Staff Writer 7:15 PM Saturday, January 29, 2011

DAYTON — Sexual discrimination against women in the workplace has declined in many categories since 1980, when the battle-of-the-sexes film comedy “9 to 5” introduced three women who had to break the law to get a break from their abusive male boss.

“It might not be as blatant, but it still exists,” said Melissa Josephs, director of equal opportunity policy at the Chicago-based national advocacy organization Women Employed, who hasn’t seen the recent Broadway musical based on that film.

She doesn’t consider “women losing out to men for promotions, or women getting hit upon at work” reasons for song and dance in real life.

“Things have gotten better. One big change we can see in this economy is that it’s no longer automatically assumed that if you have a family, the man is the breadwinner and the woman is caretaker. Most women in the workforce are balancing work and family,” she said.

“But we still have sexual harassment and equal-pay issues. I personally would rather see ‘Norma Rae’ set to music.”

That 1979 film was about a single mother who fought to unionize the textile mill where she worked.

Josephs said laws like the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978), the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009) have made a difference.

“People still need to come forward, which they may be more reluctant to do when the economy is like this. The laws still have to be enforced. Very few people want to file a lawsuit over issues like not having their job held for them if they take a leave to have a baby. They just the want the problem to go away,” she said.

The wage gap between men and women is narrowing but hasn’t disappeared. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women workers as a whole earn 79 percent as much as men. Women now make up the majority of the workforce.

According to the national organization The Wage Project, which held a “Start Smart” workshop on the subject at Wright State University, last week, a woman with a high school education will make $700,000 less during her working lifetime than a comparably educated man.

Based on current pay rates, the gap at other education levels is $1.2 million for a college graduate and $2 million for graduates of professional school (business, medicine, law).

The Wage Project poses this question to men and women:

“What would you, your daughter, your mother, your niece, your grandmother, or your sister do with another $700,000 or $1.200,000 or $2,000,000 over your lifetime?”

The wage divide is even more extreme for black women and Hispanic women.

The Wage Project considers wage discrimination a form of sexual harassment and one of the factors that leads women to leave their jobs, therefore losing opportunities for raises and promotions.

It finds that occupations traditionally identified as “women’s work” are still lower paid. “Are janitors really worth more than nurses’ aides, parking lot attendants more than child care workers, construction laborers more than bookkeepers and cashiers. According to American payrolls, they are.”

One place the gap is trending in the other direction is for female CEOs.

Bloomberg News Service reports that in 2009, women heading the nation’s largest companies earned an average of $14 million, or 40 percent more than their male counterparts. “In 2009, female CEOs got raises averaging nearly 30 percent, while male CEOs took pay cuts.”

Among those at the top were Carol Bartz of Yahoo!, $47.2 million; Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft Foods Inc., $26.3 million, and Indra Nooyi of Pepsi Co., $15.8 million.

Nooyi is number one on Fortune magazine’s “most powerful women” list.

But only 16 companies among the S&P 500 are run by women. The theory is that since executive pay information has become increasingly available to the public and the media, any board of directors underpaying a female CEO would invite bad publicity.

Most women who are chief execs also are mothers. The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2010 that 11 of the 12 on its list at that time shared both distinctions, “throwing a curveball at the mommy-track idea.” Susan Ivey, 52, who just stepped down as CEO of Reynolds American, has five children.

Women also are making gains internationally.

In 2001, only 9 percent of the 2,500 top government and business executives attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos Klosters, Switzerland, were women. This year, 20 percent were attendees at what the WEF calls an “unrivaled platform to shape the global agenda.”

Marie Wilson, author of “Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help run the World,” told an interviewer that’s still not enough because social scientists have found it takes at least 30 percent “to integrate women’s points of view into discussions.”

For more information about women’s job issues and advocacy, visit www.wageproject.org, www.womenemployed.org or www.eeoc.gov.

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