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Ruth Bader Ginsburg devoted much of her career to advancing women’s rights. Despite her heroic efforts to bridge the gender gap, much work remains to be done.
Women can be biased against women
According to an article on BBC, Catherine Nichols, a Boston — based author, sent a summary of her novel to 50 literary agents who were “overwhelmingly female”. She was rejected by 48. Two expressed an interest in seeing more of her work.
She decided to conduct an experiment. She sent the same material to another group of literary agents (also mainly female), but posed as a male author.
She received 17 positive replies.
There’s evidence bias against women is so ingrained in our subconscious that even “avowed feminists” harbor it.
The evolutionary basis for this bias was explained by Mary Ann Sieghart, who describes herself as a “staunch feminist,” as follows: “... if our society is filled disproportionately with men in top positions, we are going to associate ‘male’ with ‘leader’, ‘success’ and ‘competence’ and ‘female’ with ‘home’, ‘children’ and ‘family.’ This overrides any natural bias women might have towards their own kind.”
Gender bias is pervasive
A report by the United Nations came to these stunning conclusions after assessing biases in politics and education (among other areas) in 75 countries:
- There are no countries in the world with gender equality.
- Almost 90% of men and women have some bias against women.
- Almost half of the men surveyed in all countries felt they were more entitled to a job than a woman.
- For the period from 2010-2014, 84.6% of women exhibited “some bias” against women and 59.7% expressed “moderate to intense bias” against women.
- In the U.S., 57.31 of those surveyed held one bias against women, 30.07% held two biases, 42.69% percent exhibited no biases.
The World Economic Forum made these depressing findings in its Global Gender Gap Report 2020:
- Only 55% of adult women are in the labor market versus 78% of men.
- Over 40% of the wage gap (the ratio of the wage of a woman to that of a man in a similar position) and over 50% of the income gap (the ratio of the total wage and non-wage income of women to that of men) “remains to be bridged.”
- In many countries, women are “significantly disadvantaged” in accessing credit or financial products.
- Across the 107 countries surveyed, it will take, on average, 99.5 years – and perhaps as much as 257 years – for the gender gap to close. The report projects it will take 151.4 years to close the gender gap in North America.
- The U.S. ranks a depressing 53rd in “[T]he Global Gender Gap Index 2020 Rankings.” Iceland is first. Among the countries with higher rankings are Rwanda, Latvia, Nambia, the Philippines and Bangladesh. In the subindex measuring the gender gap for Economic Participation and Opportunity, the U.S. ranks 26th, behind countries like Zambia, Burundi and Madagascar.
In addition, the gender gaps noted above, the U.S. ranks only 34th in educational attainment, a shocking 70th in health and survival and a lowly 86th in political empowerment.
Is there hope?
The top 10 countries where women face the fewest obstacles to equality are Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Rwanda and Germany. Those countries demonstrate a commitment to gender equality that provide a glimmer of hope for American women.
Practical suggestions
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The first step is bridging the wage gap between men and women. Corporate leaders should follow the example of Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. He ordered a salary review of all 17,000 employees. The review found “glaring differences” in every department and geographic location.
Benioff adjusted salaries to bridge this gap, and ordered periodic audits to be sure the gap did not reappear. He offered this advice to corporate leaders: “In the end, the most important thing leaders can do to promote equality is to open themselves up, take an honest inventory, listen to people, and never be too proud or defensive to make corrections.”
If those running corporate America sent the following e-mail to the head of human resources tomorrow, how quickly do you think the gender-based wage gap in the U.S. would disappear? Going forward, the most critical part of your performance evaluation will be whether you have identified and eliminated any gender-based wage gap.
We don’t need 151 years to do this. It could be resolved tomorrow.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
