Women will outnumber men in managerial and professional occupations by 2030, a Washington, D.C., research foundation reported Wednesday, leading to a "dramatic reversal of gender roles in the workplace."
The Employment Policy Foundation traced the change to an emergent generation of young women who, in comparison with male peers, are more likely to graduate from college, are winning more high-paying jobs and, among one major subset, taking home fatter paychecks. Now at the lower rungs of American corporations, this cohort is poised to climb higher and higher over the next few decades, utilizing and reinforcing a mentoring network first laid by their mothers and grandmothers, the report concludes.
"It's just a matter of time," said Ron Bird, the foundation's chief economist. "Women will dominate not only the whole category (of managers and professionals), but also the top of it, as well."
The foundation's annual report projected that women will occupy 54 percent of managerial and professional occupations in 2030, compared with 49 percent in 2000 and 29 percent in 1970, even though they make up less than half the work force. That's partly because young women are now entering the work force at the same rate as men -- but into the top job categories more quickly.
The result, said Bird, who examined data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that college-educated women who have never married or had children make two cents more per hour than men in the same situation. While not statistically significant, that figure nevertheless marks an important landmark, Bird said.
The news is not all good, however. The report notes that women continue to trail men slightly in the completion of advanced degrees and in degrees in physical sciences, factors that could keep women out of the uppermost management ranks. Also, it defines managerial and professional jobs in the same broad fashion as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lumping together everyone from Wal-Mart store managers to teachers to Fortune 500 CEOs.
That's important because, by some accounts, women are concentrated in the lower-income portion of that pool. David Levine, a business professor studying organizational behavior at UC Berkeley, notes that women in recent years have increased their presence in the management and professional jobs in the fastest-growing sectors of the economy. But those sectors, such as retail, also tend to be lower paying.
For example, Levine said, in the medical profession, far more women have become nurses than have become doctors. Those jobs don't pay nearly as well. In retail, said Levine, "Yes, you are a manager, but you are earning less than the median wage." And nurses "are not poorly paid, but doctors are paid a whole lot more."
The result is an income disparity that could be tough to bridge, not to mention a glass ceiling that Levine thinks will be hard to crack. Today, he said, only one of the top 20 companies in the United States is headed by a woman, and it would be a surprise if even one quarter of all top corporate executives are women a decade or two from now.
Kathy Down-Logan, an entrepreneur from Los Altos, is both encouraged and bothered by gender workplace trends. On the one hand, she found "an old boys network" among the Silicon Valley venture capitalists she hoped would fund her start-up, especially after it lined up a multimillion-dollar client commitment in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.
But Down-Logan could not convince the investors lining Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to take a chance on her company. "People are investing in people they know," especially in the down economy, she said.
On the other hand, Down-Logan has watched over the years as a support network of both women and men emerge to help women managers survive and succeed in tough environments. "At GE, I was quite often the only women in a lot of different settings and there was definitely a glass ceiling," she said.
"The biggest problem for women, both inside and outside of corporations, is very much the mentoring, because women are building a new network and they don't have the reach and depth and effect of the male network. You almost have separate women and men networks. My best advances came about at GE, from working with men whose wives or daughters had been discriminated against and had their eyes opened and decided they were going to work with me to give me a fair shot."
Ryan Tate is a general assignment business reporter. Reach him at 925-977-8568 or rtate@cctimes.com
|
