The Glass Ceiling
The glass ceiling, the metaphor used to describe invisible barriers responsible for excluding women and minorities from the highest echelons of corporate culture, is built on empty statistics and political correctness. As the daughter of the pay gap myth, the glass ceiling employs a similar pattern of statistical manipulation and weak generalizations based on inference.
The Federal Glass Ceiling Commission released their tome on the status of diversity in corporate America entitled, Good For Business: Making Full Use of the Nation's Human Capital, in March of 1995.
The Commission contends that, "At the highest levels of corporations the promise of reward for preparation and pursuit of excellence is not equally available to members of all groups."37 But with its anecdotal testimony, outdated figures, and reports from advocacy groups, the Commission's contention rests on shaky ground.
The Glass Ceiling report claims that "Only five percent of senior managers at Fortune 1000 companies are women," which, like the 72 cents mantra, has become a rallying cry for advocates of gender-based preference policies. These advocates do not point out that five percent is a threefold increase from the mid-1980s when women held about 1.5 percent of these positions.38
Furthermore, the five percent figure used so liberally is outdated. Catalyst, a women's research institute in New York, estimates the senior manager figure to be closer to seven percent, and a Korn/Ferry study found that women executive vice-presidents in the Fortune 1000 industrials and the Fortune 500 service companies accounted for nine percent of total management. Should current trends continue, women could reasonably expect to have as much as 15 percent of senior corporate posts in these elite corporations within 10 years.39
Ultimately, these numbers are meaningless unless compared to figures on the qualified labor pool. If women constitute only 5 percent of the pool of people with the qualifications of corporate senior managers -- typically a MBA and 25 years in the labor force -- we would expect women to be approximately 5 percent of senior managers. Advocates typically throw out figures like 5 percent without specifying a benchmark, implying that the relevant point of comparison is women's majority proportion of the population. Any figures regarding senior management in Fortune 1000 companies are meaningless until we know the gender composition of the qualified labor pool.
The Real Story
In our society, individual choices determine a person's compensation level, not gender. In 1993, forty-six percent of the American labor force was female, but the jobs they chose and the commitments of time and energy each woman makes reflect directly on her earnings and achievement.
In 1993, more than one-half of all full-time female workers were employed in the following occupations: administrative support; executive; managerial and administrative; teaching; nursing; and bookkeeping and accounting clerical. Most of these fields are not famous for high-yield incomes, leaving women economically less competitive by virtue of their independent career choices. Figure XIII and XIV show popular fields of work chosen by men and women. When we look at the two tables, we see that ignoring career selection and simply comparing average wages of men and women is not a comparison of like units.
Figure XIII: Popular Fields of Work Chosen by Women, 1993
Figure XIV: Popular Fields of Work Chosen by Men, 1993
Although for some the fact that women have tended to concentrate in traditionally lower-paid fields is evidence of discrimination, this cannot be inferred from the data. All professions have costs and benefits, pluses and minuses. While investment bankers may make more money than school teachers, few would argue that school teachers don't derive non-monetary benefits -- primarily frequent and substantial vacations -- absent on Wall Street. When humans are viewed as individual agents, instead of as the bricks for some elite academic's utopian construct, it is little wonder that women have clustered in certain fields. Simple economic logic tells us that if a field is, for whatever reason, attractive to women or any other group, this will increase the supply of labor, and, in turn, decrease overall wages.
There is another reason women have traditionally concentrated in certain fields. In light of the fact that many women interrupt their careers for the important task of bearing and raising children, it follows that women may choose to work in fields in which their skills atrophy slowly. It is simply an inconvenient fact that skills become obsolete more quickly in some fields than others. Dr. Sowell notes that a "physicist loses about half the value of his or her knowledge from a six-year layoff, but it would take a historian more than a quarter century to suffer a similar loss."40 Sowell continues:
Someone who is a good editor, teacher, or librarian today is likely to be good in these occupations again in five or six years. But a tax attorney who has missed five or six years of tax legislation and its judicial interpretation cannot advise a client as effectively as someone who has been keeping up with these changes on a day-to-day basis. Nor can an aeronautical engineer who has missed the development of the latest jet engines, or a medical researcher who has missed the research finding and advances in techniques of the past several years.41
As Sowell points out, women, given their consistent choices in favor of families, have chosen fields that allow for breaks without substantial economic loss. Rational self-interest, not discrimination, accounts for women's occupational clustering.
Still, the occupational groupings discussed above represent our history, not our future. Fortunately for independent young women in this country, their position in the economy has improved significantly, and will continue to do so, because of personal investment -- not special preferences. As women are having fewer children and doing so later in life, they consequently invest increased efforts in their careers. In 1993, women represented 46 percent of the nation's labor force and held 42 percent of all management jobs.42
Today's college students are tomorrow's leaders, and judging from the gender composition of today's campuses, tomorrow's leaders will include many women. Women currently outnumber men on undergraduate campuses. Moreover, women are moving into higher yield fields of study -- an unlegislated, unmandated shift in behavior that will naturally lead to higher individual incomes upon graduation. The proportion of women college graduates receiving bachelor's degrees in education declined from 36 percent in 1971 to 14 percent in 1985, while the proportion of women graduates receiving degrees in business and management rose from 3 percent to 21 percent over the same period.43 As for graduate school and professional study, Figures XV, XVI and XVII illustrate the mercurial rise in the number of professional degrees being claimed by women.
Figure XV: Percent of MBAs Earned by Women, 1960-1993
Figure XVI: Percent of MDs Earned by Women, 1960-1993
Figure XVII: Percent of Law Degrees Earned by Women, 1960-1993
Finally, to judge women's success in the business world by their presence in Fortune 1000 companies -- the premise of the glass ceiling myth -- is ludicrous. That narrow slice of the market is not representative of the economy as a whole; in fact, women are not waiting around the lower rungs of cluttered corporate ladders. Instead, they are using their own resources and talents to their best advantages. Women are starting businesses in droves and are increasingly responsible for keeping America's entrepreneurial spirit alive. According to a recent study conducted by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners and Dun & Bradstreet Information Services:
Today there are 7.7 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. generating nearly $1.4 trillion in sales.
Women-owned businesses employ 15.5 million people in the U.S. alone, 35 percent more people than the Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
From 1991 to 1994, the rate of employment growth for women-owned businesses was 118 percent higher than the national average. Employment grew by 11.6 percent among commercially active U.S. women-owned firms over that period, compared to the national average of 5.3 percent growth for all U.S. firms.
The diversity of women-owned businesses is staggering. In the 1980s women moved into agriculture, communications, transportation, and manufacturing. Between 1991 and 1994, the number of women-owned construction companies increased by 19.2 percent and the number of women-owned manufacturing firms increased by 13.4 percent.
Endnotes
1 Orlando Patterson. "Affirmative Action, on the Merit System." The New York Times, August 7, 1995, p. A13.
2 Christina Hoff Sommers. Who Stole Feminism? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 28.
3 Some critics contend the Declaration of Independence actually laid the foundation for a legacy of gender discrimination in this country by specifying sex in this statement. This is a willful distortion of the common substitution of "man" for humanity, referencing a universal man. As Thomas West points out in his soon-to-be-published work, "The Liberalism of the American Founding: Blacks, Women and the Poor" (forthcoming 1996), parallel constructions in works of the period affirm the Founders belief in the equality of all humanity and a genderless conception of human freedom.
4 United States Constitution, Amendment XIX, Section 1.
5 Civil Rights Act of 1964, Public Law 88-352, Title VII, section 703 (j).
6 Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America.
7 As defined by Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
8 This section of this briefing paper is based on the framework Sowell develops in the "Vision of the Anointed," section heading "The Residual Fallacy" pp. 37-40. The serious researcher should consult this book for a more detailed analysis than space permits here. 9 Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, Basic Books, 1995, p. 38.
10 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, unpublished data in U.S National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1994, table 239.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No. 32, "What's It Worth? Educational Background and Economic Status: Spring 1990." Income figures are for 1990 and include those with master's degrees.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 As of 1990, 9 percent of men with a bachelor's degree or higher earned their degree in education while 12 percent of women with a bachelor's degree or higher earned their degree in business and less than 2 percent of women held degree in engineering. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No. 32, "What's It Worth? Educational Background and Economic Status: Spring 1990."
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? New York: Quill William Morrow, 1984, p. 93.
20 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No. 32, "What's It Worth? Educational Background and Economic Status: Spring 1990," p. 4.
21 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-70, No. 10, "Male-Female Differences in Work Experience, Occupation, and Earnings: 1984," U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1987.
22 "Facts on Working Women." U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau. No. 93-5, December 1993 p. 8.
23 Ibid.
24 Robert Topel, "Specific Capital, Mobility and Wages: Wages Rise with Job Seniority", Working Paper No. 3294, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1990, as qtd. in "Facts on Working Women." U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau. No. 93-5, December 1993 p 8.
25 Ibid.
26 Includes currently married, widowed and divorced women. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1994 Statistical Abstract of the United States, No. 59.
27 June O'Neill and Solomon Polachek. "Why the Gender Gap in Wages Narrowed in the 1980s." Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 11, no. 1, 1993, p. 205. 28 California National Organization for Women. "Statistics on Women and Work in the United States and California." Guide to Women and Affirmative Action. May 1995.
29 National Committee on Pay Equity. "The Wage Gap: 1993." File Publications.
30 Unpublished data from the Current Population Survey. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
31 "Facts on Working Women." U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Bureau. No. 93-5, December 1993.
32 Sowell, 1984, p.93.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 O'Neill, p. 11.
36 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, as qtd. by June Ellenoff O'Neill. "The Causes and Significance of the Declining Gender Gap in Pay." Neither Victim Nor Enemy: Women's Freedom Network Looks at Gender in America. Ed. Rita J. Simon. Lanham, Md: Women's Freedom Network & University Press of America, 1995, p.8.
37 Federal Glass Ceiling Commission. Good For Business: Making Full Use of Human Capital. March 1995, p. 11.
38 Leslie Kaufman-Rosen with Claudia Kalb. "Holes in the Glass Ceiling Theory." Newsweek. March 27, 1995, p. 24.
39 Ibid.
40 Sowell, 1984, p. 94.
41 Ibid.
42 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
43 June O'Neill and Solomon Polachek. "Why the Gender Gap in Wages Narrowed in the 1980s." Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 11, no. 1, 1993, p. 224.
44 Sowell, 1984, p. 93.
45 Jonathan S. Leonard. "Women and Affirmative Action." Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 3, no. 1, Winter 1989, pp. 61-75. Leonard's piece examines the effects of affirmative action on women's relative position in the market and finds that "affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace" (p. 61.)
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