New Wage Gap Stats for Managers...and they aren't pretty

Wage Gap Stats
 A quick post because I've never seen these stats delivered before. And I hope to never see such a wide gap again. As reported by the Atlanta Business Chronicle based on Bureau of Labor Statistics. The wage tap is over 20% in 5 sectors including 29.9% in the category of management, business and financial operations.

"The 7.35 million women in the management, business and financial operations category earned a median of $961 per week during the second quarter of 2011. The 8.78 million men in the same classification drew median pay of $1,371 per week. 

Here in Rhode Island, the Vision 2020 @equalityinsight initiative is working to engage organizations on this issue. What are you doing where you are?

Social Networking = Savvy Networking?

This headline from The Republic caught my eye this morning, "Social media helps professionals break through gender barriers". Being committed to breaking through gender barriers I read the article which describes a networking "savviness formula" i.e. the gender comparison of the percentage of profiles in relation to the number of connections they have. For example in the tobacco industry women account for 70% of connections, but only 45% of profiles.

Our focus at Leading Women is to help women understand the difference between social networking and strategic networking and we know that social connections don't necessarily equate to savvy networking. Strategic networking is about using our relationships in service of a larger outcome. For example, to what business and/or career purpose do we leverage our connections?

Our research indicates that men are perceived as much more strategic networkers while women are seen as better at developing relationships. What is your experience?

By the way, according to LinkedIn's savviness index:

"The top industries where women were deemed the savvier networkers, according to LinkedIn, were tobacco, ranching, international trade and development, alternative medicine and alternative dispute resolution. As for men, they trumped women in online networking savviness in law enforcement, medical practices, capital markets, hospital/health care, and cosmetics. Across all industries, both globally and in the United States, men took the connectivity prize, according to the LinkedIn report."

To see what else we're keeping our eye on these days, check us out on Facebook.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
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2 Steps Back and 1 Step Forward

Since last month when I signed Vision 2020's Declaration of Equality (please go and sign it here: http://www.drexel.edu/vision2020/get_involved/declaration/ ) the Senate failed to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act because the entire republican block including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted against it. That's the 2 steps back.

Now, for the 1 step forward - this week as reported in the Iowa Independent,

"U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for testimony on a more than 30-year-old United Nation’s treaty — one that was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 but has never been brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate for an up-or-down vote. The treaty, known as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW, has been called an international bill of rights for women and has been ratified by all but seven countries. In addition to the U.S., other hold-out countries include Sudan, Iran, Somalia and three small Pacific Island nations.

“CEDAW is about giving women all over the world the chance to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that American women have struggled long and hard to achieve,” explained Durbin, who led the CEDAW hearing as part of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and Law. “These are fundamentally American freedoms — the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — and CEDAW is a fundamentally American treaty. Women have been waiting for 30 years. It’s long past time for the U.S. to ratify this treaty and we should do so without further delay.”

Unfortunately, instead of highlighting the very real challenges that are faced daily by women in the U.S., Durbin instead closed his call with this:

“The U.S. does not need to ratify CEDAW to protect the rights of American women and girls,” concluded Durbin. “While more progress is needed, women have fought long and hard for equal rights in the U.S. and have won many victories along the way. … American women have rights and freedoms that far exceed those required under CEDAW — and ratifying the treaty would not change current U.S. law in any way. The United States ought to ratify the treaty to ensure our dedication to the protection of human rights around the world isn’t questioned.”

And, if that's the perspective needed to get the U.S. to ratify thereby separating itself from the Sudan, Iran and Somalia on this issue, so be it, but Michelle Chen aptly points out in a Huff Post editorial that ratification could cause headaches for our legislators on two provisions of Article 11:

"(d) The right to equal remuneration, including benefits, and to equal treatment in respect of work of equal value, as well as equality of treatment in the evaluation of the quality of work;
(e) The right to social security, particularly in cases of retirement, unemployment, sickness, invalidity and old age and other incapacity to work, as well as the right to paid leave"

If you care about legal protection for the gains we've made and further action on the family-friendly policies that study after study says are important for women's continued gains in the workplace, consider a call to your senator on this issue.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.  Follow her on Twitter.

Wage Gap and Lipstick (Yes, Indulge Me)

$$Wage Gap$$

According to the census bureau (and as reported by USA Today) the wage gap between women and men is smaller than it has ever been. But is this good news? I'd say not. The reason is that so many men have lost good-paying jobs...jobs that might never return.

Here's how related trends break down:

"Women have held their own or increased dominance in the skilled health care trades — nurses, physical therapists, lab technicians — that are growing in employment. Nine of every 10 nurses are women — same as a decade ago.

Men have increased dominance in the industrial and construction trades such as sheet metal workers, printing press operators and roofers, but those jobs are declining in numbers. The computer business — programmers, operators, hardware engineers — is the only part of the modern economy in which men outpaced women in the past decade."

And, perhaps the most important quote from the article:

"It's not good news for women to have men making poor economic progress," says Carrie Lukas at the Independent Women's Forum. "This isn't a gender war. If men lose, that doesn't mean that women win."

It is worth noting, that when I did a Google news search, this news was covered by only 6 media outlets.

On Lipstick

The cover of the October issue of Money Magazine symbolized women with a big smacker of a lipsticked set of lips. That same week a blogger writing as Rabbit Write invited women to join her for The No Make-up Week experiment.

While the two might seem totally disconnected, here's what I make of them. The premise of the Money article (a similar WSJ article and a CBS MoneyWatch report) is that women come out at the short end when it comes to retirement funds.

The reasons are many (read the articles to find out), but the one that no one talked about is this...

Women have to buy makeup...and cosmetics and have our hair styled and colored and get our nails done and toenails and buy jewelry and accessories. To sum it up, we are exhorted from everywhere to spend money on accoutrements that men don't (or pay much less for) and we make less than they do. No wonder there's little left to save! So, if we all went without makeup (and some other supposed necessities) and put the money into retirement accounts, maybe we'd be better off.

Women CEOs More Trusted

For the second year, the Management Today Institute of Leadership and Management reports that the overall trust in women CEOs remains higher than for men.

"Women rate more highly than their male counterparts both when it comes to employees having confidence in their boss's ability to do their job and also when it comes to being principled and honest. Female CEOs score higher than male CEOs in these areas by two and three index points respectively. But the really important differentiator is chief executives' knowledge of what their employees have to contend with in their day-to-day lives - female CEOs are seven points ahead of their male counterparts on this measure."

Everything New is Old Again

Having been around for a while, it gets my goat when the same old advice is packaged up as new advice for the new reality. Excuse me, but these ten tips have been around in one form or another for the 40 years I've been in business! You'd think that HBR and Success Magazine would know better.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.  Follow her on Twitter.

I'll Bet $250 Million

The Facts
Until last week, the largest award that I knew of in a gender discrimination lawsuit was a $54 million award against Morgan Stanley. That has been trounced by the $250 million in punitive damages and $3.3 million already awarded in compensatory damages (with more to come*) to be paid by Novartis. The jury found the company guilty of paying women less than men, promoting fewer of them and allowing a hostile workplace.

So, I went online to see a couple of things. First, how is this being spun by various media? Second, and this one I'd bet $250 mil on, the number of women on Novartis' board?

The Spin
The New York Times led with the fine, but in the first sentence highlighted the irony of Novartis' 10 years as one of Working Mother's 100 "Best Places to Work for Women" award (this is why I think the NAFE award is much better). Market Watch led with Novartis' dispute of the finding and Business Insurance called the award "breathtaking".

The headline that galled me the most was from the WSJ: "Hit from US discrimination suit looks manageable." Excuse me! If I were a shareholder, I'd want my dividend pennies from that money - that, oh by the way, could grow significantly. Let's see...5600 times $300,000* would bring the $253.3 million up to nearly $2 billion. Unless, of course, Novartis is successful in its appeal.

But money aside, think of the "hit" the women of Novartis sales in the US have taken in diminished earnings for themselves and their families - not to mention the harassment they dealt with.

The Board Failure?
But let's return to the money. Were I a shareholder, I would be wondering where was the board in protecting my investment? Were I a betting woman, I'd bet that Novartis' board would have fewer than 3 women on it. Why? Because boards with 3 or more women (and the higher the precentage the better) are more likely to pay attention to wage and career path equity for women. So, I looked on BusinessWeek's investing site and found that - as if its last update - there are only 2 women on the Novartis board out of 15 directors.

According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, 72% of surveyed companies have no way of tracking wage equity! One of the ways to decrease that number is to have more boards with higher percentages of women on them...women who can see the relationship between their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and a company's track record on wage and career path equity. Because one of the responsibilities of the board is risk management - and even if it's a small fraction of Novartis' revenue, I'm sure the potential $2 billion could be put to much better use than awards to defendants.

*Each of the 5,600 women in the class could receive up to $300,000 each based on the ruling of the court-appointed administrator.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Another Smorgasbord

Executing Executive Compensation
In a recent Bloomberg News article about F500 women CEO compensation, a compensation expert was quoted as saying,

“When you see numbers like this, one can truly say that the glass ceiling in Corporate America has been shattered,” said Frank Glassner, CEO of San Francisco-based Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. “I don't remember seeing women ever getting paid more than men.”

He was commenting on the fact that, according to Bloomberg, the 15 F500 women who were also CEOs in 2008 got a 19 per cent raise in 2009 — while the men took a 5 per cent cut.

This has VERY little to do with the glass ceiling being shattered. As several studies in the past have indicated (and later comments in the Bloomberg article attest) most of those women were earning significantly less than their male counterparts. This isn't a smashing of the glass ceiling, it's what could be called a "market adjustment" in response to wage inequity. To quote Graef Crystal, the analyst who crunched the numbers,

"compensation committees are saying we don't want to have any trouble" over underpaying women, "so if we err, let's err on the side of giving them too much."

A Peek Into IWiNs
We call internal women's initiatives and networks IWiNs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and DeAnne Aguirre recently provided a peek into the women's advancement activities at AMEX, Deloitte, Citi and Cisco. Read about them here.

Tearing My Hair Out
If I see another study that over-emphasizes interpersonal skills or personal attributes to explain why women are better leaders, I'll go bald! Not long ago, ASPIRE released the most recent claiming that women will be the leaders of the future because they self-describe as matching 8 out of 10 of the most needed leadership attributes. What are these? Integrity, emotional intelligence, responsible, takes action, people-person, aware of behaviors, change agent, true to self, visionary, inspirational. (BTW again as I mention in my book, No Ceiling, No Walls, the women do NOT match on "inspirational", although men do.)

These are not the criteria that get people into the corner office. They are nice, but insufficient. Along with them are the hard skills like business, strategic and financial acumen. As long as studies continue to under-measure these, the more women will wonder why they aren't moving into the C-suite!

Damned if You Do...Doomed if You Don't
This earlier Catalyst finding (that women are seen as competent or liked, but rarely both) seems to be turned on its head the higher women move up the ladder. A new study led by assistant professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that:

“In business environments, even if women are thought to be sufficiently competent, they are frequently thought to be not very nice,” said Rosette. “But on the tiptop rungs of the corporate ladder, competence and niceness may have a certain level of compatibility for women top leaders.”

Although both top executives and middle managers were described as successful, students only evaluated females more favorably than males when they were in top-level positions. They rated these women as more competent for having faced double standards and triumphing over exceptional hurdles.

Participants in the second study also rated women as more relationship-oriented because they expected top women to engage in a more traditionally ‘feminized’ type of leadership, an employee-focused leadership style that is increasingly viewed as effective.

Both the double standard and feminization of management perceptions help explain why women top leaders were rated as more effective leaders overall than men."

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

A Smorgasbord of News

Finishing my new book No Ceiling, No Walls has kept me too busy to blog (hey, that's an interesting title for something), so there's a ton of news to report.

Having a woman heading PR for Cadillac has turned women into social media promoters of the car. Looks like Cadillac has figured out that women are an untapped market. Read more here.

One of the aspects of leadership is using your personal greatness...and one of the components of personal greatness is the alignment of what you say your values are and how you behave. I love what Sallie Krawchek told a conference room of women MBAs about this. When faced with a difficult situation she asks herself:

"not what I think I should do, but what the person I want to be should do - what she would do."

Sallie is the former chair and chief executive of Smith Barney and later chief financial officer at Citi and chief executive of Citi's global wealth management.

Recently a woman told me she thought she'd like to move into academia - she thought it was a more benevolent culture for women. Heidi Brown of Forbes puts that idea to rest in this article about women college presidents. 23% of college presidents are women (happily up from 10% in 1986). 64% of men have tenure - another significant disparity. This reminds me of research done on women in academic medicine that found that women really do have to work twice as hard as men to advance on the academic ladder - more publications, more funding brought in, more years on each step.

We all know that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin both faced sexism during last year's presidential campaign. In Massachusetts, the subtlety of sexism is playing out in the battle for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. As reported by Joan Vennochi in Boston.com:

Therese Murray... looks for sexism under every political rock and finds it in every criticism of a female candidate.

“You have all these little code words; now it’s cautious,’’ said Murray, complaining about a word used by Representative Michael Capuano, one of Coakley’s challengers.

Sure, there are code words used to undercut women in business and politics, and often they are contradictory. A woman is too soft or too tough, too provocative or too frumpy, too young or too old, too single or too married.

How can Coakley be too “cautious’’ if she is also too “ambitious,’’ as suggested by Stephen E. Smith, one of Ted Kennedy’s nephews?

“It made me want to throw my BlackBerry,’’ said Ellen R. Malcolm, president and founder of EMILY’s List.

As Malcolm points out, “There are four candidates, and every single one is ambitious. . . . It is a code word in the sense that it is considered a bad thing for a woman.’’

Forbes' look at CEO compensation differences between women and men reminds us that although some of the women CEOs make significant income, the wage gap exists even at the top of companies. For example Lynn Elsenhans...

"was paid $2.2 million last year by $37 billion refiner Sunoco ( SUN - news - people ). Bruce Smith, head of refining concern Tesoro ( TSO - news - people ), which had sales of $20 billion in 2008, took home $18.6 million."

On the other hand, Carol Meyrowitz, CEO of TJX (think Marshalls and TJMaxx) makes nearly as much as Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE..

Fawn Germer wrote an excellent piece on Huff Post about the wallop women MBAs have taken during the great recession - they've been fired at more than 3 times the rate of male MBAs.

"Corporate leaders, who are mostly male, are turning back toward the tried-and-true. It’s not that they are saying, “Let’s freeze out the women and the blacks and the gays so us white boys can handle things.” They’re saying, “Who can help with this?” And they look around and see who’s around them, and well, it’s mostly white men.

“They are thinking, ‘Who do I work with? Who do I golf with? Who do I have a relationship with?’ While women have done a good job of cracking into it, they haven’t fully done it yet,” said McGurl, now president of Sutton Place HR Consulting Group. “I don’t think anyone is out there thinking, ‘I’m going to whack all these women."

But women are getting whacked."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fawn-germer/women-senior-execs-take-a_b_295229.html

25 Most Influential Women in Banking courtesy of the WSJ.

If you've been reading the Leading Women blog for a while you know that having women at the top makes a significant positive impact on the advancement of women in the company. Now, having a First Lady willing to speak out through the gender lens might benefit women in the country. As reported in MS Magazine.

" Obama referenced studies showing that women are more likely than men to hold part-time or small business jobs that do not provide health insurance and that women who do have health insurance are often charged more than men. "A recent study showed that 25-year-old women are charged up to 45 percent more for insurance than 25-year-old men for the exact same coverage. And as the age goes up, you get to 40, that disparity increases to 48 percent," Obama stated, according to the White House transcript. She noted that this disparity is especially troublesome considering that women still earn less than men on average."

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls (Dec 2009). She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Ode to Google Alerts

I love Google Alerts. They keep me up to date on what's happening with women around the country and around the globe. And sometimes what's happening is pretty funny. Just today, the alerts offered this contradictory content.

Women are doing great! (As reported here in Training & Development magazine.)

"In 1968 the standing of women in the labor force was deteriorating to the point that President Lyndon B. Johnson described the underutilization of women’s skills as “the most tragic and the most senseless waste of this century, a waste we can no longer afford.”

Forty years later, the outlook is quite the opposite. More than 1 billion women constitute nearly half of the global workforce today, and many are confident executives who embrace challenges to advance.

Six out of 10 female executives believe that their careers are successful or very successful, and 81 percent of these women take on additional responsibilities and complexity to advance their careers, according to a recent Accenture study..."

So, I went looking for more information and found that the subheading of the Accenture study was "half of women feel insufficiently challenged in spite of confidence in skills". Strange that T&D put a positive spin on the report. BUT to me the most important finding is this: Men overall were more likely than women to say they have asked for pay raises (56 percent vs. 48 percent) and promotions (42 percent vs. 37 percent).

Women are doing poorly! (As reported here by the Epoch Times.)

"With products sold in almost every country in the world, Coca-Cola management strongly believes in the diversity of its workforce. The company’s management personnel is drawn from many countries including Australia, Colombia, France, Ireland, Lebanon, Liberia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

“This extraordinary diversity of ideas and cultures and beliefs is undeniably one of the most important competitive advantages we have as a business system … I work with senior women executives throughout our company to identify strategies to attract and develop more women into leadership positions,” said in his speech.

Kent was appalled as women managers are almost nonexistent in the bottling and distribution companies Coca-Cola engages.

Coca-Cola is now seeking to address a lack of gender diversity, after Kent learned that there are only two female senior executives and just two women in charge of bottling companies around the world, none of them in the United States..."

And another alert suggested that if you want advice on how to remedy bad news (like that about Coke's bottling and distribution companies) you should ask a man (like the one who wrote 21 Ways Women in Management Shoot Themselves in the Foot). There's something about this that just rubs me the wrong way.

UPDATE: New spin on prior post.
Q. Why do women MBAs earn less than their male counterparts?
A. Motherhood - although, the article title says its because "women work less" GRRRR. From NY Times Weekend.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Women MBAs Earn Less (Why am I Not Surprised?)

I didn't remember that the Equal Pay Act was signed by President Kennedy in 1963. I was reminded while creating a speech for Women's History Month. My...how far we haven't come.

In yet another report on unequal pay (thank you Lilly Ledbetter for putting teeth into the Act), The Economist is reporting on a study on the earnings of men and women MBAs. From the National Bureau of Economic Research:

"The authors tracked the earnings of 1,600 MBAs who graduated from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business between 1990 and 2006; they attribute the differences to choice of subjects (women took fewer finance courses), that women’s careers were subject to more interruptions, and that the women worked fewer hours than the men.

The main underlying reason for the second and third of these explanations is that once women MBAs had children, many cut back on hours, or dropped out—13% of the women in the study were not working at all ten years after graduating, while the corresponding figure for men was a mere 1%. The researchers stress that active discrimination is unlikely to have played much of a role in the pay gap—but the continued influence of gender roles in determining career paths is clear." (e.a.)

I beg to differ...women, weigh in: is thinking that the belief that "women take care and men take charge" counts as "active discrimination"? Do you think active discrimination still impacts career advancement?...wages?
Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Thank You Lilly Ledbetter!

"Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue, it's a family issue ... And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination."

President Barack Obama
on the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Power to close the wage gap. Holding managers' and HR departments' feet to the fire to ensure equal pay. I'm giddy!

Read more here.

This and That

Revisiting old news.

What would you think if you read this title: "Best-paid executives: the gender gap exaggerated"? Well, if you were a normal reader of English, you'd think that the gender gap between the best-paid men and best-paid women was smaller than thought.

Funny, the accompanying article (accompanying the 2007 Fortune most powerful women in business) reported this:

"Altogether, the top 25 highest-paid men made $1.3 billion in 2006, 4.35 times more than the top 25 best-paid women. And no woman cracked the ranks of top 25 highest-paid executives overall -- 25th on that list was Alan Schwartz, president and co-COO of Bear Stearns, who earned $37.3 million last year.

Indeed, Cruz, the top-earning woman, made just 22 percent of what the No. 1-ranked male executive, Nardelli, earned - a far greater discrepancy than the 75 percent managers and professionals overall experience.

"Women don't seem to be able to get on that same bandwagon," said Vicky Lovell, director of employment and work life programs at the Institute for Women's Policy Research in D.C.

"Women at (the highest) level face the same kinds of obstacles that women do throughout the workforce but there may be a more cumulative effect," Lovell explained.

That's due, in part, from the compounded impact of being offered less in compensation and not being given same opportunities over the course of a long corporate career, she said."

Makes me wonder what the editor was thinking with that headline!