Women have gained, but is it still a man's world?

   When Nancy McGlen was a young political scientist at the University at Buffalo in the early 1970s, she was one of just two women out of 35 faculty in the department.

   A male colleague said he couldn't co-author a research paper with her because it "wouldn't look right," McGlen recalled. Another, older colleague once patted her on her backside in front of the department secretary.

   "I think it would be fair to say, like many women of that time, my status was impacted by the fact I was a woman," said McGlen, now dean of Niagara University's College of Arts and Sciences.

   Working women say things have improved a lot over the past few decades, but they still struggle to achieve full equality in the workplace.

   In interviews for today's article, women from a range of job titles and backgrounds said they've made advances, attitudes are better than they once were, but challenges remain.

   Discrimination that exists today is more subtle.

   Some women said it can be hard to succeed in a working world where many of the rules … written and unwritten … were set in place by men.

   Child care is still a big concern for women, who bear much of the burden of child-rearing, and the lingering pay gap between the genders remains an issue. Further, the economic woes of the past year have hit women as hard, or harder, than men.

   And the rise and fall of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a presidential candidate … and the attention-grabbing debut of Sarah Palin on the national political scene … presented mixed messages to women.

   We'd like to hear from women and men on these and other issues. What are your own experiences in the work place? Do you think women still are discriminated against on the job?

   Why do child care responsibilities still fall primarily on the shoulders of women?

   Does the glass ceiling still exist? Why are women more successful than men in school, but still less likely to rise to the highest positions in the business and political worlds?   

   … Stephen T. Watson

   

Comments

[Al]

Yes, the glass ceiling still exists, but it is an amorphous one. Intelligence and skills are being recognized more and more. Women serve in the military, are astronauts, and lead nations, like Germany. But women cannot have full equality as long as the tactics and economic system of money and power exists as it is today. Nurses, teachers, female executives will always underearn in comparison to men because of the bias built-in to the evaluation and promotion systems. The day will come when real and equal standards, economically and professionally, will be decided upon, then equal opportunity will be more than a cathword phrase. To struggle upwards using today's measures, it isn't possible for women to achieve a class equality.

[Karen]

I, too, view things through a lower lens, being a woman.
GM here in Ft Wayne, wants to go to a 4 day, 10 hour week in order to help employees save on gas. All well and good.
Only thing is, a higher percentage of women here, are single parents. They rely on child care. What child care place opens at 4 am or earlier? What child care place stays open past 3 am? There are employees here, who live in Michigan, Ohio, and in Wabash, Kokomo, Indianapolis, former Delphi, Guide, and Allison workers who transferred here, to keep working, and who can't afford to move to Ft wayne. This move is not going to save anyone any money.
I've worked at places, as recently as the eearly 90's, where men doing the same job as me, with less seniority, got more pay. The boss's excuse? "He has a family." And I didn't? I tried fighting it, only to be told by a labor lawyer, that the backlog on such cases was so great, the place would be out of business before I got heard in court. Which is what happened. I simply quit, as soon as I got another job. I work in a UAW shop now, but still hear of such practices at non union shops.

[HapKlein]

My workplace experience extended from about 1950 to about 1996.

I did factory work in the early fifties and noticed that women, regardless of ability were assigned minor jobs with limited demand and invariably lower pay. Once, I was assigned to a machine to assemble switches. The parts were tiny and had to assembled quickly with use of a foot press to fuse the resulting widget. I could do about a hundred an hour and asked a foreman what was the rate. “350 pieces and hour” he roared with laughter, you got to be broad to do that work, men are too slow. I also learned that woman made $.75 less an hour than men on that machine.

In the late 1960’s I was a foreman and was asked to work with another man to request a woman who was otherwise qualified for a job in construction to withdraw her application. She was next on the list for an entry-level job. It was a task we were assured was necessary to avert having to duplicate bathrooms on construction sites. Honest.

Anyway the woman was built like a fireplug with obviously powerful muscular build. She was intelligent and avowed she just wanted active work outside. On the way back to my office I assured my companion that she appeared more capable than two of the men I currently had in my work crew.

Sadly they bought her off with a payroll position but within three years woman were filling those jobs nearly as quickly as men.

Shortly after that a friend of mine, a real top athlete, related how she had tried out for the fire department. She described how in all the agility and strength tests the men were able to jump in and do the test with rarely a repeat or an instruction. It was, she said as though they had lots of practice. The women, of course had to be given lots of instruction and rarely could do the tasks half as easily as the men and consequently got lower scores.

Since I am blue collar I see things through a lower lens than sociologists but I have always blamed a bubba factor as one reason for holding down woman in the workplace. Men just presumed they should be in ascendance and consistently stacked the deck to ensure that occurred.

By the time I retired I had a brief stint as an EEO advisor. It was really a revealing time of my life for by this time I was dealing with first generation female supervisors. Who did I mostly represent? Young black females whom, I perceived, were thought to be much too demanding for their role in the order of things.

I was able to increase the role of communication in the order of things. All new supervisors hope to be obeyed more than listened too. But anyway I see woman are still paid less than men for the same type of work, are assigned to less demanding work and have to work twice as hard to advance in any network.

Sadly I have no solutions. But this sort of friction, male-female, skin color, etc, does burn too much energy and should not be.