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Essay on Women in the Workforce
The importance of careers in the plans and lives of women continues to grow as people become aware that the working woman now has replaced the housewife as the norm in the United States. The absolute number of women in the workforce currently exceeds that of men. By 2006, 70-75 percent of all women aged 18-64 are expected to be in the labor force, compared to 63 percent for 1984. Striking changes in how women's careers are viewed have accompanied their increased occupational involvement.
Early models of career development aimed at men failed to account for the many factors that uniquely affect women's careers, including cultural and organizational barriers to women's advancement, sex role training, and competing work and family roles. Interest in women's careers has burgeoned in the past decade, however, producing a flood of research about women and work and culminating in the "career psychology of women" as a field of its own. (Paige D. Martin, Don Martin, Maggie Martin, 2004)
UNDERSTANDING SEX DISCRIMINATION
Women's career progress has not been commensurate with our increased participation in the workforce and work commitment. About 45 percent of women are full-time, year-round workers, compared to 65 percent of men, yet we earn from 24 percent to 45 percent less than men, depending on the type of job we hold. Professional level jobs offer no exception to the wage inequity rule. Women MBAs average less in earnings than men within a few years of graduation, women civil servants are concentrated in the lower paying grades, and only 10 percent of full professorships in academe are held by women. Why do women earn less than men? Three approaches have been used to answer this question. The first has been to identify patterns and changes in occupational sex segregation to determine if they can explain wage differences......
