Editor’s Note: A version of this post originally ran in Ragan’s PRDaily.
The White House recently released a report showing that women still only earn about 75 percent of what men earn on the job. I feel disgusted but unsurprised.
Women have earned less than men since the government began tracking these numbers. In 1979, a woman earned 62 cents for every dollar earned by a man. In 2005 and 2006, women earned 81 cents on every dollar earned by men. That was the all-time high!
The word glass is used a lot of business management metaphors that use glass to describe the invisible concerns and plights of certain groups. The glass ceiling may be the most familiar. Recently, I have come across another term.
The glass escalator bounced onto my radar during my dissertation. This term describes the advantage of being a man in a stereotypically female profession. Christine L. Williams examined this phenomenon in four female-dominated professions: nursing, librarianship, elementary school teaching, and social work. Men who worked in these “untraditional” fields faced discrimination outside of their chosen profession, but internally they were given token status with great benefits. From Williams:
This bulletin just crossed my desk. A new poll this month tells us that Americans believe we’re still far from equality between men and women..
Okay, maybe it’s not earth-shattering news. But it is a bit discouraging that, given 90 years since women achieved the vote, we’re no farther in overcoming our gender gap.
According to our friends at the Harris Poll, the divide remains pretty steep. More than 63% of us think the U.S. still has a long way to go (and unsurprisingly, that includes 74% of all women, yet only half of all men).
In my view, “femme fatale” is out of date. She is one of those female types in the film noir movies, where the male hero (think Bogart, Mitchum) is trying to make something of himself, and his downfall, his Achilles’ heel so to speak, is a… woman, a femme fatale. Beautiful, enticing and sneaky, but deadly. His obsession with her distracts him from his goals and she can even make him do bad things. She is fatal, hence, the fatale part. He wants her, but she’s bad, mostly because she makes love to him, and it’s the ‘30s and ‘40s, and “good girls” didn’t do that kind of thing before marriage. She proves to be his undoing, and for that, and for being a bad girl, the movie script usually kills her off at the end.
With all of the progress made on behalf of women’s rights in 2009, one would think that we could finally receive an equitable salary.