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:
In Hermina Ibarra’s Harvard Business Review podcast titled Women are over-mentored (But under-sponsored), she discussed a recent study where she found that many mentoring programs were not producing a true substantial result for women: promotions up the corporate hierarchy.
In essence, the women were “being mentored to death rather than promoted.”
Mentoring is a tricky and fuzzy concept that gets thrown around a lot. Mentoring has a lot of connotation. Talking to people about mentoring provides you with an assortment of definitions and descriptions. What we do know is that mentoring is a relationship between two people that will change over time. Sometimes it is formalized by organizations or associations. Sometimes it is an organic relationship that emerges out of a talk over coffee or bonding at a retreat.