New Workplace Reality: This is a Woman's World
by Maria Meyers
Many businesses have come to realize that male-dominated leadership may be producing a drag on the company's bottom line.
Growing up, I remember my brothers saying that they wouldn’t do the dishes because “that was women’s work.” Luckily for me, my wise mother firmly set them straight and educated all of us in the process. The definition of “women’s work” has changed significantly since then.
For the first time in history, women comprise more than half of the U.S. work force and now hold the majority of middle management jobs, nearly doubling this statistic since 1980. Bachelor’s and master’s degrees, a portent of future affluence, are earned by females at a rate of 3-to-2 over their male counterparts. And, women are responsible for 73 percent of all consumer decisions in America.
It was the recent recession that tipped the scales, with male-dominated industries like manufacturing and construction sending more males to the unemployment lines than females. This “man-cession” is also seeing more males opting out of the job search and choosing not to return to the work force.
According to “The End of Men,” in The Atlantic, women now occupy 54 percent of the banking and insurance positions and make up 45 percent of law associates and 30 percent of our physicians. Even veterinarians have tipped the scale to primarily female. The only fields where women are slow in closing the gap are in the engineering and hard sciences, although these percentages are shifting, as well. Extrapolate this to understand that women are making the country’s financial decisions and writing its laws.
More and more, women own and operate America’s small businesses, accounting for 55 percent of new startups and leading the statistics in new firm growth. Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent; U.S. firms overall grew by 7 percent. Studies by the Women’s Center for Business Research peg the economic impact of women-owned business at $2.8 trillion annually, contributing more than 23 million or 16 percent of all U.S. jobs. “If U.S.-based women-owned businesses were their own country, they would have the 5th-largest GDP in the world, trailing closely behind Germany, and ahead of countries including France, United Kingdom and Italy,” says the center.
There are two areas, however, where women are still not keeping up: pay equity and seats at the very top of the biggest organizations.
Today, women still make roughly 20 percent less than their male peers, although this statistic has dropped significantly from the 40 percent differential in 1980. The reasons for this are debated. A variety of studies suggest that this may be related to the role of women as primary care-givers, causing women to be less likely to work continuously and to make career choices that balance home responsibilities. When factors like family and labor force experience are taken into account, however, the gap still exists, which may point toward systemic discrimination as one of the explanations.
But young women are making strides in pay equity and this generation may put that trend behind us once and for all. A recent study by Research Advisors shows that in 2008, single, childless women between ages 22 and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities, with incomes that were 8 percent greater on average. Why? Because more women have college degrees than men and are now beating them out at commanding the higher-paying jobs.
Although well-educated and driven, women still run less than 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies and hold only 15 percent of the board seats. A trend that may well be changing. If these big organizations want to drive profit to the bottom line, they will take notice of word from New York-based nonprofit Catalyst Inc. that “companies with more women board members, on average, significantly outperform those with fewer women, by 53 percent on Return on Equity, 42 percent on Return on Sales, and a whopping 66 percent of Return on Invested Capital.”
In a white collar, knowledge-economy world, women’s work is now corporate work. Expect women in today’s management and executive positions to quickly gain experience and shatter the glass ceiling. Watch these women put their mark on business as they bring their own personal insight into aspects of the consumer and innovative solutions that balance work and home life. 
Maria Meyers is director of the UMKC Innovation Center and founding director of KCSourceLink.
P | 816.235.6112
E | meyersme@umkc.edu