Women Are Taking Over?! Not So Fast…
Photo by uncorneredmarket.com
I don’t read articles about the “progress” women are making and get excited. I read them and feel discouraged that things are not moving faster. I read them and think, if this topic is still newsworthy it’s too early to celebrate. When reading Newsweek’s, “Women Will Rule the World,” I didn’t take it at face value. I read between the lines and did some research.
Here are a few points of clarification:
- “American women are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases.”
According to she-conomy.com, 91% of women say that advertisers don’t understand them.
- “Of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are filled primarily by women.”
The two that aren’t, which Newsweek fails to mention, are janitor and computer engineer, and there might be more growth in computer engineering in the next decade than in all other 14 fields combined.
- “The debate over women in the workforce is still fresh and exciting in the developing world.”
That there is a debate over women in the workforce at all is problematic. Not only should women be allowed to work, they should also be making as much money as men.
This is the most informative paragraph of the article:
It’s clear that challenges remain—not just at home, but around the world. Women in the U.S. may be working more, and in greater numbers, but women are still just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and make 77 cents on the dollar. Even as women rise in power, gender discrimination is still prevalent in the developing world, with more than a quarter of men and women in Brazil, India, China, and the UAE saying they believe that women are treated unfairly at work. (In India, the figure is 45 percent.) There are also cultural constraints that limit women’s upward mobility: in China and Russia, for example, extreme jobs (requiring 71 and 73 hours of work a week, respectively) are a challenge to everyday life, especially child rearing. Societal disapproval of women traveling alone often caps female careers—as higher-level positions require more frequent travel—and in many countries, like India and Brazil, women simply feel unsafe getting to and from work.
As the friend who sent me this article said, “Women rule the world because we are willing to do crappy jobs at low wages.”
By the way, this Newsweek article largely plagiarizes summarizes Hanna Rosin’s article, “The End of Men” in The Atlantic. Rosin’s article is part of “The Ideas Issue,” featuring the biggest intellectual trends of the year as reported by some of the most prominent journalists of our time. Only three out of the 15 journalists that were selected for the issue are women.
