Over the past few weeks, millions of people watching Margot Robbie’s movie Barbie, which reached $1 billion at the global box office, learn that in the real world, la vie isn’t always en rose for Barbie. Women living in the real world already know this reality all too well.
Many women are fighting hard to get ahead while juggling career ambitions alongside a deluge of other critical responsibilities like raising children, caring for aging parents, and trying to cope with mental health challenges and feelings of burnout and exhaustion. The pandemic and more recent economic uncertainty have only added stress to what was an already tenuous juggling act.
Add to the mix headwinds of a tougher job market, corporate retrenchment of remote work and DEI focus, three years later, women are still struggling. In fact, a recent McKinsey report on AI found that women are 1.5 times as likely as men to have AI displace their jobs. Amid the generative AI boom, this doesn’t exactly help to paint an overly optimistic picture for women in the workplace.
Fortunately, the story isn’t all bad. Years after the onset of the pandemic, the number of women in the workforce has outpaced pre-pandemic levels, a “She-boom” if you will, and the pay gap has narrowed according to new data.
While this progress is encouraging, we still need to achieve some notable milestones before we can do a victory lap for working women in the U.S.
Keep closing that pay gap
While the “pay gap” between women and men is now the “narrowest on record,” it’s stubborn — women still only make 84 cents to every dollar their male counterparts take home with gap further widening for women of color, with Latinas and Native women making 57 cents, Black women 67 cents.
The job gains we’re now seeing as women flood the workforce may not do much to close this gap once and for all. Employment is booming in areas traditionally held by women, including nursing and teaching — but these industries are historically lower-paying than male-dominated sectors like construction and tech. Indeed, women comprise just 28% of the STEM workforce, which abounds with economic and leadership opportunity.
We won’t reach true victory for women until we achieve true equality — and women’s wages should reflect that.
…and close the leadership gap, too.
There was much celebration earlier this year when the Fortune 500 crossed a milestone, as women-led businesses represented more than 10% of the listed companies for the first time. That stat held: in June 2023, Fortune released its annual Fortune 500 rankings, and 10.4% of the CEOs on that list were women.
While this certainly represents progress, 10% is still a shockingly small percentage of leadership positions, and it doesn’t reflect the composition of today’s workforce. Women make up just under half of the U.S. labor force, and as of September 2022 they actually outnumber men in the U.S. college-educated labor force.
To achieve true parity, women don’t just need to close the wage gap — they also need to narrow the leadership gap. When the composition of top leadership reflects the composition of the workforce, women can begin to think about declaring victory.
Address inequalities at home as well as in the workplace
The “she-cession” wasn’t just the result of lost jobs in industries decimated by the pandemic (i.e., retail, hospitality, restaurants, etc.). The hardship women particularly faced was also exacerbated by their disproportionate assumption of unpaid childcare and household responsibilities.
In 2020, women took on an additional 173 hours of unpaid childcare — or roughly three times the 59 additional hours that men assumed. The imbalance in men and women’s domestic work is nothing new, but the pandemic exacerbated it — according to the World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, men in 33 countries worldwide spent about 19% of their total work time doing unpaid work. Women, conversely, spent a majority of their time (55%) in this same category.
Remote and hybrid work have made it easier for women to remain in the workforce, but these trends also might mean that women are always doing work, whether paid or not. This can lead to burnout and serious mental health consequences.
If women are to bring their whole selves to the workplace, they need support and equity everywhere they go — and that includes in the home.
We’re cautiously optimistic about the state of women in the real world
While we’re not yet ready to take a victory lap, we’re cautiously optimistic about the state of women in the real world. The first step toward progress is awareness, and companies, families, and individuals have recognized the need to achieve higher levels of equality between women and their male counterparts. Before we can truly celebrate, we need to focus our attention on gaining faster, more systemic progress for women in terms of their pay, their leadership opportunities, and their domestic responsibilities.
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