Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski

decades, but in the past five years that growth has stalled.
    So if women are now fifty percent of the workforce, why aren’t more women in charge?

PROBLEM? WHAT PROBLEM?
    The truth is that the general populace thinks women are already leading across all sectors of the economy. “That’s what Deborah Rhode, a scholar at Stanford, wrote of this phenomenon about a decade ago, and it’s still true,” says women’s advocate Marie C. Wilson.
    Wilson is a co-creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day® and founder and president of the White House Project, a national nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to advance women’s leadership in all communities and sectors. The
problem, she explained, is that if people think women have already reached parity, the political will doesn’t exist to continue fighting for change. “Even though the majority of Americans are comfortable with women leading in all sectors, women’s leadership numbers are static at an average of eighteen percent across all ten examined sectors,” Wilson says. “When we have actually gotten small groups of CEOs together and interviewed them about why there are not more women leading, they will say, ‘I’m not comfortable—I’m just not comfortable.’ Some of that is because there are so few women, they think they’re going to say the wrong thing.” She suggests that men may be hesitant to give women direct feedback for fear of retaliatory lawsuits. And there just aren’t enough women leading to fundamentally change the dynamic.
    Wilson says that “the magic number seems to be thirty-three percent. If you have one-third women, like you now have on the Supreme Court, it starts to not be about gender, it starts to be about what each of us is talking about. Until you have one-third you are still looked at through a gender lens.”
    None of this comes as a surprise to women themselves. As columnist Lisa Belkin noted in a recent New York Times Magazine article, “Telling women they have reached parity is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it feels true.” Most women can tell you from personal experience that they’ve been paid less than men for the same work.
    Researchers agree that a lot of the gender wage gap is explainable. Women take time off to have children, so their careers
are interrupted and they’re not putting in the same number of hours. Women are the caregivers—they’re more likely to be the ones taking care of the kids, their aging parents, and their extended family. They also do the majority of housework even when they’re the primary breadwinners. Men will choose higher-paying occupations and women will choose more portable (and lower-paying) occupations that allow them to move with a higher-earning spouse. So conventional wisdom says women don’t commit as strongly to the labor market, and as a result, they don’t earn as much over the course of a lifetime.
    But women’s choices don’t explain everything. “What you find is that when you pull out all of those factors, you still have about forty percent of the wage gap—9.2 cents—unexplained,” says Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

SUBCONSCIOUS BIAS
    The sad fact is that both men and women are more likely to consider men to be valuable employees. Researchers referred to one experiment in particular that’s been repeated in many different places. Ilene H. Lang, a former tech CEO now at the helm of Catalyst, a leading research organization that studies women in the workforce, summed up the findings this way: “Basically, if you take resumes and strip them of names and all gender information, then take the exact same resumes and put a man’s name on some with links to a man, and put a woman’s name on others with links to a woman, and send
them out, hiring managers say that the women are unqualified and the men are terrific candidates. Men get the promotion or job and the