Essay Series 7.5: Women and men still face many obstacles to full participation in work.

Women and men face many obstacles to full participation in the benefits of work. Women’s obstacles relate to skepticism, discrimination, finance, and motherhood. Women need business and political leaders, most of whom are men, to help remove these obstacles.

Men are facing obstacles too. Many of their traditional jobs are disappearing, and their wages are less financially rewarding. Men have been reluctant to move into service and care-related work, where employment opportunities are increasing. This reluctance has hurt them in the changing job market.

Obstacles to Women at Work

Women still face many obstacles to fulfilling their potential at work, including skepticism about their competence, sexual harassment, and other forms of discrimination, financial disadvantages, and the career costs of motherhood.

Skepticism

Society is skeptical that women have what it takes to make it in the business world. Women face doubts about their competence, drive, and commitment to their careers. Women also face a lack of role models in the corporate hierarchy.⁵⁹⁸ Women who have gained corporate leadership positions often get their jobs when companies are weak and then get blamed when the corporations fail. This phenomenon is called the glass cliff.⁵⁹⁹ Researchers examined the timing of women being appointed to boards or hired as the CEOs of major companies in the United Kingdom and the United States. They found women got these positions after the companies were in financial trouble. The glass cliff appeared to have happened to Jill Abramson of the New York Times in 2014, Ellen Pao of Reddit in 2015, and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo in 2017.⁶⁰⁰

Discrimination

Women face pervasive discrimination in terms of sexual harassment, underrepresentation in STEM jobs, faulty equipment at work, and bias in artificial intelligence (AI).

Sexual harassment: The most recent (2021) comprehensive review of studies that I could find related to sexual harassment in the workplace reported that a meta-analysis from the early 2000s showed that 58 percent of women experienced some form of sexual harassment on the job. Rates ranged from 43 percent in government to 69 percent in the military. The figure was 46 percent in the private sector. The few studies of sexual harassment of men show that rates ranged from 8.7 percent of men in the federal workforce to 82.6 percent of men in policing.⁶⁰¹ According to a 2011 U.S. survey, the construction industry had the highest rates of harassment, followed by transportation and utilities.⁶⁰²

The sexual harassers of women and men generally are men. A 2018 study of the federal workforce found that the harasser was a man in 82 percent of incidents that had the greatest impact on victims (women and men). In a study of military reservists, 78 percent of men who experienced harassment reported that their worst experience came at the hands of men. For women, the figure was 88 percent. When men experienced sexual harassment from other men, it generally came in the form of humiliating men who didn’t fit into heterosexual male norms.⁶⁰³

STEM jobs: Women have a minority of STEM jobs, which generally provide more financial rewards than do traditional women’s jobs. Women earn less than men in STEM jobs, and half the women in these jobs report experiencing discrimination. The situation is much worse for Black and Hispanic women, who are no more than three percent of the women in technology-related jobs. This situation is ironic because computer programming was originally deemed “women’s work.”⁶⁰⁴

Faulty equipment: Most equipment is designed around the male body, which is heavier, taller, and more flat-chested than the average woman. For example, airplane, coastguard, emergency services, farm, and military equipment and safety features were designed for men. Women can receive injuries from work equipment that isn’t designed for them.⁶⁰⁵

Artificial intelligence (AI): AI has a bias toward men. For example, a 2016 study found that AI recognized male voices more readily than women’s in voice recognition applications, which include devices in vehicles and medicine. Speech recognition technology was trained on men’s voices.⁶⁰⁶ AI also is trained on text and images that are biased toward males. Males’ pronouns and images appear in these databases at roughly twice the rate females’ do. This affects web search algorithms and amplifies the bias toward male data and information. In addition, the people creating algorithms are generally men.⁶⁰⁷

AI is used in the review of job applications, medical decision-making, credit and insurance decisions, and in criminal justice. As demonstrated in Essay Series 4.2, medical research even now has been conducted mostly on men, and available data focuses on men or fails to analyze women’s data separately. It follows logically that women will be at a disadvantage when it comes to medical decision-making based on algorithms. This could kill women and girls. AI has the potential to further entrench discrimination against women.

Finance

Women face a number of obstacles in the paid work world. Women receive lower wages and less financial investment in their businesses than men. In addition, women who are in low-wage jobs often have few job protections and unsafe work places.⁶⁰⁸ Research published in 2018 found that, on average, women business owners received less than half the business investment of men. Yet women produced more than twice the revenue when they did receive funds.⁶⁰⁹ All of these obstacles add up to women enduring a distinct disadvantage compared to men.

Motherhood

Women who are mothers of dependent children face a unique set of financial obstacles. Many mothers have unpaid maternity leave or no leave at all, lack paid sick leave, and can’t access affordable childcare. Motherhood has another financial penalty. In 2022, mothers aged 25-34 earned 85 percent as much as fathers that age, whereas women in this age group without children earned 97 percent as much.⁶¹⁰

Women’s disadvantages in the workplace hurt children because women provide the primary financial support in 41 percent of U.S. households. In about half of families where both parents work, women out earn men.⁶¹¹ Everyone needs women to receive fair and living wages for the vital work they do and the financial contributions they make to their families.

The Labor Market for Men

Automation and free trade have affected men’s jobs. And the resulting long-run shift away from jobs requiring physical strength is going to continue.⁶¹² The labor market trajectory for men has declined in terms of employment, occupational stature, and real wages (wages adjusted for inflation). Women dominate today’s more robust service-related jobs.⁶¹³

A literature review, which focused on jobs in health care, early education, and domestic roles, found that men’s participation in these careers remained stable or decreased from 1992 through 2019. Men had 13 percent of health care support and special education jobs and only 1.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teaching jobs. Among the reasons are:

1. Gender stereotypes and undervaluing skills considered traditionally women’s.

1. Health, education, and domestic jobs paying less than STEM jobs.

1. Men facing hostile workplaces in health, education, and domestic careers.⁶¹⁴

While the share of men in the labor market has steadily decreased, the share of women working has rapidly increased. Men’s labor force participation has dropped from 96 to 89 percent since 1975. One-third of men with only a high school education are now out of the labor force and thus not counted in unemployment figures. The greatest decrease in men’s employment has been among men aged 25 to 34.⁶¹⁵ Of women aged 25 to 54, 78 percent are in the labor force, up from 55 percent in 1975.⁶¹⁶

Men’s real wages peaked in the 1970s and have been falling ever since, with the exception of men in the highest-income classes.⁶¹⁷ One of the reasons that the pay gap between women and men has decreased is that men’s wages are stagnating. Men’s median weekly wages have increased just 7 percent since 2000, compared to 19 percent for women.⁶¹⁸

The remaining gap in men’s and women’s salaries has to do with who cares for the children. The more children a woman has, the further she falls behind in terms of earnings. Women’s and men’s salaries are roughly equivalent until women have children. Within the constraints of their work demands and benefits, women often have more time off, and men often work more overtime and take fewer hours of unpaid leave.⁶¹⁹

Reflections

All available data tells us that women suffer huge and deadly disadvantages compared to men in the work world. Women are most often the victims of sexual harassment, and men are most often the perpetrators. Women have worse pay and less access to investment capital. Being a parent disadvantages women in many ways, especially if they are single. The biggest surprise to me, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, is that safety equipment and AI algorithms hurt women. Equipment failures can disable or kill women, and so can medical-decision-making algorithms that rely on men’s data.

It’s not just in the work world. Women face higher rates of serious injury and death in car crashes, partly due to safety systems designed around male bodies. Crash test dummies that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) uses to test the safety of cars still don’t reflect the average woman’s size and shape. Women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in a car crash than men and 17 percent more likely to die. Since the 1980s, researchers have pointed out the need for crash dummies to reflect the size and shape of women’s bodies.⁶²⁰

Fortunately, I haven’t suffered much from most of the many disadvantages other working women have. I haven’t been sexually harassed, probably because my supervisors and colleagues at work have been mostly women. I haven’t yet been disabled or killed in a car crash, but my seatbelt has never fit properly across my chest. I haven’t had to wear safety equipment at work, and I never needed to ask anyone for a financial investment in a business.

However, I have suffered three episodes of discrimination in employment. The first was when I was pregnant (See Essay 7.3). The second was related to performance reviews (See Essay 7.2). The third happened when I applied for a job for which I was better qualified than the man who eventually got promoted. As soon as I applied for the job, the posting was withdrawn. Then, a different job was created for the man the supervisor (a woman) wanted to promote.

What obstacles have you or others faced at work, and what were their effects?