By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – In studying corporate America, I'm always intrigued as I learn more about the space three Mack trucks, traveling side by side, can drive through. It's called the Gender Gap. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
Now, I wasn't that surprised to read in the current issue of Business Week that only 16 percent of senior management positions are held by women. And on corporate boards, women occupy 13 percent of the seats. This is according to Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business. And you want to hear something really amazing? That's twice as many as there were in 1995.
Then, out of all the Fortune 500 companies, only eight CEO's are women. But here's progress: according to a corporate-pay expert, women who grace a company's top 5 positions get paid, "as generously as their male counterparts." It's just getting there that's really hard.
So why don't women in all other positions make as much as men? Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean of London Business School, gives a couple explanations. One - there's a whole laundry list of ways men and women view competition differently, most of them sounding pretty innate, kind of that Mars and Venus thing. But the second cause for women getting less pay is much more tangible: "Both experimental and survey research show that men are much more likely than women to negotiate for pay, promotions, and recognition in the business world."
Tyson quotes a statistic from a compelling new book - "Women Don't Ask," by Professor Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University: "Only 7 percent of female master degree grads negotiate a higher first offer, versus 57 percent of men!" That says it all and it all starts there. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m.
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