Women ask for Raises but Aren’t Heard
Women ask for pay rises, but their calls go unheeded, according to a new Catalyst study reported byCNN's Business 360 blog, which explodes the myth that the gender pay gap is due in part to the fact that 'women don't ask'.
According to the Deutsche Bank sponsored study, which has an extensive press release onCatalyst's own web site, men who do all the things you're supposed to do to advance your career - building relationships with senior management, showing willingness to put in extra hours and take on extra commitment, taking on new challenges - really do enjoy more career success than the men who don't bother to do those things.
For women who go the extra mile in the interests of furthering their career, well, it seems that they aren't any better off than the women who choose to do the hours and work specified in their contract, and no more.
In other words, there appears to be little incentive for women to be pro-active in advancing their career. They just end up with lower pay and more work.
The study focused on the pay gap in the upper echelons of the workplace, so some of the numbers are truly startling. They found that the pay of male executives outpaced women by around $4,600 in their first jobs post-MBA, with this gap widening to an eye-watering $31,000 later in their careers.
An interesting extra element to these findings was that women seemed to be rewarded for loyalty (female executives rising through the ranks with a single exployer tended to earn $53,000 more than those who hopped between organisations), while men ended up earning $13,000 if they chose to pursue promotion by moving to a new employer.
The final key finding does at least come as no surprise: among the most proactive employees included in the study, 21% of men reached leadership positions such as senior executives or CEO level, compared with just 11% of women. The glass ceiling is alive and well, as most ambitious women in the workplace are all too aware, but the stark figures presented in this study are still shocking for the 21st Century!
The gender pay gap isn't the only myth exposed by the study. It's been said that women are paid less than men because they consciously seek out slower career paths. Extreme doubt is cast on this assumption by the study's findings, which suggest that women are, overall, less satisfied with their rate of career growth than men, which hardly suggests a lack of ambition.
The gender pay gap is a shocking anachronism, and one which people tend to assume is being gradually corrected, in spite of constant evidence to the contrary. Hopefully this study, and others like it, will help to hasten equal pay for men and women.
