What would it take to achieve gender parity? How far are we from that goal?
The pay gap, one barometer of progress, hasn’t budged in a decade, according to a new study from the American Association of University Women. For every dollar earned by a man, a woman earns 79 cents. That chasm is considerably wider for black and Latino women, and for women with children.
Women who forge ahead face other challenges. In academia, in the male-dominated STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, instances of sexual harassment are being documented with increasing frequency. And if women pursue projects that primarily benefit other women, the obstacles can be particularly daunting. Recent news accounts highlight these struggles, from one entrepreneur’s Silicon Valley quest to find investors for a hiring website that would make corporate America friendlier to women, to the years of frustration an engineer and her female business partner endured while seeking funding for tampon technology that could give early warning of cancer and reproductive diseases.
Naming the problem can, in itself, mark a kind of progress: on the elite conference circuit, the ubiquity of all-male panels is being called out on social media. At this year’s World Economic Forum, more than three-quarters of the speakers and moderators were men. Despite that fact (or perhaps because of it), “women” was one of the five-day Davos gathering of global elites’ most-Tweeted topics.
One path to change is leadership—when women lead, their skills and contributions are more likely to be recognized, and they in turn are more likely to acknowledge the accomplishments of other women. In advance of an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event with Time political correspondent and New America Fellow Jay Newton-Small asking “Are Women Changing the Way Institutions Are Run?”, we posed a related question to several women leaders: What is the single biggest change we’ve seen as a result of women in leadership roles?
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