The Challenges Facing Women in the Office - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Prudence LaBeach Pollard explores workplace challenges that women face in a study that also recommends strategies to address them.

• Mining pre-existing studies, she finds that in general, the wage gap is just as omnipresent in industries that are dominated by women as well as those that are dominated by men.

• Even considering just nonmonetary benefits, including those women report to be most valuable, men come out well ahead.

• Among inequities affecting managers across industries, the report finds that managers make significantly less starting when the percentage of women they supervise goes over 50 percent. Also, a manager whose supervisor is female is paid significantly less than one whose supervisor is male.

• After listing the above and many other impediments to women’s success in business, she concludes baldly, “[W]omen are not taken seriously at work.” And she concludes, [I]f corporations are to benefit fully from the capabilities of qualified managers, certain workplace attitudes and behaviors must change or the workplace must be protected from expressions of partiality and gender/sex bias.’

• Her solutions include, “[M]anagers who desire to be upwardly mobile and desire for higher compensation require powerful networks to provide facts and to champion their cause. In addition to the need for particular types of mentoring, women could benefit from being mentored by both men and women, with the preference being for women if advancement is desired.”

Prudence LaBeach Pollard’s 16-page research review