V. WHAT KEEPS WOMEN FROM MEN'S WORK?

Here are the some of the questions often posed about women relative to Men’s Work, and some of the answers that research has made available. Each woman can better understand herself if she first recognizes traits she shares with womankind in general. Then she can move on to identifying the characteristics that distinguish her as an individual.

IS MEN’S WORK TOO PHYSICALLY DEMANDING?
Women are concerned about the physical demands of men’s work. The truth is, relatively few non-traditional jobs necessitate exceptional strength. While a few jobs require considerable upper body strength, keep in mind that many women are much stronger than many men. Also, a lot of jobs thought to be brawn-intensive have been shown to take no more strength than housework requires. The coordination and nimbleness a woman might contribute to a job trimming trees or plumbing would often offset a strength disparity.

HOW DIFFERENT ARE MEN AND WOMEN?
Evidence indicates that women, generally speaking, come to the job market with traits, desires and tastes different than men’s.
When, as sophomores, the high school class of 2005 took the PSAT (practice SAT college entrance exam), they were asked what their college majors of interest were. The most frequently indicated interest for males was engineering (16.1%). For females it was health sciences and services (22.6%). (*)
There is reason to believe that the nurturing tendencies of women, whether innate, or caused by upbringing, influence their career choices, and therefore, their earning potential. In 2004, at Notre Dame University, 57% of Arts and Letters students were female. According to Christina Wolbrecht, a political science professor, “Major choice influences future employment, future earnings, and is where the wage discrepancy starts.” (*)
A very significant 64% of anthropology majors are women at that university. Anthropology Department Chair Jim McKenna believes that anthropology is a very nurturing field, and he said “We do identify, in a stereotypical role, this persona of nurturing, caring, listening, observing and protecting with female qualities.” (*)
Do many women prefer a facilitating or helping role at work? Do many feel less comfortable in a leadership role? It seems so.
Girls care. They like to help. Females are more interested than males in community service beginning in elementary school.
Boys want to lead the charge. One study of undergraduate students at the University of Maryland revealed that men were more likely to consider themselves as leaders than were females, and they also viewed themselves as acting more strongly on things they believed in than did the women (especially if they get to delegate!).
We do not know exactly why women are making the choices they are making, why men more aggressively seek leadership roles, etc. I will leave it to Sociologists, Biologists and Psychologists can sort through the facts and figure out why women’s and men’s traits and aptitudes are as they are, collectively and individually. While we might speculate, it’s too soon to even appear to be drawing conclusions, as Harvard President Lawrence Summers learned the hard way when he suggested that biological differences account for women’s relative lack of career success in the sciences. We cannot distinguish with certainty the influence of our hard-wiring from the influence of our social programming. Without generalizing about the relative power of these influences on each person, it is well worth our while to look at the facts, look at our collective tendencies and consider how they’ve affected our individual decisions. It is also worth studying those women who have chosen to move beyond traditional roles.
This book was written to let girls know that, for one reason or another, they have been shying away from a lot of great jobs and flocking to a relative few. Each woman can ponder her own influences, and address the wonderful possibility that a wealth of opportunities exist that she has not yet considered. This book urges women to, no matter what, take a look at all that’s out there. This book exists to help remedy one reason why women don’t consider a huge number of jobs--that they simply don’t know enough about them to have thought about them before.

DO WOMEN NOT CARE AS MUCH ABOUT THE MONEY?
Women care about other aspects of jobs besides money and promotion. In a 2002 study by Teresa Heckert, in which 102 college seniors and 504 alumni from a mid-western university were interviewed, women rated the pay and promotion facets of a job significantly lower in importance than did the men. They rated the remaining facets listed (travel, interpersonal relations, non-tangible benefits, family considerations, benefits, and societal contribution) significantly higher than did the men. (*)
What do women want at work? Here are some of the considerations that distract women from the jobs where they might make as much money as possible.
It seems women care quite a bit about pleasant working conditions.
Physical features of certain jobs come into play. A simple example: generally, women don’t want to get dirty. They also don’t like danger. Some jobs, especially those requiring much upper body strength, do not appeal to many women. These aspects, however, aren’t what keep women from doing most of the non-traditional jobs.
Women care about having more time off, whereas men are more willing to work extra hours for extra pay. Women judge satisfying relationships at work to be more important than men do. They like supervision and friendly coworkers. Men like autonomy. They are more willing to be relatively isolated on the job. Women care more than men do about flexibility of the work schedule to allow accomodations for family life. Women also care more about travel opportunities and benefits. Men care significantly more than women about salary and advancement opportunities. (Heckert, 2002) Men are also more likely than women to take commission-based jobs, which can be stressful and difficult, but lucrative.
These facts are affecting women’s willingness to get into, or stay in, careers whose best qualities are pay and promotion possibilities.
A woman’s chance for a raise or promotion is also affected, if, relative to her male colleague, she wants less overtime, frequently asks for schedule adjustments, or, as is statistically borne out, goes part-time, or takes leaves-of-absence.
There are, of course, reasons, besides fastidiousness and a wanting to enjoy going to work, that make women feel as though they must emphasize qualities besides high pay when choosing their careers. These circumstances will be discussed later.
Many women are, understandably, defensive of their priorities. After all, shouldn’t the other facets of a career, besides just money and the chance of climbing the ladder, be important to everyone? Of course they should. It’s fine to make a conscious choice, if you can afford it, of maximum flexibility, a job with the kind of gratification money can’t buy, or a just-plain-fun job! Just be aware that, as it stands now, men are generally more willing than women to prioritize money and advancement over all other conditions, so they are getting and hanging on to the jobs with more money and advancement. Just make sure your job is giving you what you need, after looking at every component.
Over time, two occurrences will help reduce the gap between men and women in the workplace, in both compensation and conditions.
First, as our society evolves, the workplace will continue to sensitize to the rest of life’s considerations, like family and health. They will incorporate a broader range of qualities (non-tangible benefits), which both men and women alike will appreciate and increasingly demand.
Second, women will more and more often choose jobs traditionally done by men, risking less flexibility or more adjustment, in order to maximize their earning and advancement potential.
These two movements will support each other. As women decide they are willing to sacrifice some other job qualities, to do men’s work to get men’s pay, companies doing business in those arenas will be positively influenced by women’s more nurturing style. The resulting environment will be better for everyone, increasing job satisfaction and business success.
As traditionally male-operated companies’ policies and style evolve, women will be more drawn to these fields. These women will then serve as role models for girls who will then consider more options when contemplating their own futures. It’s already happening, as some occupations (lawyer, veterinarian, physician) have already left the list of NTOs for women in the past few years. In short, over time, we’ll all come together.

WHAT ABOUT THE LACK OF EXPOSURE TO JOB POSSIBLITIES? SOCIAL PRESSURE?
Outside influences surreptitiously, sometimes unintentionally, narrow a girl’s perspective during critical years.
One educational authority on gender equity believes that a young woman who might have been interested in a non-traditional job, but is steered by a counselor to a traditional role, loses the potential to earn up to 150% more in her lifetime.
The media is an overwhelming influence. I just watched an inspiring TV commercial for NASDAQ, a stocks-selection service. It featured dramatic music and four ‘visionary’ CEOs meant to inspire investors. None of them were female.
Career colleges, trade schools like those advertising heavily on daytime television, customarily show computer technologists as male, massage therapists and medical and dental assistants as female. This is the perfect example of the vicious cycle. Women are shown images of other women in certain fields, and are more likely to think about entering them. Consequently, trade schools (technical institutes, career colleges) continue, like any business, to solicit to their proven target audience. I was flabbergasted by one recent cosmetology school television spot which declared, “Create your own future! Create your own look!” This insulting campaign trivializes the importance of women’s career goals. Another very often-aired commercial has a happy young woman declaring “Making people feel good...you can’t get a better job that! That’s why I trained to be a massage therapist!” If this were true, we’d all be able to do volunteer work for a living.
Family influence contributes greatly to a girl’s basic outlook, achievement orientation and self-confidence. Parents of daughters need to be careful that they don’t take it lightly when their daughters don’t grasp math and science concepts. There should be a presumption that these skills will be equally important in the career goals of boys and girls. Parental encouragement is a major predictor of a woman’s persistence in science.(Scientific American, 1998.
I must also address the sometimes-judgmental context of female society. If you’ve read “I Don’t Know How She Does It”, by Allison Pearson, which depicts the dilemmas of working moms, then you probably either laughed or cried at the chapter where she roughs up a store-bought cake to make it look homemade in order save face with the critical super-moms. Most women, certainly the single moms I know, wrestle mightily with their own internal demands--to be a good parent, a homemaker, a contributor to society, and, often, a breadwinner. They do not need additional scrutiny and subtle condemnation of their choices by other women. Each woman deserves to find her own delicate balance, for the benefit of herself and her family, and we cannot know her needs and personal challenges.
How pervasive is the ‘job ushering’ in our society? It is very influential---and occurs right from the beginning of life. Most of us with career-aged daughters were raised on the Dick and Jane readers. These books, a marker of our times, depict a total of 24 careers for females (e.g. dressmaker, governess, housekeeper, teacher, ice-skater, school nurse, etc.) and more that 146 careers for male characters. (from airplane builder to zookeeper!) There’s a bit of Disney fantasy in most of us, and we still collectively see our daughters, to some extent, as precious princesses to be cared for. Fathers and mothers alike enjoy this pretty picture for their girls, even though so many women wind up needing to earn a living for themselves and their children, and so many men resent or shirk support payments.
We honor our daughters as the strong women they will someday be, when we let them know, every chance we get, as teachers, counselors and parents, that the world is full of possibilities. We must teach them that no avenue is closed. There are no arbitrary limits.
I believe that it not enough to say to girls, as many of us do, “you can have any job you want”. We need to show them their choices.

DO WOMEN LACK CONFIDENCE?
“Pretend to what is not, and that the passion’s over, so you’ll become, in truth, what you are studying to be”---Ovid the Roman

To put it another way, as Amway founder Phil Kerns did--
“Fake it ‘til you make it.”

Women do not always muster the bluster. Men are masters of this skill. Women are often not confident enough to front the bravado required to take on a challenging job or tout their talents. Men are more likely to forge ahead, convinced that they will ‘catch up’ on needed skills in the nick of time, and still get the job done right. Women are more likely to feel not quite qualified.
This statement is bound to rankle some, and you individually may unstoppable, but its not a surprising finding, considered women’s more self-effacing nature, need for emotional support, and lack of societal support.
Studies show that young women entering college generally have less confidence in their ability to complete the coursework successfully, even though they actually prove to be just as successful in school. As we’ve discussed, they also consider themselves to be ‘leader-types’ less often than men do. Even graduate students studied at Stanford, where everyone’s pretty smart, have been shown to be less confident, both in and outside the classroom. (SIGSE Bulletin)
Both sexes must face the occasional failure, but women handle it differently than men. Female students who fail a technical course often conclude that they are not smart enough to understand the material, whereas men are inclined to attribute such failure to factors outside themselves, like poor teaching. (Ware et al)
Women’s insecurities can also make them less able than men to take criticism. Confident people do not allow criticism to affect their sense of general well-being. (SIGSE Bulletin)
Studies of Stanford graduate students also show that self-doubt makes women less likely than men to speak up in class. At a job, where the squeaky wheel might get the grease, confident self-promotion and obvious displays of initiative can increase success. Sometimes, speaking up matters.
ARE WOMEN CONTROLLED BY THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES?
A woman’s circumstances outside the workplace are more likely to affect her attitude and performance on the job.
When a woman, married or otherwise partnered, decides to embark on a career, not as the primary breadwinner, but to supplement the family income, she may be less inclined than a man to go the extra mile, work the extra hours, on the job. Without the ‘hunger’ experienced by a man who is his family’s main support, she has the luxury of working as much as she likes, at a job that she enjoys, and which suits the rest of her life.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are women who are the sole or primary support of their children and themselves. Women are far more likely than men to be single parents with majority or sole custody of children. The ability of these women to take jobs where lot of extra hours, frequent travel and unexpected dinner meetings are required to climb the corporate ladder, is limited. It really is true that, by and large, behind the successful man is a good woman, or at least SOME woman, keeping the home fires burning and tucking the kids in. Most fathers have that. What’s behind the successful mother? Sometimes only a halfway decent day care center that closes at 6 PM sharp. Sometimes not even that.

IS IT STILL A MAN’S WORLD?
Should we lay any of the blame for the wage chasm on pure chauvinism? Is a sexist society keeping women ‘in their place’? Is any of the disparity just plain unfair?
In short, it’s still not fair, but its much more fair than it used to be. These days, out-and-out discrimination probably only accounts for about 10 percentage points of the pay gap. (Businessweek Online, 2004) There are still instances of women earning less money for doing the very same job, doing it just as well as a man, and for the same number of hours. These infractions are being addressed more and more consistently, with lawsuits aimed at various entities, from Wal-Mart to the court system itself. Furthermore, instances of this type of gap are less and less common as we look at fields requiring higher education. In fact, in professional fields where women are rarities and companies want more female representation, they are often offered higher salaries than men.

THE UNFAIRNESS WOMEN HELP CREATE
Of course, unfair circumstances in the rest of a woman’s life can also affect the energy she puts into her career. Women in two-parent working households are still doing the lion’s share of domestic duties, still often expected to take the overriding responsibility for everything from meals to science projects.
The way men and woman function together is like a complicated dance which we have all performed together for centuries.
The domestic steps of the dance have traditionally been choreographed by women. Women complain about the unfair distribution of labor in the home, but often, it’s their own high standard, not held by others in the home, that creates the work load. A woman’s self-image may hinge on the appearance of the domestic show presented to the world, and, after so long, women have this routine down.
In the work world, however, men have been the dance leaders and they aren’t easily going to surrender that position without learning some fancy new footwork.
The dance is changing, though, and the new routine will be a better one for men and women. We must realize meanwhile, that women will grapple with practical issues and their self-esteem as mothers, partners, and workers. Men traditionally have a lot of their ego-eggs in the one breadwinner basket, and are also experiencing some confusion as to what is expected of them as society “de-machofies”.
In their careers, women and men work differently in some ways. Confident women executives, who do become leaders, have been shown to have different management styles than men, and they are very effective.
Female leaders tend to be good at team-building. They are facilitators. They are better than men both at getting people to coordinate their efforts, and in empowering and motivating individuals. Men are more inclined to lead by reward and punishment. Because women have a tendency to focus on relationships, they communicate more frequently on the job, sharing more information, proven to affect business positively.
Over time, as corporations recognize fully the contribution women are capable of making at every level, the style of business will change. The corporate setting will adjust, be more hospitable to its female participants, and a happier place for everyone.
The wonderful news is that there are so many determinants of career success over which a woman has plenty of control. Right now--- today---with patience, awareness of options, careful choices and planning, each woman can do more than ever to have a satisfying work life that truly works with the all rest of her life.