By Savannah Miller
Shunda Leecost, a black woman, had been working with her company for three years. Things were going well. She was progressing and getting promotions, and in turn the company was excelling. To meet their growing demands, the company created a second position that also performed Leecost’s duties.
Her counterpart, a white male, had just graduated from college. He essentially performed her job for another sector of the team. However, Leecost’s position also required her to oversee budgets. That’s when the problem started.
“Because I managed the overall budget, I could also see his rate. And when I first looked at it, I was like, ‘Hm this interesting’ because it was a higher rate than mine…I would say significantly more, at least $10,000 more than what I was making, but I had been in the job for about two years,” said Leecost.
There are many other black women in Leecost’s situation, even if they don’t know it. According to U.S. Census data, black women are typically paid 63 cents for every dollar non-Hispanic white men are paid, while the national earnings for all women is 80 cents for every dollar.
Moreover, the American Association of University Women(AAUW) posted a report entitled, ‘The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap’where they reported that, “This gap persists despite the fact that black women participate in the workforce at a much higher rates than most other women.”
“For black women we’re at a crossroads for race and sex,” said Sonali Wilson, general counselat Cleveland State University. “Blacks in general get paid less, and women in general get less. So a black woman is a double victim of societal forces that prevent them from getting paid equally,” said Wilson, “So as long as those forces aren’t in check then you’re going to have this problem.”
Leecost was six or seven years her counterpart’s senior, yet despite her head start in the industry, she was still behind. As situations like this prevail, the pay gap grows from an individual circumstance to a national standard. According to ProsperityNow.org, single white men have an average net worth of nearly $29,000 while single white women have an average net worth of over $15,000 and single black women have an average net worth of $200.
One’s net worth is calculated by taking one’s total assets and subtracting their total debts, where assets would include things like stocks or property, and debts would include things like credit cards balances and car loans. Although much of this gap can be attributed to the differences in generational wealth dating back to slavery, the black community still continues to lack the proper financial education and initiatives.
So how does this gap close?
“It becomes a numbers game more so than anything, meaning that the proportion of men in the workplace in certain industries, and the level of gap that we’re looking at 20-30 percent difference on the dollar, that’s going to take a long time for organizations as a whole on the national landscapes to improve,” said Anika Warren, the founding president and CEO of The Warren Group.
The Warren Group provides consulting, counseling, and coaching services to senior leaders, academic administrators, non-profits, and student organizations at leading institutions. The Warren Group has combated these workplace issues in relation to pay equity and provided their services in hopes of change to organizations like U.B.S.,Morgan Stanley,J.P. Morgan,PepsiCo, Time Warner, Ohio State University, the American College of Financial Services.
Although some of these organizations have sought third party assistance from those like The Warren Group, it will be a long time before this gap can be closed. “Even if you’re promoting and scaling women, most organizations don’t have enough funding to have those salary increases to get women up to scale rapidly,” said Warren, “Even if they were to promote and advance every woman in an inequitable situation and give her another whatever, 5-10 percent, she’s still not to the scale of men.”
However, in the event that the organization is not focused on self-reflection and improvement, the employee has to become her biggest advocate. Whether it be addressing her employer directly or seeking various mentors and sponsors to guide her through the situation, she is ultimately responsible for sparking the conversation to improve her work environment. This can be challenging for young professionals, like Leecost, who are unsure about how to approach their employers or start the conversation.
“At the time I did approach my immediate supervisor,” said Leecost, “But the answer I got was unsatisfactory for me. The person who was making more than me had an advanced degree, but he just graduated from school, and at that point I had about six or seven years of work experience…I decided to leave the company shortly after.”
In a more conservative field, such as law, a big contributing factor is presence. Black women simply are not as established in certain professions. For example, the law profession has been and still is typically dominated by men. “When I worked at a law firm they started us out with the same offer and the same salary. But then in the years that followed they didn't really have a set pattern or amount that you’d get a raise,” said Wilson.
“As a male dominated profession, the males were being favored to get the assignment and the clients, and the females fell behind based on gender and who was giving out assignment and what their preferences were,” Wilson continued.
This initial favoritism would grow into a bigger problem, as the relationships between men would grow at a faster rate. Then when it came time for mentorships and successors, the men would be better positioned. “The older men that are getting ready to retire or had thriving practices are they’re bringing up the younger men,” said Wilson.
“It took a lot to get assignments from these guys that aren’t used to working with women, and preferred to work with men. They didn’t know that women could do just as good work, and might even end up being a better junior person,” Wilson added.
Warren also added that, “Men are more likely to pursue a position or a promotion above their skill set because they feel confident and prepared, while women are more likely to try and develop the skills before they pursue the position.” This taps into the male ability to negotiate harder. “So that creates a dynamic of who gets hired, what salary they get hired at, and the implications of ‘levelism’,” said Warren.
According to an article in Fortune Magazine, financial advisors have the highest wage gap between men and women, with women making $953 a week and men making $1,714 week.
Andrea Smith, a financial advisor with Janney Montgomery Scott, agreed with this statement but explained why this is so. “It’s a numbers game so there are much fewer women advisors then men, so men are going to have a much wider scale…so the reach across the salary range is going to be much smaller because there are fewer numbers to compare,” said Smith.
In addition to the sheer math number, the heavy saturation of male advisors triggers an subsequent bias towards men. “When it comes to promoting female advisors they are just starting to come around to seeing the value in having women advisors on the bench. In the past we haven’t promoted as much as men,” said Smith.
Moreover, gender roles still influence one’s priorities and commitments.
“While all women aren’t mothers like myself, many of us have motherly responsibilities for others in our family whether it’s aging parents, or whatever. What ends up happening for most women at some point, that caregiver role outside of the workplace challenges their ability to be a revenue or income-earner at the level that they want,” said Warren.
Societal norms have made it more expected for women to take time to tend to the family, while men are expected to remain breadwinners. This can become less than desirable for employers, or lead them prefer a man who may not have those same priorities outside of the workplace.
When it comes to childbirth, a 2018 Deloitte surveyreported that out of 1,000 men, over 300 “worried that taking a leave would hurt their careers” and over 500 worried “it would signal that they weren’t serious about their jobs”. Furthermore, a Pew research studyconducted one year prior reported that the average paternal leave averaged one week in length.
The United States struggles with parental leave. According to Business Insider, “Out of the world’s 196 countries, the US is one of only four that has no federally mandated policy to give new parents paid time off.”
One country with one of the best parental leave policies is Denmark. Denmark’s policiesgrant families “52 weeks of paid time off split between both parents,” but this had little effect on the outcome as, “women end up taking 92.8 percent of the total time”, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD).
This past September, The Wall Street Journal featured a Boston-based company, Humanyze, that is trying to combat this issue.
According to the article written by Joanne Lipman, “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap and strengthen family bonds.” Lipman interviewed the first man to be affected by the company’s new mandated change – Jeremy Doyle – and she also spoke with various company representatives to get a clearer understanding of their rationale.
The analytics firm “is among the first not only to give men and women equal lengths of paid parental leave, but to insist that men take it,” wrote Lipman, “The firm instituted the policy in 2016 because most men didn’t take leave even when it was offered, for fear it will derail their careers.”
Matt Krentz, a senior partner with the company, told Lipman, “If we pull the guys aside and say, ‘It’s a mistake, it’s going to cost you in your career’…you can’t turn around and say to women, ‘Well it’s OK.”
Doyle was the first to take his 12 weeks of paternal leave, and admits that otherwise he never would have taken that much time. “If leave is normalized for new dads as well as for new moms, it’s difficult to stigmatize either one,” said Doyle.
Regulating and mandating things like paternity leave could help relieve stress that prevent employees from taking it and prevent employers from looking down on it. This is one action item that companies and organizations can work towards in hopes of closing the gender pay gap.
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