Sexual harassment is the tip of iceberg. American women say they experience all sorts of discrimination at work, much of it subtle and hard to tackle head-on.
Around 42% of working women in the U.S. say they have faced discrimination on the job because of their gender, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. And those who have report a broad array of personal experiences that often fall below the radar of human resources. They range from earning less than male counterparts for doing the same job to being passed over for important assignments.
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The survey of nearly 5,000 adults was conducted in the summer before the recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations against men in politics, the media and entertainment. Women are twice as likely as men (42% versus 22%) to say they have experienced at least 1 of 8 specific forms of gender discrimination at work; 1 in 4 working women (25%) say they have earned less than a man who was doing the same job; 1 in 20 working men (5%) say they have earned less than a female peer.
The rate of gender discrimination is consistent across racial and ethnic, generational and partisan lines. But women with more education report experiencing discrimination at significantly higher rates than women with less education. And in some regards, the most highly educated women stand out. Some 57% of women with a postgraduate degree say they’ve experienced gender discrimination versus 40% with a bachelor’s degree and 39% with no college degree.
This profession has the highest gender pay gap
One profession is lagging when it comes to women’s pay, but it’s not tech. Female personal financial advisers make little more than half (56.4%) of men in the same job, compared with 83% overall, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. (Critically, that does not account for women who are missing from senior roles in Silicon Valley and, instead, compares men and women who are in similar jobs.)
“Each week, women financial advisers on average make $760 less than their male colleagues,” says Ariane Hegewisch, program director for employment and earnings at the institute. It is “ironic” that an industry focused on helping people achieve financial security has one of the biggest gender wage gaps, she adds. (The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, an industry group, was not immediately available for comment.)
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Rebecca Fender, the head of future of finance at CFA Institute, says about 18% of financial advisers are women. “We are looking to profile more of the successful women in our industry,” she told MarketWatch. “It’s an important element to attract women into the industry. Visibility is validity.” She was surprised, she says, by the size of the gender wage gap for financial advisers and hopes that more firms disclose wage data. “We don’t think there should be a wage gap for doing similar work.”
There are 4.6 million women who work in occupations with poverty-level wages, nearly three times as many as the 1.5 million men who do, the organization said in a statement on Equal Pay Day on April 4, a date to highlight the gender wage gap around the country. In addition, the analysis finds racial disparities compounding gender inequality in the labor market. Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely to work in service occupations as white women.
Silicon Valley is particularly unfriendly for women
Earlier this year, a viral memo by now-fired Google GOOG, +0.82% software engineer James Damore theorized that the low number of female employees in Silicon Valley is due to biological differences rather than or in addition to a culture of exclusion and discrimination. Among his “non-discriminatory” reasons for the gender gap: Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things, and women on average are more cooperative.
In a statement, Google’s vice president of diversity, integrity and governance Danielle Brown said of the memo: “I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender,” adding, “It’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.” She said Google values “alternative views,” but said that discourse should happen alongside the principles of equal employment and the company’s code of conduct and anti-discriminatory laws.
Mothers and women of color face an uphill struggle
Nearly three times as many working mothers quit their jobs to care for a family member and a higher percentage turn down promotions, “setting them off of the same career acceleration track as their male counterparts,” says Jean Martin, talent solutions architect at CEB, a Washington, D.C.-based advisory company. “Women who are fast tracked for executive ranks sometimes report back that the demands of traditional executive jobs are enough to drive them out of traditional organizations.”
The gender wage gap for women of color continues to indicate a marked earnings inequality for Hispanic and black women, the Census Bureau previously found. For every dollar earned by a white man, Hispanic women earned 54 cents and black women earned 63 cents in 2015. Black women’s earnings increased by 9% to $36,212 a year from $33,225 per year, compared with rises of 4.3% for Asian women, 2.6% for Hispanic women, and 2.8 % for Caucasian women.
More women are confined to low-wage service work
Of course, in addition to a wage gap within occupations, there is also a wage gap “between occupations.” Previous Institute for Women’s Policy Research analysis has found that more than one in four employed women in the U.S. are concentrated in low-wage service work, such as teaching young children, cleaning, serving, and caring for elders. Workers in these majority-female jobs are also disproportionately women of color, Hegewisch says.
Gender pay gap figures don’t adjust for job choice and duration, which all influence pay. Women dominate fields like education, which are not typically high-paying. Men dominate fields like IT, math, engineering and sciences, which tend to have higher-paying jobs. But as more women have achieved a college education and entered the workforce over the last half-century, the gender wage gap has improved. In 1960, women were paid around 61 cents on the dollar compared with men.
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So what should companies in 2017 do?
“Revisit their pay policies to ensure equitable banding for equal work,” CEB’s Martin says. “They should redesign roles to ensure that there are sufficient roles with the flexibility needed to address family concerns and adopt a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination of all types — not just in dollar compensation. but in the distribution of job opportunities, recognition and the way in which teams collaborate and work together.”
Meanwhile, the debate over women’s lack of representation in high-paying senior roles in Silicon Valley continues. Paul Griffiths, the CEO of MedTouch, a digital content and marketing company focused on the health-care industry, wrote on MarketWatch Tuesday: “The notion that technology must be male-dominated because ‘men are better at technology’ is antiquated and boring, like any grainy filmstrip from history class about colonizing the moon: quaint, if it weren’t so dangerous.”