Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

“Aerodynamics have proven that the bumblebee cannot fly. The body is too heavy and the wings are too weak. But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, and it goes right on flying, miraculously.” --Mary Kay Ash

Mary Kay, who always wore a diamond lapel pin shaped like a bumblebee, created the first corporate culture for women in America when her company got listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1976.

Exactly 40 years have passed by, and it appears that either the American corporate houses are wary of bumblebee miracles, or are threatened by them. Either way, as “In the Lead” column of Wall Street Journal reported today, the male corporate bastion would let women employees work only at positions that do not threaten their status quo.

Columnist Carol Hymowitz writes that although women hold more than half of all management and professional jobs, the vast majority are concentrated in entry-level and middle positions. Last year, women held 16.4% of Fortune 500 corporate officer jobs, up just 0.7% from 2002.

Going by the rate of progress over the past decade (which has been on an average, one-half of one percentage point per year), it would take 70 more years of corporate struggles for women to attain parity with men (that is, for women to have just 50% of Fortune 500 board seats)!

And going by the current growth rate, will women of color ever reach any parity whatsoever? Apparently not! As further victimized at the corporate alter, women of color hold only 3.4% of officer jobs (as compared to 16.4% overall).

Currently, one in every nine Fortune 500 companies has no women on its board! And for those women who are on board, they are systematically excluded from key leadership, agenda-setting and decision-making opportunities, since they are astoundingly underrepresented as chairs of most powerful board committees, including audit, compensation, and governance.

Such systematic exclusion of women from decisive positions has become essential for the male supremacy to reign over its industrial complexes. As a result, at the topmost position, women have represented less than 2 percent of the Fortune 1,000 CEOs and just 1.4 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs.

‘Came a long way, baby?’

Some proponents of workforce diversity are quick to point out that the growth of women will be gradual. Factors attributed to this optimism include widening corporate opportunities, scope for higher education, Civil Rights legislations etc. But this assumption of eventual progress is clearly based on a flawed historical understanding of women at the workplace. Most often we are led to believe that the women ‘have come a long way’ (remember Virginia Slims cigarette ads?), from being homemakers to being CEOs. And hence the facilitating passage must be the ideal one.

Now that we are grimly reminded that women occupy less than 2% of the CEOs positions, let us visit the workplace landscape to understand if they are indeed making progress, and if so, of what type.

In 1950, there were 18.4 million working women in the US. This has grown to an amazing 70 million now. Now this is some real growth here. According to Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, women represent 47% of the total labor force of America! Among women workers, 61% are African-American women, 60% white women, 58% Asian women, and 56% Latina women.

Whereas on one hand there is such an overwhelmingly high participation of women in the US workforce, comprising half of the entire labor, on the other hand, less than 2% of women actually own any major corporate house, and less than 20% even work as corporate officers.

If statistical analysis alone could help, then wars would not be taking place in modern times. It is imperative to go beyond the numerical analysis that’s done periodically by several profit and non profit agencies, and focus on ways to radically change the scenario. With sustained increase of this rate (which has been consistently been the case since decades now), there is no way an equity can be achieved. In fact, as seen from the disparity among women workers and women owners, the gender gap is not one of quantity, but of qualitative power.

It is about trenchant lack of women’s empowerment in the era of corporate globalization. The way is to radically change the structure from the top, starting from the “Fortunes”. And no amount of waiting for a noble legislation or of depending on just gestures from old guards of capitalism will do. Systematic oppression requires systematic upheavals.