#gettingto5050

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#GettingTo5050 begins with you! Help chip in by spreading the message 50-50day.org

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When we have more women at the table, we get better policy outcomes. We'll keep fighting until we have equality in Congress! 

[creativesage]

Women Need More Money. Being More Confident Won’t Help Them Get It.

A confidence gap in girls is often given as a reason more women don’t advance up the corporate ladder. But there is no evidence that is true.

Photograph by Chaloner Woods/Getty Images          

By Sarah Green Carmichael

For most of women’s lives, our most valuable asset is our career: our earning power. And the best way to increase earning power is to move up the corporate hierarchy.

For example, HSBC recently reported that its gender pay gap is a mind-boggling 61%—not because women are earning less for the same work, but because women aren’t represented in leadership roles. Two-thirds of junior employees are female, but women hold only about one in five senior roles.

So why don’t more women advance—and get the higher salaries that advancement would command? This is a question with a thousand answers. But too often, the one that gets attention is confidence and its related trait, competitiveness. Women, we’re told, lack both.

                                                                                                                           We’re told this by clinical psychologists writing in the New York Times, journalists writing in the Atlantic, even by peer-reviewed papers published in prestigious journals. We’re told this by well-meaning bosses, mentors, even friends.

There is just one problem.

Many of these arguments rely on data gathered from teenagers—stories of adolescents that psychologists have treated, or data from high-school-age subjects.

While there is evidence that teenage girls are less confident than their male peers, the gap between adult women and men shrinks to a sliver, and there is a fierce debate among researchers about whether even this small gap exists. Analyzing more than 200 studies—for a total of nearly 100,000 study participants—the University of Minnesota’s Kristen C. Kling and her colleagues found in a canonical study that the adolescent confidence gap shrinks markedly by age 23. Other research has found that while there may be a small—again, small—gender confidence gap among adults, this is because men rate their abilities more highly than their performance would warrant. In other words, women aren’t lacking confidence—men are overconfident.

One of the biggest landmark studies on gender differences found no innate differences at all, other than a handful of physical differences such as the distance men can throw a ball.

                                                                                                            If we want to understand the real reason that more adult women aren’t getting ahead in organizations, we need to stop looking for answers in the hallways of high schools. We need to look for answers in the research conducted on living, breathing, adult women in the workforce.

Look there, and what do we see? That women get less credit for the work they do, especially when they collaborate with men. That women ask for raises just as often as men, but are less likely to get them—and when they do get raises, they get smaller pay bumps. That women who are mothers have their commitment unrelentingly questioned (even though research on academics has shown that mothers are more productive than non-mothers). That women are less likely to be referred to by their professional credentials when introduced by men (but not by other women). That women’s mistakes are typically judged more harshly and remembered longer.

You may have read that women don’t brag about their accomplishments because they’re not as sure of themselves. But the real reason is that people often penalize women who boast.

You may have read that women are less likely to apply for jobs for which they’re not 100% qualified because they lack confidence. But when someone actually surveyed women about this, the top reason they gave was that they thought job requirements were, well, requirements and they didn’t want to waste time on a fruitless application. (This was also the top reason given by men.)

You may have heard that women don’t bounce back from setbacks because we’re perfectionists who judge ourselves too harshly for failure—but in fact, a study of executives who missed out on top jobs found that the experience crushed women’s confidence in the hiring process itself, not in themselves. Fewer women were willing to try again because, they said, they felt they had only been recruited as tokens to make the finalist pool look more diverse.

Again and again when we look at adult women, we don’t see a bunch of shrinking violets who could get ahead with just a little more moxie.

We don’t even see problems that confidence can solve.

What we see, and what the data tells us, is that women and men are treated differently, and that this differential treatment results in women consistently getting less pay and fewer promotions. This inequality compounds over the course of a career and the hierarchy of a company: Going up the corporate ladder, there are fewer and fewer women at every level. This is how we end up with a gender wealth gap that is even larger than the wage gap: For every dollar owned by an unmarried man, an unmarried woman owns just 32 cents. Bank of America estimates that by the end of her working life, the wealth gap will have cost a woman $1 million.

So yes, to the extent that there are adolescent girls out there suffering from an undue lack of self-esteem, let’s fix it. But let’s stop using the confidence gap as an excuse for the lack of women at the top. It is a myth, and a costly one.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Barron’s.]

[creativesage]

(via World Bank: Women have equal legal rights in just 6 countries — Quartz at Work) 

Leveling the Field

By Ephrat Livni

A nation’s laws reflect its values and aspirations, and dictate the realities of its citizens. Sad, then that so many legal systems around the world make it more difficult for women to work, earn money, and enjoy freedoms than for men.

In a new report, the World Bank examined 35 indicators of legal equality in 187 countries, covering everything from property ownership and inheritance laws to job protections and pension policies, along with rules governing marriage, movement and travel, pay, and personal safety.

It found that men and women are completely equal, legally speaking, in just six countries, where women are provided with all of the same opportunities as men and legislating protections that promote gender parity, such as parental leave and equal pay laws.

The stellar six

The good news is that, as a globe, we are making progress. A decade ago, not a single nation met all the criteria laid out by the World Bank when measuring equality. In 2019, six economies — Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Sweden — scored 100 on the index, meaning that women have equal rights with men in the 35 measured areas.

It’s notable, too, that sub-saharan Africa, as a region, had the most reforms in the last 10 years. In that area, there were 71 different laws passed in the last decade that allowed women to start jobs and provided recourse from workplace harassment and domestic violence. By contrast, economies in the Middle East and North Africa enacted only 19 reforms during the same time, including new domestic violence laws in Algeria, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

The needed fix

Much more work remains to be done if men and women are to operate equally around the world. On the whole, women have only three-quarters of the legal rights that men enjoy, according to the new index. The legislative disparities lead to harsh realities, constraining the ability of women worldwide to work, start businesses, and make economic decisions that are best for them and their families.

The dismal statistics are not only disheartening for the billions of women who are not operating on a level playing field. They also indicate that many economies are not functioning optimally and that countries are depriving themselves of wealth.

“If women have equal opportunities to reach their full potential, the world would not only be fairer, it would be more prosperous as well,” said World Bank Group interim president Kristalina Georgieva in a statement. “Change is happening, but not fast enough, and 2.7 billion women are still legally barred from having the same choice of jobs as men.”

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Quartz at Work.]

[headcandy]

Starting June 1, Head Candy will officially be a GENDER NEUTRAL SALON! 👏🏻 . . We will be charging based on time and technique, NOT GENDER! We’ve thought about it and it doesn’t make sense to charge more money just for being female. It’s 2018 and we think it’s about time that we charge based on the individual, not the gender! . 🙌 We know that women are sick and tired of paying more for the same services as men and we are doing our part to #endthepinktax . ❤️ We are also an inclusive and #safespace and want ALL clients to feel comfortable in our salon, regardless of how they identify themselves, or how they don’t identify themselves. . We are happy to help answer any questions you have about our new pricing policy for haircuts, and we are proud to be Gender Neutral! . #salonheadcandy #nonbinary #genderneutral #genderneutralsalon #mtlaurelnj . . . #mountlaurel #longhairman #menwithlonghair #genderequality #genderequal #genderless #gendernonbinary #5050 #changemaker #gettingto5050 #nonbinary #lengthnotgender #axthepinktax #pinktax #womanowned #womanownedbusiness #safespacenj #marltonnj #marltonhair #cherryhillnj #southnjsalon #southnjhair #njawardwinningsalon (at Mount Laurel, New Jersey)

[phillynessa]

50/50 Day

50-50day.org

[creativesage]

(via LET IT RiPPLE | 50/50 Day) — founded by Tiffany Shlain

Join us for the second annual 50/50 Day on April 26, 2018, and the greater #GettingTo5050 Movement. There are already over 29,000 events signed up in companies, schools, classrooms, museums, and homes around the globe to work toward getting to a more gender-balanced world that’s better for everyone across all parts of society, from the economy and politics to culture and home. The CA Department of Education just sent out a dedicated letter from the State’s Superintendent urging all schools to participate! We provide short engaging films, action pledges, discussion materials, and a full day of live-streamed programming featuring speakers, live events, and more. Everything is free. Join us.

The first annual 50/50 Day had over 500 million press impressions, including coverage of the Times Square billboard, ABC News, NPR, Variety, Bloomberg, Time Magazine. Read more on our 50/50 Day highlights and press page.

Sign up for 50/50 DAY 2018

[Excerpt — to read this entire post, and for more information about #5050Day and #GettingTo5050, visit: http://www.letitripple.org/films/50-50/5050-day/ ]

[creativesage]

(via Why were women written out of history? An interview with Bettany Hughes - English Heritage Blog)

As part of our Women in History series for Women’s History Month, we spoke to award-winning historian, author and broadcaster Dr. Bettany Hughes about why women were written out of history and what we can do to redress the balance.

Do you think women have featured less in history than men have?

Absolutely, it’s the inconvenient truth that women have always been 50% of the population, but only occupy around 0.5% of recorded history. Clearly something has gone wrong here, the maths just doesn’t work.

Why do you think this is?

To solve that particular problem I think we need to go right back to pre-history. When we go back into the pre-historic world, we see the polar opposite.

If you look at all the figurines made between about 40,000 BC, until around 5,000 BC — a period which really sees the flourishing of the modern mind — at that time around 90% of all these figurines are of women. So women are very present in the archaeological record, but then start to disappear once pre-history turns into history.

What happens?

At the birth of civilised society, you have these very highly productive and sophisticated, settlements, with women having great status; they are high priestesses, they have property rights and own land, they write poetry- but these new civilisations want to expand. So — broadly speaking — when that happens, what you need is muscle power, and society becomes more militarised. The balance of power shifts.

It really is quantum shift in the story of the world, we start to find these powerful warrior gods appearing in the archaeology as well as in epics; The Epic of Gilgamesh; The Iliad and the Odyssey; and this represents a gear change in how we are told the story of humanity.

But why does this shift in society then become an endemic throughout history?

We retain this status quo; we keep what we have by growth and military means; muscle still matters. This becomes a base note in society, where as previously a measure of achievement might have been the physical survival of the community, and of quality of life, it is now expansion and success. Women’s roles remain diminished.

So do women continue to impact history?

Yes. There are brilliantly feisty women from history who have made an impact, and whose stories need to be told. For historians it’s our job to fill in the gaps in history. We need to actively look for women’s stories, and put them back into the historical narrative, there are so many women that should be household names but just aren’t.

Why do you think that is then, that we know of some women but not others?

A lot of the women that we think of, like Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, one of the reasons their stories have lasted is that they are portrayed as highly sexualised. They are exciting, but the danger of their influence has also become a warped morality tale; we remember them as creatures who draw men towards their beds and towards their death.

Arguably we can be seen to categorise women throughout history.

Definitely, often women aren’t allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at maths; she wasn’t that much of a looker. But when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk. Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives.

So is this why, even now, we don’t acknowledge women’s role in history as much as we do men’s?

I don’t think there are malign forces at work here; it’s just a practical issue. Physically the stories of women have been written out of history, rather than written in. But times are changing; we’re getting more interested in the story of what it means to be human, as opposed to being a man or a woman.

So what can we do to help this change happen?

Whenever I feel sad about how systematically women vanished from history, I take the long view, and say, there has been a problem here for at least 3,500 years, so it’s no surprise that we have some catching up to do! But that in itself is quite empowering, because we know what we are up against.

This is an issue that has very deep roots, and we can see how and why that plays out, and therefore what we can do to start to change things. What we need to do is make sure that collectively we are known as the generation that opened rather than closed minds, and who opened these stories up, and put them back onto the page and into our collective memory.

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Dr. Bettany Hughes is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. For more on her work, visit www.bettanyhughes.co.uk

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What impact did women have on English history?

In a survey we commissioned for Women’s History Month (March 2016) we discovered that 40% of people thought that women did not impact history as much as men.

We’re aiming to help change this perception and celebrate Women in History with a series of blogs, articles and profiles of just a few women whose contribution to England’s history you might not have heard about – read more about them here.

Who has inspired you the most? Tell us in the comments or connect with the conversation on Twitter using #WomensHistoryMonth.

[Additional Twitter hashtags to follow are: #GettingTo5050 + #WomenWhoInnovate + #WomenInnovate + #SheInspiresMe — and you may discover others to follow — let us know!  This is a post from the English Heritage Blog, and we need to make an even greater effort to find or rediscover the histories of women from other racial and ethnic backgrounds around the world.  — C.H.]