Women in the Workplace: The Unfinished Fight for Equality
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/cbsn-originals-women-in-the-workplace
CBSN Originals. Citation:
CBS Interactive. (2021). CBS News. Retrieved November 7, 2021, from https://www.cbsnews.com/video/cbsn-originals-women-in-the-workplace-the-unfinished-fight-for-equality/#x.
- “What do we think of when we think of a leader? We think of someone who is brilliant, intelligent, compassionate. That can be anyone. That doesn’t necessarily have to be situated within a male’s body.”
- Movements like the Me Too movement among many others have played a big role in exposing/uncovering the inequalities that women have experienced and continue to experience every day
- A statistic they showed: “A record 41 women are fortune 500 CEOs– and for the first time two Black women made the list.” (by Courtney Connley)
- Especially in 2020, we saw women being pushed back into traditional gender roles
- (minute 1:12) “In a single year we wiped out 3 to 4 decades worth of progress on women coming into the workforce, on being able to make a living for themselves and their families.”
- “Women are not perceived as capable in the ways that we have historically seen men.” -Dr. Tsedale Melaku (she is a sociologist and an author)
- This is because of the patriarchy, because of the way power plays out
- Women (especially black women) when/if they’re seen as strong it’s in a negative way; it’s because they’re angry, aggressive, etc.
- “In 2019, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted. In 2020, women “held just 38 percent of manager-level positions, while men held 62 percent.” Source: Women in the Workplace, 2020, LeanIn.org and Mckinsey
- Tina Tchen- President and CEO, TIME’S UP Now
- “There are lots of reasons why women have not reached the heights (of men) in corporate America”
- “One of the problems is clearly the tactics we have been using have been insufficient”
- “Changing our culture, changing how we think about women’s leadership, changing how we invest in our young women, giving them the courage and aspirations and inspiration to dream bigger for themselves and fight through the daily indignities to realize that bigger dream”
- Women in management: 40%, but women of color only make up:
- Latinas: 4.3%
- Black women: 4.0%
- Asian Women:2.5%
- Source: Catalyst, quick take: Women in management (August 11,2020)
- “These numbers really speak volumes about the experiences of women of color in corporate organizations.”
- “Women of color sit at the painful intersection of race and gender discrimination. They live with both of those forces coming at them. What’s sometimes hard for women of color is they not only sit at that intersection, they get lost at the intersection because even as companies are getting better at looking at diversity data, when you start to ask how many black women do we have, the numbers fall off the map.”
- “It’s 2021. It’s 3 black women out of 500 people”
- “Women are held to a certain standard where not only should they be ambitious, driven visionaries, but also nurturing and compassionate.” -Leigh Stein
- The Wing story- an example of a place meant to be just for women, meant to be inclusive. It ended up getting cancelled in some ways because although the website and everything appeared inclusive, people from the inside were saying that it was in fact not inclusive at all, black women reported feeling like ‘the help’, and the majority of the members were middle class white women.
- Talk about the woman who had to be the one who stayed home, it’s a good personal anecdote to add if needed
- She decided that ‘something had to give’. She decided to leave her job. “It wasn’t a question of who that person would be”
- Economic toll of the pandemic on women
- 275,000 women left the workforce in January compared to 71,000 men
- “And now the covid19 crisis could erase all the gains that women have made in the recent years in the workplace”
- 2020 put women back into default caregiver/nurturing roles (min 22)
- Many women had to decide between employment and caregiving
- “Supporting their re entry into the workforce is going to be critical for us to gain the losses that we have sustained as women during this pandemic. And I think with that we have to create the universal child care policies essential to supporting families, I think we also have to strengthen your networks as women to identify opportunities and support opportunities for re entry.” -Jacqueline M. Ebanks
- “I think our progress in terms of women and leadership is slow across all sectors but trending in the right direction. The issue for me is how do we accelerate that change and how do we sustain that change. And there’s no one answer. We’ve gotta make sure that we have policies that ensure that women can become unfettered from caregiving roles in society. I think equality important is that we need to have cisgender men who stadn upa nd speak for gender equtiy and against gender discrimination.” -Jacqueline M. Ebanks
- “It’s critically important for men to be at the table and be invested in it.” We need men to embrace these issues. We need men to be invested in it. (minute 26)