12/17/12

Wage a War on Wages

How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up
By JESSICA BENNETT
Published: December 15, 2012


A workshop at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx dealt with the many issues of the gender pay gap — and offered ways for women to negotiate about salary. Sain Mota, a participant, answered a question during the session.

“How many of you know about the wage gap?” she asks a roomful of undergraduates, almost all of them women, at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx.

A few hands go up.

“Now, how many of you worry about being able to afford New York City when you graduate?”

The room laughs. That’s a given.

Ms. Houle is the national director of a group called the WAGE Project, which aims to close the gender pay gap. She explains that her dollar bills represent the amounts that women will make relative to men, on average, once they enter the work force.

Line them up next to a real dollar, and the difference is stark: 77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women. On a campus that is two-thirds women, many have heard these numbers before. Yet holding them up next to one another is sobering.

“I’m posting this to Facebook,” one woman says.

One of three male students in the room is heading to the photocopier to make copies for his mother.

Another woman in the group sees a triple threat. “This is crazy,” Dominique Remy, a senior studying communications, says, holding the pink cutouts in her hand. “What if I’m all of them? My mother is Latina. My father is Haitian. I’m a woman.”

I’ve come to this workshop amazed that it exists — and wishing that there had been a version of it when I was in school.

I grew up in the Girl Power moment of the 1980s, outpacing my male peers in school and taking on extracurricular activities by the dozen. I soared through high school and was accepted to the college of my choice. And yet, when I landed in the workplace, it seemed that I’d had a particularly rosy view.

When I was hired as a reporter at Newsweek, I took the first salary number that was offered; I felt lucky to be getting a job at all.

But a few years in, by virtue of much office whispering and a few pointed questions, I realized that the men around me were making more than I was, and more than many of my female colleagues. Despite a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit filed against the magazine in 1970, which paved the way for women there and at other publications to become writers, we still had a long way to go, it turned out.

When I tried to figure out why my salary was comparatively lower, it occurred to me: couldn’t I have simply asked for more? The problem was that I was terrified at the prospect. When I finally mustered up the nerve, I made my pitch clumsily, my voice shaking and my face beet red. I brought along a printed list of my accomplishments, yet I couldn’t help but feel boastful saying them out loud. While waiting to hear whether I would get the raise (I did), I agonized over whether I should have asked at all.

This fear of asking is a problem for many women: we are great advocates for others, but paralyzed when it comes to doing it for ourselves.

BACK at the Bronx workshop, Ms. Houle flips on a projector and introduces Tina and Ted, two fictional graduates whose profiles match what’s typical of the latest data. Tina and Ted graduated from the same university, with the same degree. They work the same number of hours, in the same type of job. And yet, as they start their first jobs, Ted is making $4,000 more than Tina. In the second year, the difference has added up to almost $9,500. Why?

“Maybe he just talked up his work more,” one woman, a marketing major, suggests.

“Maybe he was mentored by other men,” another says.

“Or maybe,” chimes in a third, a nursing student, “she didn’t know that she could negotiate.”

Bingo. Over the next three hours, these women are going to learn how to do it — and to do it well.

There has clearly been much progress since President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, mandating that men and women be paid equally for equal work. Yet nearly 50 years later, if you look at the data, progress toward that goal has stalled.

Of course, not all statistics are created equal. Some account for education and life choices like childbearing; some don’t. But if you sift through the data, the reality is still clear: the gender gap persists — and it persists for young, ambitious, childless women, too.


Continue reading, here.

12/5/12

Women Breaking Barriers on Congressional Committees

Nita Lowey breaks barrier on Appropriations panel



By DAVID ROGERS, Politico.com 12/4/12 11:44 PM EST

Rep. Nita Lowey — Bronx-born, Jewish and Mount Holyoke-educated — was tapped to be the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, making her the highest-ranking woman in the history of that once hidebound Southern male enclave that famously resisted hiring even female secretaries for decades.

The 75-year-old New Yorker will succeed retiring Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) in the new Congress just as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) will move into the ranking spot on the House Financial Services Committee, replacing Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Together with Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) in the Rules Committee, they pose a remarkable trio for Democrats: women leading the opposition party in three of the House’s five most exclusive committees.

For Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who broke her own barriers as the first female speaker of the House, it’s a personal triumph, made more so in Lowey’s case because of their friendship and Pelosi’s own roots in House Appropriations.

Indeed, in the early 1990s, first Pelosi and then Lowey and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) all won seats on the panel and established themselves as a force on labor, health and education issues as well as foreign aid. When Republicans took over the House in 1995, the three women had to scramble in the minority but those ties remained important even after Pelosi left the panel to climb the leadership ladder.

Among the top committee posts voted on Tuesday by the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, Appropriations was the only real contest. Lowey had to first get around another woman, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who enjoys more seniority on the panel but less of a following in the party.

In a secret ballot, the New Yorker prevailed easily, 36-10, and by prior arrangement, the two lawmakers had agreed not to contest the outcome in the full caucus. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Kaptur joked beforehand of being the Toledo Mud Hens vs. the New York Yankees: “I’m just happy to be in the league,” she told reporters.

For Lowey, it’s a lesson that patience pays. Elected to Congress in 1988, she has twice been seen as a potential Senate candidate, first in 2000 and then again in 2009. But on each occasion, she opted to stay put, accumulating the seniority that has now allowed her to move into the ranking position.

Indeed, the top Democratic ranks on House Appropriations have seen a remarkable level of change in the past three years, beginning with the sudden death of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) in February 2010, the retirement of former Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) at the end of that year and now Dicks’s surprise decision to leave after a relatively short two-year run in the top position.

Continue reading, here. 

12/4/12

More Women in Government=Less Corruption?

Are women leaders less corrupt? No, but they shake things up

By Stella Dawson
Reuters – 8 hrs ago

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (TrustLaw) - It is almost a cliché that getting more women into power is a good way to tackle corruption. Women, the argument goes, are less likely to take bribes or put personal gain before public good.


But is it true?

While many bristle at the suggestion that women are the "fairer sex," considering it simplistic and even sexist, a growing body of research hints that the ascent of women might indeed help dent corruption.

A deeper look shows the connection between gender and corruption is more complex than the cliché suggests.

It is not that women are purer than men or immune to the pull of greed. Rather, the link appears to be that women are more likely to rise to positions of power in open and democratic political systems, and such societies are generally more intolerant of wrongdoing, including the abuse of power and siphoning off of public money.

"It's not about having more women in politics and saying, 'Ah, that will change everything,'" said Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador for global women's issues.

"It's about changing the gender imbalance and then we could do a better job of tackling our problems. From what we can glean, you can tell this would have a salutary effect."

So it might not be a direct cause, but anecdotal evidence would seem to support the view that with more women in public office the quality of government improves, and with that. corruption falls.

In Lima, Peru, for instance, a field study by Sabrina Karim found that public perceptions of whether bribery was a major problem among traffic police had plummeted in 2012 compared with 14 years earlier. The change came after recruiting 2,500 women to patrol the streets.

A separate public opinion survey showed 86 percent approval for the job done by female traffic officers. From the point of view of the female traffic police, Karim, now a doctoral candidate at Emory University, found that 95 percent of those surveyed thought the presence of women on the force had reduced corruption and 67 percent believed women were less corrupt.

Mexico has copied Lima and introduced women officers as a way to tackle corruption.

India also has seen changes since a 1993 law reserved 30 percent of seats on village councils for women. The World Bank's annual World Development Report this year credited this change for increasing the provision of clean water, sanitation, schools and other public goods in the villages, and for lower levels of corruption.

The World Bank report found that bribes paid in Indian villages headed by women were 2.7 to 3.2 percentage points lower than in those led by men. When men control all the levers of power, researchers say, money is more likely to be invested in big-ticket construction projects such as road building where corruption is rife, rather than in schools or clinics.

BREAKING THE OLD BOY'S NETWORK

Mahnaz Afkhami, who was minister of state for women's affairs in Iran from 1975 to 1978, thinks raising women's voices can have a significant impact on the quality of government.

"There is a direct relationship between the level of democracy and the presentation of women in leadership and the quality of governance," said Afkhami.

"They are not part of the old boy's network and they are less willing to take for granted that this is the way things are done," she said.

Afkhami is now president of Women's Learning Partnership, a training and advocacy center for women leaders based in Maryland. During her tenure in Iran, she oversaw women gaining equal rights to divorce, support for employment, maternity leave and childcare.

In Nicaragua, a councilman soliciting sex in return for metal roofing for her home prompted Aurora Arauz to run for a seat on the municipal council.

Arauz was president of a women's cooperative and trained in her legal rights, so she filed a police complaint when the council member sought a sexual bribe, the U.N. Development Programme reported in a study published in October on women's perceptions of corruption. The council threw the man off the body and held a special meeting to improve services for women, including naming Arauz as a women's coordinator.

All these examples reinforce an influential World Bank study in 1999, which found that for every standard deviation point increase in women in public office above 10.9 percent, corruption declined by 10 percent.

NOT THAT SIMPLE

Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who as Indonesia's first woman finance minister earned a reputation as a tough reformer, agrees that at the grassroots level, more women in government can have an important impact particularly on how resources are allocated.

Women think of the welfare of children first and whether they have enough food to feed the family, whereas men can be less sensitive to public needs and serve their own interests, she said. "They are just being comfortable among themselves and are not having other views," she said.

At the national level, however, Indrawati and other experts said the impact of more women in power was less clear and it is too simplistic to say women clean up government.

Today, women hold a record 20.2 percent of seats in national legislatures, more than double their number in 1987, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Rwanda for example allots half its parliamentary seats to women.

Despite these gains, corruption is scarcely in retreat.

A Gallup poll of 140 countries released in May found that two-thirds of adults worldwide believed corruption was widespread in business and in their countries. Widely watched governance indicators from the World Bank likewise show that the number of countries that have improved their corruption scores is roughly similar to those that have deteriorated.

Helen Clark, who served nine years as prime minister of New Zealand, said there is no specific proof that women are any less corrupt than men. Instead, integrity may be more a function of opportunity and the way society operates than of gender, she said.

"There is a growing body of evidence that corruption operates in specific political and social networks to which women do not usually have access - particularly when women are new to positions of power," said Clark, who is the first woman to head the U.N. Development Program.

A new study titled "Fairer Sex or Purity Myth?" by researchers at Rice University and Emory University lends support to the idea that it is institutional structures that matter most, and that women's political gains are a result.

The report found that in autocratic regimes with strong male hierarchies, more women in power had little measurable impact on corruption, but that in more open, democratic political systems the change was noticeable.

The researchers speculated that the difference may be partially because women are less apt to take risks. They cite two different behavioral studies from 2003 and 2008 that show women are just as ready as men to take bribes, but they are more cautious if there is a good chance they will be caught.

In autocratic regimes, women are more likely to have gained power through male patronage, and if corruption is the norm within the male hierarchy, women are less likely to speak out for fear of losing their jobs, they said.

The opposite happens in open and democratic governments. The risk of getting caught is higher where the legal system functions well, and where voters are more likely to punish corruption at the polls. Because they tend to be risk-averse, women are doubly cautious, they said.

This could help explain why corruption in a patriarchal culture like India remains so pervasive despite women's increased political participation, while in open and transparent Nordic countries it is low.

Indeed, a new U.N. study examining 3,000 elected women and men in Indian villages noted that the social and cultural environment does play a powerful role. If women face low levels of literacy, poor training, a large housework burden, live in male-dominated societies and are financially and socially dependent on fathers and husbands, public positions for women have less impact on corruption and governance.

Lavina Banduah, executive director of the Sierra Leone branch of Transparency International, which watches out for graft worldwide, sees the problem daily in her country, which ranks high for corruption and low for accountability on governance indicators.

"Women cheat other women," Banduah said. "In the marketplace, it is women who are using the dubious means and weighting the scales."


(Reporting by Stella Dawson; Editing by Jackie Frank)