(토요모임) [29. July. 2017] Saturday meeting topic

[Scarlet]

Howdy ! 

It's me Scarlett !   

This week we are going to deal with 2 topics about Expert generalist and a gender equality.

For gender equality issue we will cover related materials from every corner of life. 

◈ Leadership : Why being a Jack of all Trades is no bad thing

◈ Gender inequality / Education/ Job market share

< Overview >

----- The Biggest Stories About Gender Inequality at Work

< Countermeasures for Gender Inequality>

----- Women Say Networking Helps Them Overcome Gender Discrimination in the Workplace

----- Six ways to fix gender inequality at work

< Gender Gap in every corner of life >

----- Male-dominated engineering has an 87 per cent gender gap - but it pays pretty well

----- Want more women to study science? Hire more female professors.

----- “Women’s work” and the gender pay gap

< Reverse Gender Discrimination >

----- [IN&OUT KOREA] Anonymous Interview on Misogyny Pt. 1

Hope you enjoy the topics. 

With luv 

Scarlett

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Why being a Jack of all Trades is no bad thing

28 Apr 2017/ Michael Simmons/ Contributor, Forbes, Fortune, HBR, and Time

How is it even possible that Elon Musk could build four multi billion companies by his mid-40s — in four separate fields (software, energy, transportation, and aerospace)?

To explain Musk’s success, others have pointed to his heroic work ethic (he regularly works 85-hour weeks), his ability to set reality-distorting visions for the future, and his incredible resilience.

But all of these felt unsatisfactory to me. Plenty of people have these traits. I wanted to know what he did differently.

As I kept reading dozens of articles, videos, and books about Musk, I noticed a huge piece of the puzzle was missing. Conventional wisdom says that in order to become world-class, we should only focus on one field. Musk breaks that rule. His expertise ranges from rocket science, engineering, physics, and artificial intelligence to solar power and energy.

In a previous article, I call people like Elon Musk “expert-generalists” (a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Company). Expert-generalists study widely in many different fields, understand deeper principles that connect those fields, and then apply the principles to their core specialty.

Based on my review of Musk’s life and the academic literature related to learning and expertise, I’m convinced that we should ALL learn across multiple fields in order to increase our odds of breakthrough success.

The jack of all trades myth

If you’re someone who loves learning in different areas, you’re probably familiar with this well-intentioned advice:

“Grow up. Focus on just one field.”

“Jack of all trades. Master of none.”

The implicit assumption is that if you study in multiple areas, you’ll only learn at a surface level, never gain mastery.

The success of expert-generalists throughout time shows that this is wrong.Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on just one field.

For example, if you’re in the tech industry and everyone else is just reading tech publications, but you also know a lot about biology, you have the ability to come up with ideas that almost no one else could. Vice-versa. If you’re in biology, but you also understand artificial intelligence, you have an information advantage over everyone else who stays siloed.

Despite this basic insight, few people actually learn beyond their industry.

Each new field we learn that is unfamiliar to others in our field gives us the ability to make combinations that they can’t. This is the expert-generalist advantage.

One fascinating study echoes this insight. It examined how the top 59 opera composers of the 20th century mastered their craft. Counter to the conventional narrative that success of top performers can solely be explained by deliberate practice and specialization, the researcher Dean Keith Simonton found the exact opposite: “The compositions of the most successful operatic composers tended to represent a mix of genres…composers were able to avoid the inflexibility of too much expertise(overtraining) by cross-training,” summarizes UPENN researcher Scott Barry Kaufman in a Scientific American article.

Musk’s “learning transfer” superpower

Starting from his early teenage years, Musk would read through two books per day in various disciplines according to his brother, Kimbal Musk. To put that context, if you read one book a month, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you.

At first, Musk’s reading spanned science fiction, philosophy, religion, programming, and biographies of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As he got older, his reading and career interests spread to physics, engineering, product design, business, technology, and energy. This thirst for knowledge allowed him to get exposed to a variety of subjects he had never necessarily learned about in school.

Elon Musk is also good at a very specific type of learning that most others aren’t even aware of — learning transfer.

Learning transfer is taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. It can be taking a kernel of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to the “real world.” It can also be taking what we learn in one industry and applying it to another.

This is where Musk shines. Several of his interviews show that he has a unique two-step process for fostering learning transfer.

First, he deconstructs knowledge into fundamental principles

Musk’s answer on a Reddit AMA describes how he does that:

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.

Research suggests that turning your knowledge into deeper, abstract principles facilitates learning transfer. Research also suggests that one technique is particularly powerful for helping people intuit underlying principles. This technique is called, “contrasting cases.”

Here’s how it works: Let’s say you want to deconstruct the letter “A” and understand the deeper principle of what makes an “A” an A. Let’s further say that you have two approaches you could use to do this:

Which approach do you think would work better?

Approach #1. Each different A in Approach #1 gives more insight into what stays the same and what differs between each A. Each A in Approach #2 gives us no insight.

By looking at lots of diverse cases when we learn anything, we begin to intuit what is essential and even craft our own unique combinations.

What does this mean in our day-to-day life? When we’re jumping into a new field, we shouldn’t just take one approach or best practice. We should explore lots of different approaches, deconstruct each one, and then compare and contrast them. This will help us uncover underlying principles.

Next, he reconstructs the fundamental principles in new fields

Step two of Musk’s learning transfer process involves reconstructing the foundational principles he’s learned in artificial intelligence, technology, physics, and engineering into separate fields:

- In aerospace in order to create SpaceX.

- In automotive in order to create Tesla with self-driving features.

- In trains in order to envision the Hyperloop.

- In aviation in order to envision electric aircraft that take off and land vertically.

- In technology in order to envision a neural lace that interfaces your brain.

- In technology in order to help build PayPal.

- In technology in order to co-found OpenAI, a non-profit that limits the probability of negative artificial intelligence futures.

Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor of psychology and one of the world’s leading thinkers on analogical reasoning, recommends people ask themselves the following two questions in order to hone their skills: 

“What does this remind me of?” and “Why does it remind me of it?”

By constantly looking at objects in your environment and material you read and asking yourself these two questions, you build the muscles in your brain that help you make connections across traditional boundaries.

Bottom line: It’s not magic. It’s just the right learning process

Now, we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class expert-generalist:

- He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader.

- He read widely across different disciplines.

- He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental principles and reconstructing them in new ways.

At the deepest level, what we can learn from Elon Musk’s story is that we shouldn’t accept the dogma that specialization is the best or only path toward career success and impact. Legendary expert-generalist Buckminster 

Fuller summarizes a shift in thinking we should all consider. He shared it decades ago, but it’s just as relevant today:

“We are in an age that assumes that the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable… In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.”

If we put in the time and learn core concepts across fields and always relate those concepts back to our life and the world, transferring between areas becomes much easier and faster.

As we build up a reservoir of “first principles” and associate those principles with different fields, we suddenly gain the superpower of being able to go into a new field we’ve never learned before, and quickly make unique contributions.

Understanding Elon’s learning superpowers helps us gain some insight into how he could go into an industry that has been around for more than 100 years and change the whole basis of how the field competes.

Elon Musk is one of a kind, but his abilities aren’t magical.

Want to take to learn like Musk? I created a free learning how to learn webinar you might like. It’s based on the learning best practices of the world’s top entrepreneurs.

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/how-elon-musk-learns-quicker-and-better-than-anyone-else?utm_content=buffer0e586&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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Being a Jack of All Trades Doesn't Mean You're a Master of None

Melanie Pinola/ 6/07/13 1:30pmFiled to: LEARNING

You've probably heard the derogatory saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." It implies that by trying to learn many things, you give up mastery of any of them. Quora designer David Cole says this is a myth.

He talks specifically about the field of design (the myth of the "unicorn" designer who can do everything from identity design to user interface design to Javascript coding), but his arguments apply to many fields. You don't have to pick between being great at one thing or just mediocre at many things.

"Learning isn't a zero-sum activity," Cole writes:

The central counter-argument here is that any learning comes with opportunity cost. Learning Python might very well take up time that you would otherwise use for studying, say, product management. This is true, in theory. But in practice, most designers I know, including myself prior to joining Quora, are not learning at their maximum rate. I have spent much of my career solving the same design problems over and over again with no substantive personal growth to show for it. I don't think my situation is unique.

But even if you were learning at your maximum rate, the opportunity cost argument actually works in favor of the multi-disciplinary approach. Design and its component practices are like any other craft: you can always develop a deeper familiarity with the minutiae, asymptotically approaching mastery. But this is a process with diminishing returns. Would you rather carve a door 1% better than you did last year, or learn how to build the rest of the house in the same amount of time? As I argue below, the connective tissue between these skills may actually be more valuable than incremental gains in a single practice.

We've discussed previously how knowing a little of everything can often be better than having one expert skill set. If you're not convinced yet, Cole's many arguments further support the view that you can be a generalist or take a multi-disciplinary approach and still do great work.

Article source : http://lifehacker.com/being-a-jack-of-all-trades-doesnt-mean-youre-a-master-511886334

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< Questions >

Q1. Have you ever heard about old saying which is 'Being a Jack of All Trades Doesn't Mean You're a Master of None'? Do you agree with this conventional wisdom?

Q2. If above sentence is true, which one is better for you between being great at one thing or being just mediocre at many things? Why do you hold that stance? 

Q3. Do you know what the term "expert-generalists” is? 

Q4. This article suggest that 'Expert-generalists' study widely in many different fields, understand deeper principles that connect those fields, and then apply the principles to their core specialty. Especially, Elon Musk is one of representative expert-generalists. Could you find any exemplary case of expert-generalists around you? 

Q5. Do you think what makes Elon Musk achieve successful milestone in his mid-40s? Some have pointed to his heroic work ethic (he regularly works 85-hour weeks), his ability to set reality-distorting visions for the future, and his incredible resilience. Do you think what was the most principal reason for his success? 

Q6. Do you enjoy reading? Do you enjoy read books widely across different disciplines or only one field at a time?

Q7. Have you ever heard about the 'Learning transfer ability'? According to this article,  learning transfer is taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. Do you have one? 

Q8. According to this article, we can learn how Musk has become a world-class expert-generalist as belows. How about you? Do you have those tendencies? 

- He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader.

- He read widely across different disciplines.

- He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental principles and reconstructing them in new ways.

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Year in Review: The Biggest Stories About 

Gender Inequality at Work

In 2015, companies and individuals made some strides toward tackling the wage gap, 

the rarity of paid leave, and professional sexism.

LI ZHOU  DEC 31, 2015/ BUSINESS

Gender inequality in the workplace continued to be a subject of contention this past year. Companies from Netflix to Goldman Sachs sought to make their paid-leave programs more equitable. The gender wage gap was called out again and again, by workers as varied as Hollywood actresses and Google engineers. Government policies in the U.S. and abroad aimed to increase transparency around pay and require more women in company boardrooms. Gender discrimination was brought to the fore in a series of high-profile lawsuits.

These make up just a fraction of the events that transpired. What follows is a look back at some important moments from the past year when men and women moved closer to workplace parity.

Ellen Pao takes a break with her legal team. (Stephen Lam / Reuters)

In a $16 million lawsuit, Ellen Pao sued her former employer, the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination. She alleged that the company overlooked her for promotions on the basis of gender and later terminated her when she brought up the issue. While Pao lost her case in March, it ultimately drew greater scrutiny to the underrepresentation and experiences of women in tech and venture capital. She’s since written more about her careers in law and tech, including a commentary in the newsletter Lenny, in which she continues to call out sexism in Silicon Valley, but is optimistic about change. She writes: “Eventually, there comes a point where you can't just rally and explain away all the behavior as creepy exceptions or pin the blame on yourself … You see patterns, systemic problems, and it doesn't matter where you are or what industry you pursue.”

Patricia Arquette accepts the award for best actress in a supporting role, for Boyhood. (John Shearer / Invision / AP)

During her Oscars acceptance speech in February, the actress Patricia Arquette highlighted the need to close the wage gap in all industries and earned a standing ovation from several audience members, including Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez. “It's our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” she said.

In this 2006 photo, Erica Baker works with Raiford Storey in Google’s New York Office. (Mark Lennihan / AP)

Erica Baker, a former engineer at Google (now at Slack), created a spreadsheet earlier this year that enabled people to fill out their salaries and share that information more broadly within the company. Nearly 5 percent of workers at Google have since completed the spreadsheet, according to Baker, although she noted that she was penalized for creating it: At Google, employees are able to give each other $150 bonuses as a nod to good work, but, Baker says, seven of the bonuses she received, all of which mentioned the spreadsheet, were denied by her manager.

Peggy Young, a former UPS worker whose health care ended when the company denied her request

 for special accommodations during her pregnancy, with her daughter (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)

When she was  pregnant, Peggy Young, a former driver at UPS, requested an adjustment to her workload, per her doctor’s recommendations. The company refused and put her on unpaid leave, citing her inability to lift the 70 pounds required of her in the job description, and she ultimately sued. In March, the Supreme Court decided in Young’s favor on the grounds that UPS, which makes special accommodations for others with specific health conditions, needed to make comparable ones for pregnant women that enable them to continue working.

David Cameron arrives at Fort St. Angelo 

during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. (Andrew Winning / Reuters)

In July, British Prime Minister David Cameron established a rule requiring all companies with 250 or more employees to share information on the average pay that their male and female workers receive. His aim: to “cast sunlight on the discrepancies and create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up.” In a 2014 World Economic Forum report, the U.K. ranked 48th out of 131 countries for gender pay equity, while the U.S. came in 65th.

Jim Young / Reuters

While the headlines covering the topic were lighthearted—a Washington Post piece in July was titled “Freezing women, oblivious men”—a study from Nature published this year found that the formula used to calculate standard office thermostat temperatures was biased, and based on the resting metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man who weighs 154 pounds. Women, who tend to have lower metabolic rates, may get warmer at a slower rate and thus find that offices, in one sense, are not built with them in mind.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a weekly cabinet meeting in Berlin. (Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters)

Today, 20 percent of Germany’s corporate boardroom seats belong to women, and in a move that will increase gender diversity, the country passed a law in March instituting boardroom quotas. The law requires that companies have at least 30 percent women in supervisory seats, and German Justice Minister Heiko Maas called it “the greatest contribution to gender equality since women got the vote.” Germany follows in the footsteps of Norway, Spain, France, Iceland, Italy, and Belgium, which all have similar legislation.

California state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson is congratulated by 

senator Marty Block after her wage-equality bill was approved. (Rich Pedroncelli / AP)

In October, California’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed into law the Fair Pay Act, which enables employees to freely ask their employers how their wages compare to others in comparable positions, including those at different physical locations of the same company. It’s been called one of the strongest laws in the nation to offer such protections, and goes into effect on January 1, 2016.

Robert Galbraith / Reuters

While many strategies have been recommended to address the wage gap within companies, Salesforce, the cloud-based software company, opted to vanquish it completely by reviewing its payroll and simply adjusting salaries so that all female employees made the same amount as the men in comparable roles. The decision, which was first made public in November, was implemented following the review of 17,000 employees’ salaries and cost the company $3 million.

Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix (Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters)

This summer, Netflix became the first company to offer one year of paid family leave for new mothers and fathers. Other organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, and Spotify, quickly followed suit, enacting similarly generous policies.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Although many large companies have announced more comprehensive paid-leave policies, many of these apply exclusively to a small subset of workers in high-paying white-collar jobs. In October, the Washington D.C. City Council proposed a law that would cover all workers and enable them to take 16 weeks of paid leave to care for a child or sick family member, regardless of where they work.

Jennifer Lawrence walks the red carpet at the U.K. premiere of 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. (Luke Macgregor / Reuters)

In October, Jennifer Lawrence wrote an impassioned op-ed in the newsletter Lenny about the lack of gender wage equality in Hollywood, citing the difference between her salary with that of male co-stars Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale for their roles in American Hustle. “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn't get mad at Sony,” she wrote, “I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early … I'm over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable!” Her piece has since ignited fierce discussion about wage gaps in Hollywood and beyond, with Bradley Cooper announcing that he will openly share his salary information, in an effort to promote pay transparency.

Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, poses with his cabinet after their swearing-in. (Chris Wattie / Reuters)

In November, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, appointed equal numbers of men and women to his 31-person cabinet, which he also sits on. His reason for prioritizing gender parity? “Because it's 2015.”

Article source : https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/gender-equality-workplace-2015/422328/

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< Questions >

Q1. Do you agree that women are inferior to men? Are you sure that gender characteristics were the dominant reasons for their poor performance?

Q2. What is the influential factors for women to achieve best performance? 

Q3. Do you agree that men are inferior to women? Could you make some exemplary cases? Are you sure that gender characteristics were the dominant reasons for their poor performance?

Q4. What is the influential factors for men to achieve best performance? 

Q5. What is your gender? Do you have any skills which are superior to others because of your gender? 

Q6. Have you ever faced any gender inequality issue at your work place? How did you react to it? 

Q7. Who's policy is the most impressive agenda to boost up gender equality issue? 

Q8. What do you know about Angela Merkel? What images are coming up when you think of her? Do you know any representative policy of her? 

*** Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German politician and the Chancellor of Germany since 2005. She is also the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

A former research scientist with a doctorate in physical chemistry, Merkel entered politics in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, and briefly served as a deputy spokesperson for the first democratically elected East German Government headed by Lothar de Maizière in 1990. Following German reunification in 1990, Merkel was elected to the Bundestag for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and has been reelected ever since. Merkel was appointed as the Minister for Women and Youth in the federal government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1991, and became the Minister for the Environment in 1994. After her party lost the federal election in 1998, Merkel was elected Secretary-General of the CDU before becoming the party's first female leader two years later in the aftermath of a donations scandal that toppled Wolfgang Schäuble.

Following the 2005 federal election, Merkel was appointed Germany's first female Chancellor at the head of a grand coalition consisting of the CDU, its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the 2009 federal election, the CDU obtained the largest share of the vote and Merkel was able to form a coalition government with the support of the Free Democratic Party (FDP).[7] At the 2013 federal election, Merkel's CDU won a landslide victory with 41.5% of the vote and formed a second grand coalition with the SPD, after the FDP lost all of its representation in the Bundestag.

In 2007, Merkel was President of the European Council and played a central role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Berlin Declaration. One of Merkel's consistent priorities has been to strengthen transatlantic economic relations. Merkel played a crucial role in managing the financial crisis at the European and international level, and she has been referred to as "the decider." In domestic policy, health care reform, problems concerning future energy development and more recently her government's approach to the ongoing migrant crisis have been major issues during her Chancellorship.[9] On 26 March 2014, Merkel became the longest-serving incumbent head of government in the European Union and she is currently the senior G7 leader. On 20 November 2016, Merkel announced she would seek re-election to a fourth term.[10]

Article source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel

Q9. What do you know about Justin Trudeau? What images are coming up when you think of him? Do you know any representative policy of him? 

*** Justin Pierre James Trudeau PC MP (born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician. He is the 23rd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party.[1][2] The second youngest prime minister after Joe Clark, he is also, as the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the first to be related to a previous holder of the post.[3][4]

Born in Ottawa, Trudeau attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf and graduated from McGill University in 1994 and the University of British Columbia in 1998. He gained a high public profile in October 2000, when he delivered a eulogy at his father's state funeral.[5] After graduating, he worked as a teacher in Vancouver, British Columbia. He completed one year of an engineering program at Montreal's École Polytechnique before quitting in 2003. In 2005 he began a master's degree in environmental geography at McGill University but quit after one year. He used his public profile to advocate for various causes and acted in the 2007 TV miniseries The Great War.[6]

Eight years after his father's death, Trudeau entered politics. In the 2008 federal election, he was elected to represent the riding of Papineau in the House of Commons. In 2009, he was appointed the Liberal Party's critic for youth and multiculturalism, and the following year, became critic for citizenship and immigration. In 2011, he was appointed as critic for secondary education and youth and amateur sport. Trudeau won the leadership of the Liberal Party in April 2013 and went on to lead his party to victory in the 2015 federal election, moving the 3rd-placed Liberals from 36 seats to 184 seats, the largest-ever numerical increase by a party in a Canadian election.

Article source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Trudeau

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Women Say Networking Helps Them Overcome 

Gender Discrimination in the Workplace

Shapr surveyed 2,000 employed women between the ages of 24 and 45 during October 2016. Here’s what we found:

WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION IS REAL

Four in ten career women battled workplace discrimination to get where they are today.

Our study into the career hurdles, ambitions, and setbacks of 2,000 employed women between the ages of 24 and 45 found as many as 43 percent experienced discrimination at some point in their career when trying to climb the career ladder or establish themselves in a new working environment.

More than a third (36 percent) of women felt male colleagues were able to bond more easily with those in management or higher positions.

Unfortunately, feeling left out of workplace socializing or networking opportunities because of their gender is familiar to many women. About one in five felt they’d been restricted in their career growth and also felt that their current workplace is a “boys’ club” culture.

NETWORKING HELPS

A freelancer uses Shapr to swipe through profiles and meet other professionals.

Shapr is a free networking app that helps people meet like-minded professionals. Thousands of people use Shapr daily to find mentors and get inspired from conversations with other motivated professionals. Shapr is also used by job seekers looking for less publicized opportunities, by career changers exploring different professional pathways, and by investors looking for new and innovative ideas to bring to market. So naturally, we asked women what they thought of networking.

The results show networking works.

59 percent of today’s working women say they would be more successful if they had more opportunities to engage in networking.

Results showed your professional network makes a big impact on your ability to get in the door — two thirds had landed a job purely because of an existing contact they had.

A quarter said they have a particular person or contact who gave them a chance and helped them with the knowledge that allowed them to carve out their career.

More than half of those surveyed said the ability to make relevant contacts helps them overcome some of the obstacles women still face in the workplace.

This survey illustrates the importance of networking regularly and meeting professionals across your industry to help tackle gender bias in the workplace. Sixty-seven percent of women surveyed reported they were able to land a job because of a pre-existing contact who submitted a resume internally, provided a recommendation, or shared a less publicized opportunity. The results show that building professional relationships is one of the most impactful strategies for career advancement.

Forty-seven percent of women feel that equality in workplace opportunities has improved slightly in the last five years. Yet more than a quarter of women sadly felt there has been no improvement.

With more than half of women reporting little to no improvement for workplace opportunities in the last five years, we need tools that help women to get ahead. Shapr’s goal is to make networking inspiring, manageable and useful. This goal is accomplished through a time effective app that introduces professionals with common interests. By giving women more opportunities to engage in one to one networking, we can help eliminate the gender bias.

Use Shapr to get introduced to opportunities and professionals near you. To get started, visit http://www.shapr.co or download Shapr directly from the app store and set up your free profile.

Article source : https://medium.com/@Shapr/women-say-networking-helps-them-overcome-gender-discrimination-in-the-workplace-721e384808bc

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Six ways to fix gender inequality at work

29 Oct 2014/ Helena Trachsel/ Head, Office for the Equality of Men and Women of the Canton of Zurich

Switzerland is one of the world’s most successful economies, scoring highly in areas from innovation to institutional excellence. So why is our record less stellar when it comes to gender equality? Switzerland’s performance in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap 2014 Report is a case in point. We came first in the Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, but only 11th in terms of closing the gender gap. A closer look reveals an even starker contrast between economic success and gender bias. In the wealthy canton of Zurich, for example, women earn on average 24% less than men. In the financial sector, one of Switzerland’s signature industries, the difference is an astonishing 32%. To make matters worse, Swiss women are more at risk of poverty than men.

Entrenched traditions are part of the problem. Perhaps surprisingly, women’s independence is still a relatively recent phenomenon in Switzerland. Until 1985, Swiss women could not open a bank account or go to work without their husbands’ permission. Many young women today saw their fathers having to sign off on their mothers’ career decisions. The consequences are still felt today: 75% of female teenagers in Switzerland choose their apprenticeships from a narrow range of only 11 stereotypically feminine occupations, such as hairdressing or as dental assistants. The same proportion of male teenagers choose from a range that is more than twice as wide. Popular “masculine” jobs, such as car mechanic or IT specialist, also offer more opportunities for career development.

If we want Swiss society to truly embrace gender equality, we have to start at school. We need to teach both girls and boys to aim for ambitious careers, demand better pay and learn to negotiate. We need to encourage girls to picture themselves as future breadwinners. It should be natural for a girl to think about becoming a carpenter when she grows up, and for a boy to want to be a nurse.

For companies, there are six concrete ways of promoting gender equality at every stage of the hiring process and career progression:

1. Rethink job interviews. The question: “What do you think your salary should be?” should be abolished altogether, as women consistently ask for less than men. Instead, interviewers should provide a fair and transparent salary range and ask applicants to position themselves within it.

2. Make gender equality part of training and education. Young people should be supported in choosing jobs that are future-oriented and promising, regardless of their gender.

3. Be proactive about welcoming women. Companies should clearly state that they want to hire, support and promote women. Salaries and promotions should be monitored and eval‎uated on a regular basis to ensure equal treatment.

4. Make flexibility and work-life balance a part of the wider company culture. Too often, employees have to specifically ask to work part-time or work from home, which can be awkward. Companies should instead offer a broad range of different options.

5. Don’t limit your talent pool. Companies should aim for a 50-50 gender split in all their teams – right up to the executive floor. Offering practical support such as childcare, is part of this, as is the right attitude. It should not be a career killer for a man to ask for extended leave because he wants to look after his children.

6. Use the power of networking. Networking, mentoring and coaching opportunities can help women build confidence and develop their careers.

Young people today have a very different view of what a great career means. Many want equality in their private and professional lives, and see a healthy work-life balance as crucial to their happiness. This presents a huge opportunity for redefining gender roles. The challenge is to address this in all sectors – business, education, research and politics. When it comes to gender equality, we all have to work together. Only then can we provide the next generation with the very best support for shaping their own path in life and contributing to Switzerland’s continued success – regardless of gender.

Author: Helena Trachsel is the Head of the Office for the Equality of Men and Women of the Canton of Zurich

Image: Swiss Economy Minister Doris Leuthard is silhouetted against a Swiss national flag as she speaks during the party’s convention at the cable car station on the top of Saentis mountain (2,502 metres above sea-level) in eastern Switzerland, September 15, 2007. REUTERS/Miro Kuzmanovic

Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2014/10/six-ways-fix-gender-inequality-workplace/

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< Questions >

Q1. In your work place, do you have distinct roles for women? What is that? 

Q2. In your work place, do you have distinct roles for men? What is that? 

Q3. What is your job? How many female colleagues do you have in your field? 

Q4. Do you think your field have salary gaps between men and women? 

Q5. How do you think about the boy's club or the girl's club? 

Q6. Are you involved in any group gathering with same gender?

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Male-dominated engineering has an 87 per cent gender gap - but it pays pretty well

National Women In Engineering Day: The gender pay gap between male and female engineers has narrowed. But there are still eight times as many men as women in the industry, research shows

By Radhika Sanghani10:48AM BST 23 Jun 2015 CommentsComment

The gender pay gap between male and female engineering staff has closed by six per cent in the last couple of years.

But the gap between applicants is still huge, with eight times more men than women applying for jobs within engineering.

A new study from recruitment website Reed.co.uk found 97,681 women in the UK applied for engineering roles in 2014 – compared to 753,263 men.

It shows a gap of 87 per cent between the genders - a tiny drop from 2013, which saw a gap of 88 per cent between male and female applicants.

The study comes on National Women In Engineering Day which celebrates female engineers and encourages women and girls to consider the profession.

• 'My dad said architecture wasn't for girls. Boy I proved him wrong'

There has been little progress regarding the numbers of female applicants, but the gender pay gap in the industry has reduced year-on-year. In 2013, men earned 10 per cent more than women with average salaries of £31,720 while women earned £28,496. But last year, men earned just four per cent more with salaries of £33,583 compared to £32,096 for women.

Lynn Cahillane, communications manager at Reed.co.uk, which surveyed 1,197 engineers, said: “While many industries are currently suffering bad press around discrepancies in salary between genders, our data shows that engineering is actually one of the better industries for equal pay.

“What’s more, the industry is seeing huge levels of growth and we’re seeing a constant flow of jobs being listed on our site from marine engineering to micro-electronics.

"This information needs to be portrayed at schools to encourage more young people to consider a career in engineering. ”

For women, the most popular job roles within engineering were in the automotive, manufacturing and design areas.

The sections with the largest gender gap were CNC programming (creating control programs for Computer Numerical Control machines), welding and maintenance.

They were following by maintenance and mechanical and eletrical work, which were on the top 10 list of jobs women applied for.

Article source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/11692996/Women-In-Engineering-Day-Gender-gap-in-male-dominated-industry-falls.html

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Want more women to study science? 

Hire more female professors.

By Ray Fisman

The soon-to-be-completed leadership succession at Xerox from Ann Mulcahy—a woman—to Ursula Burns—also a woman—is one for the record books. It will be the first woman-to-woman transition at a Fortune 500 company, and Burns is the first African-American woman to take the helm of any such corporation.

Mulcahy has balked at the notion that the über-competent Burns needed her help—or anyone else's—in making her way through the ranks. Nonetheless, the paucity of women in senior positions who might in turn mentor young women on their way up the ladder is one of the primary reasons put forth to explain the continued existence of the glass ceiling in corporate America. In science and technology, the situation is even bleaker—women are under-represented at every level, from advanced college classes to the executive suite, making Burns' rise from math major to CEO of tech giant Xerox all the more remarkable.

Of course, female mentorship is only one strand of a complex web of explanations—from aptitude to temperament to societal discrimination—for the gender gap in science and elsewhere. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper on gender and academic achievement at the U.S. Air Force Academy, however, finds that the importance of female mentors may be even more powerful than previously thought. The study, by University of California-Davis economists Scott Carrell and Marianne Page and their colleague James West at the Air Force Academy, finds that replacing a male instructor with a female one has such a strong effect on female achievement as to erase the gender gap entirely.

The trio of economists examined the undergraduate careers of 9,481 cadets taught by nearly 250 different science and math instructors at the USAFA during the years 2000-08. Untangling the impact of an instructor's gender from the many other factors that influence student performance has hamstrung most research on the topic: If women taught by women perform better (or worse) is it because the instructors attract better (or worse) female students rather than teach them better? Or is it because women "dumb down" their syllabi or exams to make it easier for lower-performing women to do well? Or is it something else entirely?

For the students at the Air Force Academy, the researchers are blessed with the rigid curriculum and protocol of a military college, ruling out most complications. Cadets face a heavy slate of compulsory first-year courses, including a battery of science, technology, engineering, and math requirements, and within each science-related course, students are randomly assigned to one of several teaching faculty members. So whether a student—male or female—was taught by a woman was a matter of luck rather than any active choice by student or professor. Each class used an identical syllabus and all students took the same exam, which prevented the various instructors from adjusting their courses to cater to better or worse students. Further, since the researchers also had access to students' math SAT scores, they could take account of any differences in quantitative abilities among the students.

The authors found that women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male classmates, even after accounting for students' SAT scores. The gap in performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point gender gap evaporated. (It was also the case that men performed better when taught by other men, but the difference was far less substantial.) The authors persuasively demonstrate that the overall male-female performance difference is due in large part to the fact that men dominate the Air Force Academy science faculty (as is the case in most schools), with only 23 percent of courses taught by women.

The researchers also found that the influence of professor gender was even starker for the set of students who were math whizzes when they entered the Academy (those with math SAT scores above 700). For these students, a female instructor eliminated the gender GPA gap entirely—and solely because high-performing women did well in their classes rather than because high-ability men underperformed.

What's more, having a male instructor didn't just affect female cadets' performance in their first-year classes—ramifications could be seen throughout their undergraduate careers. Not surprisingly, students who did well in their introductory science classes were more likely to go on to obtain science degrees (and presumably go on to science-related professions). Among high-math-SAT students—those most likely to be the ones to go on to obtain science degrees—the authors calculate that having a women-only roster of faculty would create gender parity among science majors.

What is it about a woman instructor that is so important for female pupils? It's unlikely to be simply the sense of empowerment of seeing that women can in fact make it in science. If that were the case, then having all female professors should help their female students catch up to the men and having all male professors should cause the male-female performance gap to widen. Yet the authors found that, while female students perform better on average in classes taught by female professors, there are some male professors under whom there's no achievement gap between male and female students (and also some female professors for whom the gender gap is as big as that of some of their male colleagues). So some men are very good at mentoring women, just not nearly enough of them.

What kind of man makes a good mentor? Is it because, as is sometimes suggested, men with daughters make good mentors, having developed greater empathy for the challenges faced by their female students? Or differences in teaching style? The authors unfortunately don't know much about the Academy's teaching staff, so for now the enormous impact of professor gender remains a bit of a black box.

Regardless of the underlying mechanism at work, the study has wide-ranging implications for what might be done to keep talented women on science career tracks. Most obviously, the findings provide further justification for affirmative action programs to promote women in the sciences, to break the cycle of talented women opting out of science because there are no women in science. At the same time, we might unravel the mystery of what makes people—men or women—better at mentoring their female protégés.

I posed the question of how to create gender equity in science to Stephanie Pfirman, a Barnard College environmental scientist and a member of a Columbia University initiative on women in the sciences. She pointed out that recruiting female mentors and making men into more women-friendly bosses and teachers are both efforts aimed at changing the environment faced by young women. While these are worthy objectives, she suggested developing coping mechanisms to deal with circumstances as they are—for example, realizing that getting an A- or even a B+ in an introductory course doesn't spell the end of your career as a scientist, as many high-achieving young women believe. Yet the results of this study suggest that just by helping more women to overcome the adversities they face in becoming scientists today, we will make science less of a man's world for the female scientists of tomorrow.

Article source : http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2009/06/a_formula_for_success.html

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< Questions >

Q1. What was your major? How many female student did you have at the university? 

Q2. Have you ever faced any discrimination due to your gender or race? Please share your experiences with other members? How did you react to discrimination? 

Q3. If you are women, which major would you choose? Or which major would you recommend for you future daughter? Why? 

Q4. How do you think about LGBT? Why did you have that opinion? 

*** LGBT, or GLBT, is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. 

“Women’s work” and the gender pay gap

How discrimination, societal norms, and other forces affect women’s occupational choices—and their pay

Report • By Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould • July 20, 2016

Summary

What this report finds: 

Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men—despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment. Too often it is assumed that this pay gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves often affected by gender bias. For example, by the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

Why it matters, and how to fix it:

The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board by suppressing their earnings and making it harder to balance work and family. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

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■ Introduction and key findings

Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men (Hegewisch and DuMonthier 2016). This is despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment.

Critics of this widely cited statistic claim it is not solid evidence of economic discrimination against women because it is unadjusted for characteristics other than gender that can affect earnings, such as years of education, work experience, and location. Many of these skeptics contend that the gender wage gap is driven not by discrimination, but instead by voluntary choices made by men and women—particularly the choice of occupation in which they work. And occupational differences certainly do matter—occupation and industry account for about half of the overall gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn 2016).

To isolate the impact of overt gender discrimination—such as a woman being paid less than her male coworker for doing the exact same job—it is typical to adjust for such characteristics. But these adjusted statistics can radically understate the potential for gender discrimination to suppress women’s earnings. This is because gender discrimination does not occur only in employers’ pay-setting practices. It can happen at every stage leading to women’s labor market outcomes.

Take one key example: occupation of employment. While controlling for occupation does indeed reduce the measured gender wage gap, the sorting of genders into different occupations can itself be driven (at least in part) by discrimination. By the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

This paper explains why gender occupational sorting is itself part of the discrimination women face, examines how this sorting is shaped by societal and economic forces, and explains that gender pay gaps are present even within occupations.

Key points include:

- Gender pay gaps within occupations persist, even after accounting for years of experience, hours worked, and education.

- Decisions women make about their occupation and career do not happen in a vacuum—they are also shaped by society.

- The long hours required by the highest-paid occupations can make it difficult for women to succeed, since women tend to shoulder the majority of family care taking duties.

- Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid.

This report examines wages on an hourly basis. Technically, this is an adjusted gender wage gap measure. As opposed to weekly or annual earnings, hourly earnings ignore the fact that men work more hours on average throughout a week or year. Thus, the hourly gender wage gap is a bit smaller than the 79 percent figure cited earlier. This minor adjustment allows for a comparison of women’s and men’s wages without assuming that women, who still shoulder a disproportionate amount of responsibilities at home, would be able or willing to work as many hours as their male counterparts. Examining the hourly gender wage gap allows for a more thorough conversation about how many factors create the wage gap women experience when they cash their paychecks.

■ Within-occupation gender wage gaps are large—and persist after controlling for education and other factors

Those keen on downplaying the gender wage gap often claim women voluntarily choose lower pay by disproportionately going into stereotypically female professions or by seeking out lower-paid positions. But even when men and women work in the same occupation—whether as hairdressers, cosmetologists, nurses, teachers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, or construction workers—men make more, on average, than women (CPS microdata 2011–2015).

As a thought experiment, imagine if women’s occupational distribution mirrored men’s. For example, if 2 percent of men are carpenters, suppose 2 percent of women become carpenters. What would this do to the wage gap? After controlling for differences in education and preferences for full-time work, Goldin (2014) finds that 32 percent of the gender pay gap would be closed.

However, leaving women in their current occupations and just closing the gaps between women and their male counterparts within occupations (e.g., if male and female civil engineers made the same per hour) would close 68 percent of the gap. This means examining why waiters and waitresses, for example, with the same education and work experience do not make the same amount per hour. To quote Goldin:

Another way to measure the effect of occupation is to ask what would happen to the aggregate gender gap if one equalized earnings by gender within each occupation or, instead, evened their proportions for each occupation. The answer is that equalizing earnings within each occupation matters far more than equalizing the proportions by each occupation. (Goldin 2014)

This phenomenon is not limited to low-skilled occupations, and women cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap (at least in terms of broad formal credentials). Indeed, women’s educational attainment outpaces men’s; 37.0 percent of women have a college or advanced degree, as compared with 32.5 percent of men (CPS ORG 2015). Furthermore, women earn less per hour at every education level, on average. As shown in Figure A, men with a college degree make more per hour than women with an advanced degree. Likewise, men with a high school degree make more per hour than women who attended college but did not graduate. Even straight out of college, women make $4 less per hour than men—a gap that has grown since 2000 (Kroeger, Cooke, and Gould 2016).

■ Steering women to certain educational and professional career paths—as well as outright discrimination—can lead to different occupational outcomes

The gender pay gap is driven at least in part by the cumulative impact of many instances over the course of women’s lives when they are treated differently than their male peers. Girls can be steered toward gender-normative careers from a very early age. At a time when parental influence is key, parents are often more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields, even when their daughters perform at the same level in mathematics (OECD 2015).

Expectations can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 study found third-grade girls rated their math competency scores much lower than boys’, even when these girls’ performance did not lag behind that of their male counterparts (Herbert and Stipek 2005). Similarly, in states where people were more likely to say that “women [are] better suited for home” and “math is for boys,” girls were more likely to have lower math scores and higher reading scores (Pope and Sydnor 2010). While this only establishes a correlation, there is no reason to believe gender aptitude in reading and math would otherwise be related to geography. Parental expectations can impact performance by influencing their children’s self-confidence because self-confidence is associated with higher test scores (OECD 2015).

By the time young women graduate from high school and enter college, they already eval‎uate their career opportunities differently than young men do. Figure B shows college freshmen’s intended majors by gender. While women have increasingly gone into medical school and continue to dominate the nursing field, women are significantly less likely to arrive at college interested in engineering, computer science, or physics, as compared with their male counterparts.

These decisions to allow doors to lucrative job opportunities to close do not take place in a vacuum. Many factors might make it difficult for a young woman to see herself working in computer science or a similarly remunerative field. A particularly depressing example is the well-publicized evidence of sexism in the tech industry (Hewlett et al. 2008). Unfortunately, tech isn’t the only STEM field with this problem.

Young women may be discouraged from certain career paths because of industry culture. Even for women who go against the grain and pursue STEM careers, if employers in the industry foster an environment hostile to women’s participation, the share of women in these occupations will be limited. One 2008 study found that “52 percent of highly qualified females working for SET [science, technology, and engineering] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures” (Hewlett et al. 2008). Extreme job pressures are defined as working more than 100 hours per week, needing to be available 24/7, working with or managing colleagues in multiple time zones, and feeling pressure to put in extensive face time (Hewlett et al. 2008). As compared with men, more than twice as many women engage in housework on a daily basis, and women spend twice as much time caring for other household members (BLS 2015). Because of these cultural norms, women are less likely to be able to handle these extreme work pressures. In addition, 63 percent of women in SET workplaces experience sexual harassment (Hewlett et al. 2008). To make matters worse, 51 percent abandon their SET training when they quit their job. All of these factors play a role in steering women away from highly paid occupations, particularly in STEM fields.

■ The long hours required for some of the highest-paid occupations are incompatible with historically gendered family responsibilities

Those seeking to downplay the gender wage gap often suggest that women who work hard enough and reach the apex of their field will see the full fruits of their labor. In reality, however, the gender wage gap is wider for those with higher earnings. Women in the top 95th percentile of the wage distribution experience a much larger gender pay gap than lower-paid women.

Again, this large gender pay gap between the highest earners is partially driven by gender bias. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (2014) posits that high-wage firms have adopted pay-setting practices that disproportionately reward individuals who work very long and very particular hours. This means that even if men and women are equally productive per hour, individuals—disproportionately men—who are more likely to work excessive hours and be available at particular off-hours are paid more highly (Hersch and Stratton 2002; Goldin 2014; Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor 1996).

It is clear why this disadvantages women. Social norms and expectations exert pressure on women to bear a disproportionate share of domestic work—particularly caring for children and elderly parents. This can make it particularly difficult for them (relative to their male peers) to be available at the drop of a hat on a Sunday evening after working a 60-hour week. To the extent that availability to work long and particular hours makes the difference between getting a promotion or seeing one’s career stagnate, women are disadvantaged.

And this disadvantage is reinforced in a vicious circle. Imagine a household where both members of a male–female couple have similarly demanding jobs. One partner’s career is likely to be prioritized if a grandparent is hospitalized or a child’s babysitter is sick. If the past history of employer pay-setting practices that disadvantage women has led to an already-existing gender wage gap for this couple, it can be seen as “rational” for this couple to prioritize the male’s career. This perpetuates the expectation that it always makes sense for women to shoulder the majority of domestic work, and further exacerbates the gender wage gap.

■ Female-dominated professions pay less, but it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon

Many women do go into low-paying female-dominated industries. Home health aides, for example, are much more likely to be women. But research suggests that women are making a logical choice, given existing constraints. This is because they will likely not see a significant pay boost if they try to buck convention and enter male-dominated occupations. Exceptions certainly exist, particularly in the civil service or in unionized workplaces (Anderson, Hegewisch, and Hayes 2015). However, if women in female-dominated occupations were to go into male-dominated occupations, they would often have similar or lower expected wages as compared with their female counterparts in female-dominated occupations (Pitts 2002). Thus, many women going into female-dominated occupations are actually situating themselves to earn higher wages. These choices thereby maximize their wages (Pitts 2002). This holds true for all categories of women except for the most educated, who are more likely to earn more in a male profession than a female profession. There is also evidence that if it becomes more lucrative for women to move into male-dominated professions, women will do exactly this (Pitts 2002). In short, occupational choice is heavily influenced by existing constraints based on gender and pay-setting across occupations.

To make matters worse, when women increasingly enter a field, the average pay in that field tends to decline, relative to other fields. Levanon, England, and Allison (2009) found that when more women entered an industry, the relative pay of that industry 10 years later was lower. Specifically, they found evidence of deval‎uation—meaning the proportion of women in an occupation impacts the pay for that industry because work done by women is deval‎ued.

Computer programming is an example of a field that has shifted from being a very mixed profession, often associated with secretarial work in the past, to being a lucrative, male-dominated profession (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). While computer programming has evolved into a more technically demanding occupation in recent decades, there is no skills-based reason why the field needed to become such a male-dominated profession. When men flooded the field, pay went up. In contrast, when women became park rangers, pay in that field went down (Miller 2016).

Further compounding this problem is that many professions where pay is set too low by market forces, but which clearly provide enormous social benefits when done well, are female-dominated. Key examples range from home health workers who care for seniors, to teachers and child care workers who educate today’s children. If closing gender pay differences can help boost pay and professionalism in these key sectors, it would be a huge win for the economy and society.

■ Conclusion

The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board. Too often it is assumed that this gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves affected by gender bias. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

— This paper was made possible by a grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

— The authors wish to thank Josh Bivens, Barbara Gault, and Heidi Hartman for their helpful comments.

About the authors

Jessica Schieder joined EPI in 2015. As a research assistant, she supports the research of EPI’s economists on topics such as the labor market, wage trends, executive compensation, and inequality. Prior to joining EPI, Jessica worked at the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) as a revenue and spending policies analyst, where she examined how budget and tax policy decisions impact working families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international political economy from Georgetown University.

Elise Gould, senior economist, joined EPI in 2003. Her research areas include wages, poverty, economic mobility, and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition. In the past, she has authored a chapter on health in The State of Working America 2008/09; co-authored a book on health insurance coverage in retirement; published in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Challenge Magazine, and Tax Notes; and written for academic journals including Health Economics, Health Affairs, Journal of Aging and Social Policy, Risk Management & Insurance Review, Environmental Health Perspectives, and International Journal of Health Services. She holds a master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Article source : http://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-pay-gap-how-discrimination-societal-norms-and-other-forces-affect-womens-occupational-choices-and-their-pay/

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[IN&OUT KOREA] Anonymous Interview on Misogyny Pt. 1

By AsiaToday

 2016-08-28-1472387784-4178279-KakaoTalk_20160826_102331231.jpg

[The wall at exit 10 of Seoul’s Gangnam Station is covered with memos left by citizens, in memory of a woman who was stabbed to death by a stranger in a nearby public bathroom back in May. The murder case triggered debate on misogyny in Korea, as the crime was motivated for the murderer’s hatred towards women.]

AsiaToday reporter Lee Mi-hyun - The term “misogyny” has been bandied around in the newspapers, TV, and everyday conversations quite often since earlier this year in South Korea.

Misogyny has been often covered by newspapers along with heavy issues, such as radical Korean feminist community Megalia, Gangnam murder case, Nexon’s replacement of voice actress, and more.

We wondered what would Koreans think about misogyny in reality, not on the Internet. So we asked four ordinary Korean men and women about their thoughts on misogyny. Foreigners also gave their thoughts, too.

First question. Does misogyny exist in South Korea?

Interviewee A. ※ age/ sex/ occupation/ opinion ▷ 30 years old/ Female/ Nurse/ No, misogyny doesn’t exist.

- Misogyny doesn’t exist. I think some of minorities made the term ‘misogyny’ to highlight some women’s shortcomings.

I’ve heard a lot people saying “women are such and such” and “men are such and such.” Considering the fact that the book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” became a big hit, I can tell that men and women are mostly different.

Interviewee B. ▷28 years old/ Male/ Civil servant/ No, it doesn’t.

- I believe that ‘gender war’ frame has been excessively reported online rather than the fact that misogyny actually exists. I’ve never seen any men around me with misogynistic mind.

However, there are many people who think that men experience more unfair treatment than women when it comes to relationship, due to conventional way of thinking that man should generally win favor with woman.

Considering gender inequality and women’s marriage delaying, Korea’s marriage rate will continue to fall while dissatisfaction rate of those men with relatively higher desire of getting married will continue. I’m concerned that such dissatisfaction of men could be expressed into misogyny.

Interviewee C. ▷29 years old/ Female/ Office worker/ Yes, misogyny exists.

- I think misogyny exists in Korea. Of course, there is nobody around me who leaves such misogynistic comments online.

But sometimes I see some men, who are usually very nice and smart, have misogynistic minds without any intentions. 

Depending on your gender, people make different judgments of the same action. Besides, there are some specific attitudes and characteristics required only to women.

In this context, many misogynistic terms, including ‘Kimyeosa’ and ‘doenjangnyeo’, have been created. Kimyeosa is used to describe a Korean woman with poor driving skills. Deonjangnyeo is used to describe a Korean woman who spends too much money on luxury products compared to their income.

By contrast, there are no terms for men who do the same actions as mentioned above. There are used seldom, if ever. For instance, there are many men who would often drink expensive coffee at café. But nobody would blame them for doing so. Besides, car accident rates are lower for women drivers than men drivers. (Reporter’s note: A study showed that last year’s car crash rate was 0.34 per 100 women drivers and 1 per 100 men drivers.)

A few years ago, there were rumors spreading online that voting rate of women in their 20s accounted for only 8%. Since then, I’ve seen many comments saying that young women these days are pathetic.

Then people start to use problematic words that are used in a gender negative way for women, and those words become frequently used ones. Then both men and women start to use them without realizing the problem.

I think this frame itself is misogyny. No one thinks it’s strange because everyone is familiar with it.

There is an online culture where netizens make a sweeping criticism towards women in general claiming that women are extravagant while men work hard to collect money to get married. There is also an online culture where netizens would look at a picture of an ordinary woman and eval‎uate how beautiful she is.

Of course, I hear this kind of conversation in real life as well.

At my working office, I heard two male managers saying that women don’t have to go to a good college and the only thing that women should be concerned of is marrying well. There was a boss who even told me, “If you’re not a morning person, how would you prepare breakfast for your husband?” He said, “My wife works, too. But she prepares breakfast for me.”

In addition, there are problematic sayings that are commonly used in this society, such as “Woman’s beauty peaks at early 20s and declines since then.”

Interviewee D. ▷36 years old/ Male/ Office worker/ No, misogyny doesn’t exist.

- Misogyny doesn’t exist in Korean society. I think it’s a problem for few people.

However, I think this is hardship our society has to face as times change.

It’s true that Korean women had to endure abusive circumstances in traditional Korean society, sacrificing themselves to do all the house chores and raise children as wife and mother.

And now they want to live in a society where everyone is treated equally and participate in society as men do.

Although that’s the direction the society should go to, it’s not settled yet.

As a result, some women today shout for their rights while not taking responsibility. In workplaces for instance, you also have to deal with chores such as moving heavy boxes or cleaning up the office besides your team project. Then I find some female employees who would run the easy things and leave men to do the physically hard things. 

Of course, men are generally physically stronger than women, and normally they would do the physically demanding things. But some women take men for granted.

There are few women would think, ‘Oh, I can’t do it because I’m a woman. But I should be treated equally for other things.’ 

They believe that men must buy a house to get married, thinking, ‘I’m the one who would give birth to a child. It’s fair for women to buy furnishings for the home.’

If we look at it the other way round, there are some men claiming that they face reverse discrimination. According to them, traditional Korean men had to buy a house to get married and earn money for family, and now men is supposed to do house chores and raise a baby together as well.

I think this kind of social atmosphere played a part in widening the gender split.

[An ad campaign developed for UN Women, reveals how pervasive discrimination against women is through the use of genuine Google search suggestions. The campaign features a close-up of a woman’s face with autocomplete results for terms like “Women should..” placed over her mouth./ Source: UN WOMEN, Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai]

Interviewee E. ▷28 years old/ Male/ English teacher (American living in S. Korea) Yes, misogyny exists.

- Misogyny is not valuing women as a person. This usually manifests itself as only valuing women for sex and not for their intelligence.

I think misogyny exists everywhere, but it is more pronounced in Korea. I’ve noticed it in my time here and I think a big part is the sexualization and infantilization of women that is even more pronounced than in the US.

I think the biggest issue is the media and advertisement. Another issue is protective legislation that can fight back against the culture.

Where I am from there are many laws protecting women who are in violent relationships or subject to abuse by husbands or romantic partners along with anti-discrimination laws that protect women’s rights. In Korea there are none. This is shown also in the fact that in Korea on average women make 2/3rds less than men in the same jobs.

Interviewee F. ▷28 years old/ Male/ IT startup (American living in S. Korea)/ I’m not sure.

- To be honest, I’m not sure what misogyny is about. I don’t know if misogyny exists in Korea because I haven’t experienced it.

But in my experience of staying here, Korean women seemingly find the pressure to engage in plastic surgery procedures. So I think bad-looking women could face discrimination.

(The end of interview pt. 1)

From the response of interviewees, you will notice that each of them responded with their own definition on misogyny. It seems the different views themselves reflect the different thoughts on misogyny.

Misogyny is still a controversial concept among the public in South Korea.

There is significant debate about whether misogyny exists or not. And the most controversial point is the extent of misogyny.

It appears that many people in Korea misuse “misogyny” because it is interpreted as “hatred of woman.” Due to the strong image that the word “hatred” has, some claim that it’s not good interpretation and that the word “misogyny” should be interpreted as “looking down on woman” instead.

What does “misogyny” really mean?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “misogyny” as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”

In fact, the Dictionary of Literary and Critical Terms, the only Korean dictionary that has the word “misogyny” as its headword, defines “misogyny” as “the belief that women are intellectually inferior, emotional rather than rational, infantile, and sensual.”

While there are dictionary definitions of misogyny, people take it differently on the extent of misogyny. Some would react strongly against the extent of misogyny.

※ The next interview will share opinions on Gangnam murder case, changing gender role, and misogyny controversy that heated the Korean society.

Article source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/asiatoday/inout-korea-anonymous-int_b_11747806.html

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< Questions >

Q1. Do you think Korea society has a serious gender issue? 

Q2. Some say that women are proper for supporter's role in the society. Do you agree with this stance? 

Q3. Have you ever experienced a reverse gender inequality issue?