CEO

In As this week Mr. O'Connor told us about an award winning magazine piece that was about women in today's society. It was called The End of Men. This very "feminist" article gave many interesting points about how women are essentually excelling in the jobs force much more then men. The author, Hanna Rosin, writes, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast." Another interesting fact, "Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation." The statistics that women are climbing the job latter are staggering. I am so glad to be living in a society where men do not take up the large majority of the workforce as they have in decades past. But one thing is still grossly unequal: women in high powered positions.

The End of Men article states that only 3% of CEO's of Fortune 500 companies are women and the number has never risen much above that and how " Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities". How could this be? If the number of women in the workforce is mostly equal/more than that of men, why are such a small percentage in high powered positions?

Personally I attribute this to the difference in what men and women are willing to give up. What I mean is that I feel like more women do not want to give up having/being with their family. Being a CEO of a major company is a 24 hour job for sure. When it's a painful choice between the client crisis and your child's birthday party, I feel like the employee most likely to put company over family is the traditional, work-oriented male. Now this definitely does not apply for all men. I also feel like more women want the ability to have a career and still have a family and would rather not push to move up in the corporate world if it meant less time with their family.

Marta Cabrera, the former vice president of JP Morgan Chase, was working 12 hour days and one day had the realization that she was missing out on her childrens' lives and quit. She said, "There's a different quality of what men give up versus what women give up" when they attempt to reconcile the demands of a senior job with those of family responsibilities.

But who knows? Maybe women have just not climbed the CEO latter yet.