[/caption]Carol Forsloff - "The empowerment of women starts from the day they walk into the workplace, all staff should be treated as future managers, and have access to the same opportunities. Losing 50% of the pool of candidates for senior roles is ludicrous, and can lead to serious skills shortages in the upper levels of management,” says Stuart Bray about the lack of equity for women in the workplace.
The problem is an international one. Despite women’s achievement in education and employment, women have not yet reached full equity in work status according to the Equality and Human Rghts Commission’s recent report.
What the report found is that long working hours are common for women in the private sector. There remains, in that regard, what the Commission states is an “anti-family” culture in most work situations. Women still have to balance work and family life. The absence of women at senior levels is in part due to that anti-family culture.
Bray, who is Business Development Manager of an organization that calls itself 360 diversity, states, “Employers need to start focusing upon making the work life balance a priority for all staff, to enable parents of either gender to participate fully in both the home and the workplace. 360 diversity is a tool that workplaces can use to start addressing the needs of all staff, gain consultation, and positively promote vacancies, including senior management posts to everyone."
What Bray maintains is that at the current rate, gender equality won’t be achieved for 70 years, despite the fact there have been improvements made in employment. 360 diversity tells us that imbalance must be achieved through equality and diversity policies. One of the principal ways of achieving gender equality is through greater flexibility in working hours that allow women to achieve and still manage home obligations.
Despite the Equal Pay Act, which is similar to employment laws in the United States, the wage gap between men and women is so great that The Guardian reports equity won’t be reached until the year 2067.
Recent US statistics reveal that women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. On the other hand, childless women earn 90% of men’s pay. This substantiates the findings made in Great Britain that women’s opportunities are limited by lack of flexibility in work schedules. The fact that there seems to be a reduction in the gap between men and women also may come from the fact that lower paying jobs have a higher rate of dropout, leaving those women left in the workforce at the higher level wages.
Despite the fact women are gaining in employment in comparison with men in obtaining work, the pay differential means that the family that depends upon the woman’s income is doing less well than if the income was from the male head of the family.
