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Article Excerpt
When it comes to gender equity, have things really changed in the workplace? Many studies have looked into the complicated workplace scene for executives, long-time workers, and women but not into the possible clash of expectations versus reality for young workplace entrants. Based on a survey of Ramapo College Gen Y (born in 1980 and after) undergraduate business school students, and comparing responses to existing surveys of employees and executives by Lifetime Networks and Catalyst, it's hard not to conclude that Gen Yers may be a bit optimistic regarding gender equity issues. Gender discrimination may have "gone underground" and be harder to detect, but should continue yielding to steady pressure if new Gen Y labor force entrants are discerning.
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Introduction
For decades, studies have described a "glass ceiling," an invisible employment barrier preventing those with protected characteristics from reaching advanced positions they otherwise might achieve. Coined 22 years ago in a Wall Street Journal piece (Hymowitz and Schellhardt, 1986), the presence of a glass ceiling impeding women's career progression has been reaffirmed by research organizations including the American Association of University Women, Catalyst, the Center for Creative Leadership, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and the U.S. Glass Ceiling Initiative/Commission. In recent years, employers including American Express, Boeing, Home Depot, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Wal-Mart made headlines regarding their unequal treatment of female employees; corrective measures involved multi-million dollar settlements and procedural changes (Morris, 2005; Leonhardt, 2006). In 2008, the national candidacies of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Governor Sarah Palin also brought glass ceiling issues into U.S. public dialog (Kristof, 2008; Luo, 2008).
Against this backdrop, today's mostly Generation Y (1) (Gen Y) students are preparing to enter the fulltime workforce. The largest generation since the Baby Boomers (2), Gen Y joins the workforce when demographic trends predict tightening U.S. labor markets as Baby Boomers reach retirement age (Piktialis, 2004). New workers are increasingly valued (Southard and Lewis, 2004), especially those with post-secondary education as the economy's need for skills continues to heighten (America's Dynamic Workforce, 2007). Therefore, U.S. employers are seeking to recruit, retain, and motivate Gen Y employees (Hira, 2007), half of whom expect to be promoted in less than two years and two-thirds of whom expect to move on from their job within five years (Walker, 2006).
As a result, Gen Y and its impact on the workplace are receiving academic, practitioner, and media attention (Eisner, 2005). Several attributes of Gen Y identified in studies have stimulated this paper: Gen Y is more educated than previous generations (America's Dynamic Workforce, 2007), Gen Y women are completing more education than its men (Dey and Hill, 2007), and Gen Y has been socialized with an expectation of equality and a strong social conscience (Hira, 2007). Many proscriptive pieces have been written on efforts managers can take regarding the glass ceiling. But little research has been done on attitudes of Gen Y men and women regarding gender conditions they will find at work. Those attitudes may affect glass ceiling efforts, as well as recruitment and retention. Much research on workplace gender equity has been conducted on senior managers, those who have broken through the glass ceiling: women, or those who have been at work for some time. How do their perceptions compare with those of men and women schooled in business, beginning their careers, and not yet through the ceiling?
This paper explores a timely topic: Will the changed generation find a changed ceiling? Is a "c-change" occurring? Specifically, it examines these areas of inquiry:
* To what extent will Generation Y encounter the glass ceiling in the contemporary U.S. workplace?
* Does possessing a college degree help break through the glass ceiling?
* Are some professions and industries more gender equitable than others?
* Does Gen Y's expectation regarding workplace gender equity align with the reality it will find?
The paper seeks to contribute to business and management literature, practice, and education through secondary and primary research addressing these core questions. Relevant perceptions of Gen Y men and women enrolled in undergraduate business school and beginning their careers are identified through an original survey constructed with attributes from the existing literature. These perceptions are compared to those of other working generations and executives regarding gender equity.
Methodology
Research began with a review of the secondary literature to determine the current status of gender equity in the U.S. workplace and to provide a foundation for the primary research. More than 100 articles and reports were consulted. A piece was considered germane if it pertained to women and the earnings gap, Gen Y and the glass ceiling, or successful strategies for contemporary women's workplace advancement; if it focused on the U.S. workplace; and if it was published in the past five years--or earlier but of historical relevance. The bibliographies were used to examine the literature's central findings and research processes.
Web sites reviewed include American Association of University Women, Business and Professional Women's Foundation, Business Week, Catalyst, Families and Work Institute, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Institute for Women's Research Policy, New York Times, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Labor, and Wall Street Journal. Databases searched include ABI/INFORM, Business Source Premier, and ProQuest. Locator phrases included annual average earnings, earnings gap, major occupation and sex, women and gender, and women's earnings. Key word combinations of discrimination, education, equity, executives, gap, gender, generation Y, glass ceiling, industry, lawsuit, measuring, pay, strategies, women, work, and workplace were also utilized.
From the literature review, two studies were identified as central to construction of the survey for this paper: Catalyst's Women and Men in U.S. Corporate Leadership (2004), and Lifetime Network's Lifetime Women's Pulse Poll: Generation Why? (2006). The Catalyst study examined attitudes and experiences of Fortune 1000 executive women compared with peer men regarding workplace gender equity; the Lifetime study examined perspectives of Gen Y women compared with Generation X (Gen X) and Baby Boom women regarding workplace gender equity.
Gen Y men and women undergraduate business students were then surveyed using relevant questions from the Catalyst and Lifetime studies. This was done to compare their attitudes with those of executive men and women in Catalyst's study and with those of Gen X, Gen Y, and Baby Boom women provided in Lifetime's study. The Gen Y respondent population surveyed for this paper was similar in number (253) to the Gen Y sample used by Lifetime (250) and to the executive men sample used by Catalyst (243). It was also similar in gender proportion (53.75% men, 46.25% women) to the demographic composition of the contemporary workforce (53.7% men, 46.3% women) (Women's Bureau, 2008). All of this study's respondents were enrolled in undergraduate business classes at Ramapo College of New Jersey, a four-year public college, when they were surveyed in the fall 2007 semester. All respondents were members of Gen Y and virtually all (95.6%) had work experience: twothirds had worked for more than three years, the majority (50.6%) for three to six years, and 28.9% for less than three years.
Conditions in the Contemporary U.S. Workplace
Gen Y is entering the workplace at a time when work is the norm for U.S. adults. Some 70% of men and 60% of women age 16 or older are working or seeking work (Women's Bureau, 2008). That workforce has increasing levels of education. By 2006, some 61% of U.S. workers had attended some college or held associate, bachelor, or higher degrees; fewer than 10% of U.S. workers age 25 to 64 had less than a high school degree (America's Dynamic Workforce, 2007).
Women are a growing presence in the U.S. workforce, including women with young children. That workforce remains predominately male but is approaching gender parity. Women's U.S. labor force participation has increased from 32% in 1960 (BLS, 1960--61) to 46% (America's Dynamic Workforce, 2007). Projecting through 2014, a faster growth rate in labor force participation is predicted for women (11%) than men (9%) (Dehne, 2008). Some 63% of women age 16 or older with children under age 6 (59% with children under age 3) were in the U.S. labor force in 2005 (BLS, 2006a), compared with 39% in 1975 (Hayge, 2008).
Women are now found in management, professional, and related occupations in numbers similar to their workforce presence, holding 50.6% of such jobs. But far fewer women are found in upper ranks, as shown by these percentages at Fortune 500 companies: 2.6% CEOs, 6.7% top earners, 9.4% highest titles, 14.6% board of director seats, and 15.6% corporate officers (Catalyst, 2006a). That is unlikely to change soon. It will take an estimated 40 years at current rates before women and men reach corporate officer parity (Catalyst, 2006b).
Several factors have been associated with women's advance to top management positions. Companies with women in such positions tend to be in industries whose workforces have more than 49% women (Catalyst, 2006b), to have high rates of women in lower level management jobs, high rates of management turnover, low average management salary, and an emphasis on employment development and promotion (Goodman, et. al., 2003). Age also appears to be a factor, which seems promising for younger women. Women who do make it to the top tend to be younger than male peers and to have fewer years of service with the company and in their job positions (Burress and Zucca, 2004). In addition to getting to the top faster than male executives, these women tend to work for companies that actively hire and promote women to top positions (Younger Women at the Top, 2007).
Entrepreneurship is another feature of today's workplace with gender-linked implications. Some 70% of U.S. firms are small with at least one owner but no paid employees (Buscher, 2004), and half of U.S. businesses are home-based (Bergman, 2006). From 1997 to 2006, majority women-owned firms (2.4 million) grew at almost twice the rate of all U.S. firms (42% vs. 24%) (Center for...
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