<DOC>
[107th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:85484.wais]
WOMEN IN MANAGEMENT: ARE THEY BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING?
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY,
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT AND
INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
APRIL 22, 2002
__________
Serial No. 107-170
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
85-484 U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 2003
____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
STEPHEN HORN, California PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
JOHN L. MICA, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
BOB BARR, Georgia DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
DAN MILLER, Florida ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JIM TURNER, Texas
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
DAVE WELDON, Florida JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida DIANE E. WATSON, California
C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, Idaho STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia ------
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
------ ------ (Independent)
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
James C. Wilson, Chief Counsel
Robert A. Briggs, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and
Intergovernmental Relations
STEPHEN HORN, California, Chairman
RON LEWIS, Kentucky JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
DOUG OSE, California PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
J. Russell George, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Justin Paulhamus, Clerk
David McMillen, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on April 22, 2002................................... 1
Statement of:
Robertson, Robert E., Director, Education, Workforce, and
Income Security Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office,
accompanied by Lori Rectanus; Eileen Appelbaum, Ph.D.,
professor and director, Center for Women and Work, School
of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University;
Christine Stolba, senior fellow, Independent Women's Forum;
and Judy H. Mello, founding member and vice chairwoman, the
Committee of 200........................................... 9
Schieffelin, Allison K., former principal, Morgan Stanley,
accompanied by Wayne Outten, attorney at law; Renuka
Chander, research manager, Office of Membership and
Meetings, American Association for the Advancement of
Science; Susan Ness, Annenberg Public Policy Center, former
Federal Communications Commission Commissioner; and Marie
C. Wilson, president, the White House Project.............. 95
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Appelbaum, Eileen, Ph.D., professor and director, Center for
Women and Work, School of Management and Labor Relations,
Rutgers University, prepared statement of.................. 56
Chander, Renuka, research manager, Office of Membership and
Meetings, American Association for the Advancement of
Science, prepared statement of............................. 105
Horn, Hon. Stephen, a Representative in Congress from the
State of California, prepared statement of................. 3
Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from
the State of New York, prepared statement of............... 76
Mello, Judy H., founding member and vice chairwoman, the
Committee of 200, prepared statement of.................... 72
Ness, Susan, Annenberg Public Policy Center, former Federal
Communications Commission Commissioner, prepared statement
of......................................................... 110
Robertson, Robert E., Director, Education, Workforce, and
Income Security Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office,
prepared statement of...................................... 12
Schakowsky, Hon. Janice D., a Representative in Congress from
the State of Illinios, prepared statement of............... 6
Schieffelin, Allison K., former principal, Morgan Stanley,
prepared statement of...................................... 99
Stolba, Christine, senior fellow, Independent Women's Forum,
prepared statement of...................................... 66
Wilson, Marie C., president, the White House Project,
prepared statement of...................................... 130
WOMEN IN MANAGEMENT: ARE THEY BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING?
----------
MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial
Management and Intergovernmental Relations,
Committee on Government Reform,
New York, NY.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9 a.m., in the
New York State Assembly Hearing Room, Room 1923, 250 Broadway,
New York, NY, Hon. Stephen Horn (chairman of the subcommittee)
presiding.
Present: Representatives Horn, Schakowsky, and Maloney.
Also present: Bill Perkins, deputy majority leader, New
York City Council, Ninth District.
Staff present: J. Russell George, staff director and chief
counsel; Bonnie Heald, deputy staff director; Justin Paulhamus,
clerk; and David McMillen, minority professional staff.
Present from Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney's staff: Ben
Chevat, chief of staff; Minna Elias, New York chief of staff;
Phil Craft, New York deputy chief of staff; Orly Isaacson,
senior legislative assistant; and Jessica Fox, director of
constituent services.
Present from Assemblyman Sheldon Silver's staff: Yvonne
Morrow, director, constituent services.
Mr. Horn. A quorum being present, the Subcommittee on
Government Efficiency, Financial Management and
Intergovernmental Relations will come to order.
This subcommittee has a broad and, thus, diverse
jurisdiction. We have examined an array of issues from child
support and childcare to computer security and medical privacy.
Today, we are here to examine an issue that affects families
and the productivity of this Nation.
More than 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato
wrote, ``Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that
prevails in our country of men and women not following the same
pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind. For this
the state, instead of being whole, is reduced to half.''
When I was acting chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights for the period 1969 to 1982, we had our colleagues fully
support the Equal Rights Amendment. And as you know, it was
only missed by one or two votes in the States. Indeed, we are a
Nation that is strengthened by our belief in equal opportunity
for all Americans; yet, despite the efforts of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, yet despite those
efforts, a number of recent studies have found that women are
still being paid less than men, even though they are performing
equivalent jobs.
I welcome our witnesses today, each of whom will discuss
this troubling disparity.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Stephen Horn follows:]
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Mr. Horn. I now ask the ranking member, Ms. Schakowsky, the
ranking member from Chicago--and we are delighted to have her
here today. Chicago has the wind, New York has the rain.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I would really like to also thank Congresswoman
Maloney--I am assuming that she will be here soon--for her
tireless leadership on behalf of women's equality and for
putting together this report, along with Congressman Dingell,
which refocuses our attention on these important issues. I very
much look forward to this prestigious panel made up of people
who are doing such wonderful work, and some very good friends
of mine.
I wanted to acknowledge that on September 11th the brave
women of the New York Police Department, the New York Fire
Department and the Port Authority rushed to the rescue of their
fellow New Yorkers, women and men. They demonstrated their
commitment and their skill. These women made us all proud. It
is fitting that we are here in New York today to discuss the
welfare of women throughout our Nation.
Ours is a country founded on the principles of freedom and
equality. Our Constitution begins, ``We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.'' Nearly 100
years later President Lincoln quoted those words at Gettysburg,
saying ``our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new
Nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.'' Nearly 100 years later
President Kennedy quoted those same words and went on to say,
``The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one
man are threatened.''
Ours is also a history of struggle to make those principles
a reality for all people, men and women, all men and women.
That same Constitution had embedded in it the principle that
slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person, part
human, part property. It was not until after the death of
President Lincoln that we undid that disgrace through the
ratification of the 14th amendment. It took another 50 years
before we ratified the 19th amendment and franchised women and
another 50 years after that before we seriously addressed the
political and social equality of the races.
The last quarter of the 20th century was one of wide-
ranging social, economic and political change. Even as we
fought for equality and civil rights, we had yet to adequately
address equality of the sexes.
As with most fights for equality, the first step was to get
those in power to recognize that there was a problem. When
experts like those we will hear from today pointed out the
problems of pay equity, the establishment was quick to
rationalize those differences with explanations like attachment
to the labor force and human capital. Undeterred, advocates and
academics joined to dispel those excuses and show that pay
equity was real and unjust.
Today, our facts are irrefutable. Our evidence is
plentiful. We have before us a report that shows women still
make less for the same work and often are blocked from board
rooms. Ours is a fight for social justice and a fight against
an insidious and pervasive system that undervalues women and
their work.
Change will not come about through labor economics, but
through the same paths as past social change. We must be firm
and insistent that this injustice will not be tolerated in a
Nation that defines itself in terms of social justice. We must
repeat the evidence again and again until everyone knows the
facts and knows right from wrong. We must draw in our
colleagues in every walk of life, wherever we have the
opportunity, and make our case to our brothers, our sons, our
sisters and our daughters.
At the same time, we must remember that change is
happening. We only have to look around this room to see that
progress has been made during our lifetime.
As we struggle to make the world a more equitable one for
our children, we must also make sure they recognize our
progress. Today, there are more women in key positions than
ever before and they serve as role models for those who come
behind us, making it easier for them to earn their own place in
business or government.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Horn. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Janice D. Schakowsky
follows:]
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Mr. Horn. We will now move to the presentations. I am sure
Ms. Maloney will be here soon. We will have her statement when
she arrives.
But panel one and panel two--let me mention our order. We
are going to ask you, and if your assistants are going to
answer questions, to take the oath. This is an investigatory
committee, and so we take this very seriously.
When your name is called, under the rules of the
subcommittee, your full statement is with the reporter and
automatically put in the hearing record. We would like you to
take 7 or 8 minutes to talk from the heart and give us a
summary of your statement as we have already looked at the
written statements, which are very fine. So, it is important to
hit the main points.
We will start now with the--first, we're missing--I think
Eileen Appelbaum is missing. Let's see, we have Mr. Robertson,
Ms. Stolba, Ms. Mello, so if you will rise----
Mr. Robertson. Could we add Lori Rectanus, too?
Mr. Horn. Yes, and all your assistants.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Horn. The clerk will note that all have affirmed, in
addition to GAO's backup. May I say that we are very glad that
the General Accounting Office can be here. We always like to
have them either at the beginning or the end.
You work for the legislative branch and you do wonderful
work.
And, of course, the General Accounting Office is not what
it seems there. They are programmatically not simply in
accounting, but they are programmatically reviewing all
government activities. And the chief person involved, the
Comptroller General of the United States, Mr. Dave Walker, has
a 15-year term. So nobody can intimidate him. He is there more
than Presidents, more than Members of Congress; and he is doing
a great job, and they have fine, wonderful people.
We would like--after they finish their summary, we would
like to have you sort of sum up where we missed something with
the witnesses. We will obviously go with each witness, 8 or so
minutes, 8 or 10, and then we will--once they are all done on
panel one, we will go to questions and answers in a round of 5
minutes on each side. We treat everybody in the majority and
the minority the same way.
So we will now start with Robert E. Robertson, Director,
Education, Workforce and Income Security Issues, U.S. General
Accounting Office.
Mr. Robertson, we are glad to have you here.
STATEMENTS OF ROBERT E. ROBERTSON, DIRECTOR, EDUCATION,
WORKFORCE, AND INCOME SECURITY ISSUES, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING
OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY LORI RECTANUS; EILEEN APPELBAUM, Ph.D.,
PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR WOMEN AND WORK, SCHOOL OF
MANAGEMENT AND LABOR RELATIONS, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY; CHRISTINE
STOLBA, SENIOR FELLOW, INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S FORUM; AND JUDY H.
MELLO, FOUNDING MEMBER AND VICE CHAIRWOMAN, THE COMMITTEE OF
200
Mr. Robertson. Mr. Chairman, Representative Schakowsky,
thank you very much for inviting us to be part of these
hearings.
Today, I am going to be talking about a report that we
issued in October that provided perspective on women in
management. As I indicated earlier, I am fortunate to have Lori
Rectanus with me; she is the person that led that work. The
report was based on an analysis of the Department of Labor's
current population survey. I am going to talk about that survey
a little bit later.
The report's analysis was basically structured within three
broad areas. And as a concession to age, I am going to have to
put my glasses on now, or who knows what words may come out of
this mouth.
The first area we looked at was a comparison of key
characteristics of women and men managers, including their
levels of education, age, part-time work status, and marital
status.
The second area we looked at was women's representation in
management positions compared with their representations in all
positions within particular industries.
And finally, we analyzed the salary differentials between
men and women in full-time management positions, using a
statistical technique that allowed us to control for the
effects of education, age, marital status and race. This
morning I am going to walk you quickly through those three
areas of findings.
But first, as I said earlier, I would to talk just a little
bit about the Current Population Survey, or the CPS, data base
that we used. The CPS is basically a monthly survey of 50,000
households that contains key labor force data such as
employment, wages, and occupations. Our analysis of the data
base focused on 10 cities which, according to CPS, accounted
for about 70 percent of all wage and salary positions that were
filled by women in 2000.
Now, for the purposes of our analysis, we defined managers
as individuals with CPS occupation titles that included the
words ``administrator,'' ``director,'' ``manager,'' or
``supervisor.'' So our definition cut across a wide swath of
different types of managerial responsibilities.
The CPS data has several limitations you should be aware
of. For example, the data does not contain some of the key
information that would be necessary to fully identify causes
for salary differentials, such as years of experience or job
responsibility. Also, the CPS data are self-reported by
respondents and are not independently verified.
Having given you the setup, let me quickly walk through the
results of the findings in each of the three areas.
In summary, starting with the comparison of key
characteristics of women and men managers, we found that women
managers in the 10 industries we examined generally had less
education, were younger, were more likely to work part-time and
were less likely to be married than male managers. We have
charts and graphs to illustrate these differences. You can
either follow along with the poster boards we have up front, or
if you look at the illustrations that are in my prepared
statement, I think they start on page 3. Or you can do a
combination of both.
Starting with Figure 1, dealing with education, let me give
you a general orientation. You will see at the bottom of that
graph all of the 10 industries that we examined listed. The
dark bars on that graph represent the percent of women managers
with college degrees or greater, and the lighter bars represent
the same information for men managers. As the chart shows,
women managers were estimated to have lower educational levels
than men in all 10 industries, and these differences were
statistically significant in five of the industries.
Now, if we move on to Table 1--we haven't practiced this,
so we hope the charts stay up there--if we move to Table 1, we
find that female managers in most of the industries that we
examined were younger than their male counterparts. Hospitals
and medical services was the only industry where female
managers were older than male managers.
Now, if we move to Figure 2, that shows that female
managers were more likely to work part-time than male managers
in most of the 10 industries that we examined. For example, in
professional medical services, female managers were an
estimated four times more likely than male managers to work
part-time. In finance, insurance, and real estate there wasn't
really a significant difference between the percent of male and
female managers working part-time. Both of those were around 13
percent.
And finally, the final characteristic we looked at, Figure
3, you will see that female managers were less likely to be
married than their male counterparts across the 10 industries
that we examined.
Now, if we move to the second broad area of our analysis,
which is the representation of women managers in the 10
industries, I would ask you to look at Figure 4, which I think
is on page 7 of the prepared statement. This graph shows there
is no statistically significant difference between the percent
of industry positions filled by women and the percent of
management positions filled by women for five of the industries
we examined. In contrast, the percent of industry positions
filled by women was significantly different from the percent of
management positions filled by women in the other five
industries. Let me put this in English.
In the educational service area, in retail trade, finance,
insurance and real estate, and hospital and medical services,
women were less represented in management positions than they
were in all positions. In professional medical services, which
is the last bar there, the opposite was true. Women were
represented to a greater degree in management positions than
they were industry-wide.
Now, if we move to the last of three areas of our analysis,
which talks about the salary differentials between men and
women managers, these data are captured on table 2. What we
found here was, after controlling for education, age, marital
status, and race, full-time female managers earned less than
male managers in both 1995 and 2000 within all 10 industries.
For 2000, we found that the full-time female managers earned an
estimated low of 62 cents for every $1 earned by full-time male
managers in the entertainment and recreation services, compared
to an estimated high of 91 cents in the educational service
area.
Now, as I indicated earlier, I would caution you to
remember that the analysis of the wage differences did not
consider certain factors to help explain the differences, such
as years of experience. You also have to be careful in
interpreting the 2 years as a trend.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my prepared statement, and
I'll answer questions at the appropriate time.
Mr. Horn. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Robertson follows:]
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Mr. Horn. And our second witness on panel one has just
arrived, Dr. Eileen Appelbaum, professor and director, Center
for Women and Work, School of Management and Labor Relations,
Rutgers University.
Ms. Appelbaum. Thank you very much for inviting me here,
and I apologize for being late.
Mr. Horn. We will have to swear you in since you weren't in
the earlier group.
[Witness sworn.]
Mr. Horn. We will note Dr. Appelbaum has affirmed.
Ms. Appelbaum. Well, I wanted to speak about two things
today, both of which I know are familiar to people. But I
wanted to comment on the implications of them for both what I
call private policies, policies that companies can engage in
today and that unions can engage in today, and public policies,
the kinds of policies that require some sort of government
action.
As we begin this century, there are two salient facts about
women and work that I think are really important to make. And
perhaps I am repeating some of what has been said; I apologize
again.
The first is the dramatic increase in the employment of
women over the last century, which I think we are all aware of.
But what people may not be quite as aware of is the tremendous
increase in the employment of mothers of young children. The
employment rate of mothers of young children is now 70 percent.
Seventy-two percent of women with children younger than 18, and
65 percent of those with children younger than 6 are in the
work force.
On average, these women work pretty much full-time hours.
They are working 35 hours a week, on average, so they are
really fully occupied. The result of this is that we do not
have a situation, as we had in the 1950's and the 1960's, in
which there was a full-time adult at home to deal with all of
the care and other responsibilities.
The second salient fact is the persistent gap in earnings
between men and women. This gap has persisted, despite the fact
that today women are as likely as men to have a college degree.
In fact, at the bachelor's level, they are more likely to have
a college degree. And yet the wage gap has not disappeared; it
has narrowed. If we go back to the 1970's, we would find that
women were earning 62 cents for every $1 earned by a man, and
this gap did narrow over the 1980's, but it has stagnated in
the second half of the 1990's and it is widening again.
So I want to talk about these two points and what their
implications are, and say a few words about where the treatment
of women managers and professionals come into play.
You know, sometimes it is argued that there has not been
much change; if you look at hours that people are working, they
haven't changed much over the last 20 years, and full-time
workers rarely work more than 40 hours a week. But this really
does not get at the heart of the question, because if you go
back to the 1960's or even 1970, what you find is that, for the
most part, women stayed at home. You had one full-time worker.
If you take a look at the 1970's into the 1980's, the hours
of work of married-couple families begin to rise; and by the
middle of the 1980's, we have this situation where family hours
of work are the equivalent of one full-time and one part-time
job.
But by the time we get to the 1990's, married-couple
families with children at home, with young children at home,
families in the middle of the income distribution are now
working 3,900 hours a year. This is equivalent to two full-time
jobs. So the time squeeze comes not because individual workers
are working so many more hours, but because families are
providing so many more hours of work to the labor market. And
so we have this huge squeeze in terms of time that needs to be
taken into account.
If we look at the wage gap and ask ourselves, why did it
narrow during the 1980's and why is it stagnating now and ever
widening, what we see are two things. In the 1980's, women's
wages did rise as a result of the fact they had better
education and as a result of the fact they were spending more
years in the work force.
But the other big piece of that puzzle is that men's wages
were falling during the 1980's, and so a lot of the catch-up
had to do with the fact that the men were leveling down, not
only that women were leveling up. But that's what took place
through 1993 or 1994.
And if we look today, we see that the wage gap has
stabilized and has begun to widen again.
The reasons are several fold. If we look at women without a
college degree, what we find is that, as a result of welfare
reform and the strong labor market of the 1990's, many single
mothers entered the work force. Welfare reform got these women
off the welfare rolls, but it did not get them out of poverty;
and they moved into extremely low-paying jobs. The result is
that the gap between men and women with a high school degree or
less widened as these women entered into the work force and
found their opportunities very limited.
The second thing that happened is, if we take a look at men
and women with a college degree, we find that women are
increasingly not found in the information technology areas in
which wages have risen so rapidly in the 1990's. So if you look
at 1986, you find that women made up 35 percent of the systems
analysts and the computer programmers, but if you look at the
present period, you find they make up only 35 percent. So there
has been a decline in women's share of the very best jobs in
terms of pay in the 1990's for college graduates.
The third thing that happened is the information that has
brought us all together here today, and that is that the wage
gap for managers and professionals between men and women began
to widen in the mid-90's, and we find that women in
professional and managerial positions are falling further and
further behind.
The numbers that were in the report from Congresswoman
Maloney and Mr. Dingell talked about 10 industries, but if you
take a look at managers and professionals generally, forgetting
about whatever industry they worked in, you would find the same
story. You would find that gap widening for women relative to
men in managerial and professional occupations generally.
One of the big problems with this huge wage gap and the
fact that it doesn't disappear is, it then has implications not
only for women's ability to fulfill themselves and to reach
their complete potential and make their greatest contribution
to the economy and to their families, but it also has an effect
on the decisions that men make with respect to care activities.
If you have a wide differential in pay between a husband and
wife, it is difficult for a family to make a decision that the
father should be engaged in the care of the children. So men
miss out on a lot of experiences that they would like to have
because of these inequities.
So I think that we really need, as we look to the future,
to think about policies and practices that will promote work-
life integration for both men and women.
A lot of it, I think, has to do with the ability to control
your time at work. There are many ways in which employers and
unions can negotiate to reach opportunities for flexibility and
for workers to take greater control over their own work time.
So I think that the flexibility and work-time issues are
important--I am running out of time, but they are in my written
testimony so I won't elaborate.
We also need paid family and medical leave. This, I do not
think, can come from employers. This has to be handled the way
we handled unemployment insurance, through a fund that is
dedicated to this purpose. If we work on policies like this, I
think we have to amend the Equal Pay Act to cover part-time
workers. We are the last industrialized country in which it is
legal to discriminate against employees on the basis of the
fact that they work part-time rather than full-time hours.
So I'll just stop there, and thank you very much.
Mr. Horn. Well, thank you, and we'll get to a lot more
things in the question period.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Appelbaum follows:]
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Mr. Horn. Our next presenter is Christine Stolba, senior
fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.
You might tell us a little bit about the Independent
Women's Forum.
Ms. Stolba. I will. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of
the subcommittee. I am honored to have the opportunity to
testify about ``Women in Management: Are They Breaking the
Glass Ceiling?'' I am Christine Stolba, Senior Fellow at the
Independent Women's Forum, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan
organization dedicated to research and public policy issues on
women, particularly women in the work force. We accept no
government funds, so we are--pursuant to House Rule XI, we
don't accept any government funds.
I want to talk briefly about the issue of both the wage gap
and the glass ceiling, and then point to a few specific
problems that I had with the Maloney-Dingell report.
The existence of a wage gap and a glass ceiling are often
cited as evidence of discrimination against women in the labor
market, but the statistics and arguments to not withstand
careful scrutiny. In 1999, the average annual full-time wages
of women were 73 percent of those of men, but this average
figure fails to consider crucial determinants of wages,
including major variations between men and women in factors
such as hours worked, education, age, part- or full-time
status, experience, number of children, and most importantly,
consecutive years in the work force. When these factors are
considered, economists find an adjusted wage gap far smaller
than the 73 percent figure, with academic studies ranging from
88 to 99 percent on the male dollar.
For example, tenure and experience are two of the most
important factors in explaining the gender wage gap. According
to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, women on average spend a far
higher percentage of their working years out of the work force
than men do. As many empirical studies have demonstrated, this
means that when women return to work, they will not earn as
much as their male or female counterparts who have more
uninterrupted experience in the workplace.
In many studies, when all relevant factors are considered,
the wage gap virtually disappears. For example, University of
Maryland Professor Judith Hellerstein found that women in the
banking and miscellaneous products and plastics industries made
99 percent of what men did. A recent study by the Employment
Policy Foundation analyzed March 2001 Current Population Survey
data and found that single women who never married, live alone
and have a full-time job earn more than their male equivalents
by 28 cents per hour.
Misleading rhetoric can also characterize discussions of
the existence of a glass ceiling, which is the supposedly
impenetrable barrier that prevents women from advancing in the
corporate world. The 1995 report issued by the Glass Ceiling
Commission revealed that only 5 percent of senior managers at
Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 service companies were women, and
implied that systemic discrimination against women was the
cause. Yet the Glass Ceiling Commission report suffered from
several methodological flaws. Typical qualifications for
corporate senior management positions include both an MBA and
25 years of work experience.
Logic would suggest that the Commission made comparisons
among the qualified labor pool of men and women to determine if
discrimination was hampering women's advancement. But the
Commission instead compared the number of women in the total
labor force without reference to experience or education with
the number wielding power at larger corporations, and this gave
them the 5 percent figure.
A cursory glance at the history of professional school
degrees reveals that few of the graduates of the 1950's and
1960's, who today would be at the pinnacle of their
professions, were women. This suggests a pipeline theory where
women are moving their way through pipeline into top corporate
jobs. As well, evidence from organizations such as Catalyst
suggests that this pipeline itself might be leaking, because
women are leaving these jobs in the corporate world to take
employment elsewhere often because they want flexible work
arrangements and, also, often because they want to start their
own businesses.
And herein, I think, lies the crucial oversight of those
who continue to claim that a glass ceiling is holding back
American women. These are women's own choices and decisions
about their careers, which are never factored into the
equation.
Studies of workplace behavior have found a clear difference
in behavior and attitudes toward work between men and women,
including that women are less willing to work long hours and to
relocate and more eager for part-time work arrangements.
Logging long hours and relocation are both routes to future
promotion in corporate America. Ultimately, the only ceiling
that exists in corporate America is a gender-neutral one, and
it prevents those who choose to devote more time to their
personal lives from advancing at the same rate as those who
devote more uninterrupted time to the workplace.
Of course, unfortunately, discrimination does still exist.
But I would point out that we have two important laws on the
books that should continue to be enforced, the Equal Pay Act of
1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So I feel, although Representatives Maloney and Dingell are
to be commended for their interest in the issue of women's
advancement in the workplace, their report suffers from several
methodological flaws that render suspect its conclusions about
the existence of discrimination against women in management.
First, the report concedes that the data it used from the
Federal Current Population Survey do not account for two
important factors for determining salary levels--years of
experience and level of managerial responsibility. The
exclusion of these important variables, both of which are
crucial determinants of compensation and workplace advancement,
raise questions about the report's conclusion about
discrimination in wages.
To make a finding of discrimination, any comparison of
men's and women's salaries must take into consideration age,
education, and consecutive years of experience and the sizes of
the businesses or firms being compared. Only after holding
these factors constant can we make determinations about the
existence of discrimination.
As noted above, academic studies of the wage gap have found
far lower disparities in wages than those found in the report.
For example, Professors Marianne Bertrand at the University of
Chicago and Kevin Hallock at the University of Illinois,
writing in the October 2001 issue of Cornell University's
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, found that women's
earnings at the top of corporate America were not significantly
different from men's when all relevant factors, such as age,
education, and experience were taken into account.
Moreover, between 1992 and 1997, woman nearly tripled their
presence in the top executive ranks and strongly improved their
compensation relative to men. Similarly, a 1999 National
Science Foundation study of 1.5 million engineers concluded
that female engineers make 98 cents on the dollar earned by
their male counterparts.
Second, the report concedes that women managers are more
likely to work part-time than their male counterparts. This
means that we can and should expect that women managers'
salaries will be lower than their male and female counterparts
who do not work fewer hours per week.
Third, the report is merely a snapshot of 10 industries.
Broader evidence reveals that women continue to make gains in
the labor market and experience faster wage growth than men.
Finally, and most importantly, I sense the underlying tone
of the report suggests that equality for women means
statistical parity with men in all fields. By this definition
women will have achieved success only when they are half of all
corporate CEOs earning exactly the same average wages as men
do. But I believe this is a misguided standard of success
because it fails to account for the heterogeneity of the female
population and the powerful forces of individual choice.
The assumption that without discrimination we would make
exactly the same choices as men ignores the available evidence
on women's preferences and is an assumption that many women
find demeaning, for it suggests that we're incapable of making
choices for ourselves and of bearing the consequences of those
choices.
Thank you.
Mr. Horn. Thank you. That's a very good perspective to
hear.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Stolba follows:]
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Mr. Horn. And the last presenter on panel one is Judy H.
Mello, a founding member and vice chairwoman of the Committee
of 200. You might tell us a little bit about the Committee of
200.
Ms. Mello. I will. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and the
congressional hearing committee. My name is Judy Mello, a
founding member and the vice chairman of the Committee of 200.
For those of you not familiar with it, the Committee of 200 is
a professional organization of preeminent businesswomen leaders
and the premier organization of its kind in this country. The
Committee of 200 is focused on actively promoting women's
success in business both as entrepreneurs and as corporate
leaders.
We recently conducted the first-ever comprehensive study to
measure women's clout, if you will, in the business world. Our
goal was to define how real women's progress has been, to
demonstrate where woman actually stand in the big picture, and
to identify areas where women are either closing the gap or
possibly losing ground.
The study is called the C200 Business Leadership Index. I
think you have a copy in front of you, and I will refer to it
in a minute. It will be conducted and published annually as a
measure of American businesswomen's progress toward parity with
their male counterparts.
The Business Leadership Index measures women's progress
against their male counterparts using 10 benchmarks. The
results, which were published this last March--were released in
March, should be of some great interest to the committee.
The index is measured on a 10-point scale where 10
represents parity with men. Measured as a weighted aggregate of
the 10 separate benchmarks measured in the study, the C200
Business Leadership Index for 2002 indicates that 3.95 on a
scale of 10 percent is where the parity sits today for women.
This means that women are less than 40 percent of the way
to equality with men when measured against the following
benchmarks: First, women-owned businesses versus men-owned
businesses, parity at that point, which is a total parity of
10, women stand at 5.8. If you refer to page 5 in the folder
that I had given to you, it would be helpful.
Fortune 500 board seats occupied by women versus the number
occupied by men today stands at 2.6 on a scale of 10.
Fortune 500 corporate officers who are women versus men,
that scale is 2.78 on a scale of 10.
Company size of women-owned businesses versus company size
of those owned by men is 3.25.
Venture capital funding for women's companies versus VC
funding for men's is at 1.1 on a scale of 10.
Line and staff ratio, that is, the women of Fortune 500
corporate officer positions who hold line positions versus
staff positions, knowing that the line is the faster track to a
CEO position, that scale is 5.6 to 10.
The gender/wage gap, according to our analysis, shows that
women's average weekly earnings as a proportion of men's in
this category is 7.6.
MBA enrollment, the number of women currently enrolled
versus men, is 6.6.
And keynote speakers at the top 10 high-profile annual U.S.
conferences, meaning the number of women invited to speak
versus men, is 3.8.
Finally, the charity fund-raising chairs, the number of
women asked to serve as honorary chairpersons for one of the
top U.S. 10 charities versus men is zero.
The analysis really was to combine these 10 different
benchmarks when they are weighted to try to again assess on an
overall basis what the power and influence of women in
leadership roles are in this world. It is important to look not
just at the overall index number, which is 3.8, but also at the
individual benchmark numbers, so that we can see where we need
to concentrate our efforts most to improve the opportunities
for women in the business world.
There is a lot of talk about the great strides
businesswomen are making as business leaders in America. The
most important--most powerful women in corporate executive
offices have indeed become household names. And women who have
avoided corporate roadblocks by striking out on their own are
profiting from record growth. But let's consider what the
individual benchmark numbers really indicate.
The number of female corporate officers and board directors
at Fortune 500 companies is still negligible. At the current
rate of growth, women will not reach the halfway mark to parity
with men as corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies until
the year 2019. Neither will women reach the halfway mark in
terms of occupying board seats in those companies until 2027.
Venture capital funding going to women-led businesses is
still minute when compared to the funding going to men-led
businesses.
While women are making progress toward parity with men as
measured by enrollment in MBA programs, they still represent 25
to 30 percent of the business student body. Sadly, there are no
women acting as fund-raising chairs at the Nation's top
charities. And women's participation as keynote speakers is
under the halfway mark at a parity of 3.88.
There is, however, encouraging news. Women-owned
businesses, with an index number of nearly 6, are outpacing the
growth rate of all businesses by 2 to 1. It would seem that
women perceive the greatest opportunity in business as self-
employment, doing it their own way and avoiding the roadblocks
that corporate America sets-up for them.
The gender/wage gap issue is the closest to parity at 7.6
on a scale of 10, and that is because this is an issue that has
been discussed and addressed by committees like this for many,
many years; but the current rate of growth is still going to
take 30 years to reach parity with men. This is not to say that
there are not steps that women can take to improve their own
progress. The Committee of 200 is working especially with
younger women to encourage the kind of educational choices that
will lead women toward greater success and provide support and
resources to hasten their path.
However, a proactive stance on the part of government,
corporate America, and academic institutions is critical to
creating a business environment more conducive to the success
of women in business today.
Mr. Horn. Thank you. That is a helpful statement.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Mello follows:]
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Mr. Horn. Our friend, Mrs. Carolyn Maloney, has joined us;
and if you would like to have your opening statement--or would
you just like to go on to questions?
Mrs. Maloney. I think we--I'll put it in the record. I
think it is more important to listen to our important
panelists.
Mr. Horn. Without objection, Ms. Maloney's statement will
follow mine and the ranking member's as if read.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney
follows:]
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Mr. Horn. Welcome.
So now let's go to 5-minute rounds. There are three of us
here, and we will just rotate it to get a lot of things out. I
will lead with Ms. Schakowsky, the gentlewoman from Illinois,
to start questioning this panel for the first 5 minutes.
Ms. Schakowsky. Ms. Stolba, you make the argument that
there is no wage gap and that there is no glass ceiling for
women. You said, ``Ultimately, the only ceiling that exists in
corporate America is gender-neutral--it prevents those who
choose to devote more time to their personal lives from
advancing at the same rate as those who devote more
uninterrupted time to the workplace.''
Rather than arguing that's gender-neutral, could not one
argue that the rules of the game are structured in a way that
traditionally favor men and that the arguments for the way to
help to change the nature of the workplace would make it more
possible for women to compete equally?
Ms. Stolba. I do think that's true. You hear talk of the
``old boys club,'' for example, in corporate America. I do
think that as women become, and are now, half the work force,
and as they choose to move throughout corporate ranks, they
will begin demanding certain changes.
But I would caution in saying that I don't think there is a
role for the Federal Government to impose those changes. I
think what we have now with existing antidiscrimination
legislation is sufficient as long it is continually and
vigorously enforced. I don't think, however, that the Federal
Government should take the role of telling businesses, private
businesses, that you must give a certain number of weeks of
paid leave, paid family leave, for example, and those sorts of
things. I think that is a dangerous thing.
Ms. Schakowsky. I think it is also dangerous--the way I
hear this is, in many ways, to blame the victim. And the use of
the words ``gender-neutral'' imply that the playing field is
precisely even. And I think that it's important, whether or not
you believe that government should intervene, or whether
voluntarily the workplace has to accommodate women, to say that
it is gender-neutral and that women simply choose to be lesser
players, I think increases the burden then on women.
I want to add a couple of questions about this issue of
choice. Do you really believe that the choice that women have
to invest in family is the same as men have? I think that's
what gender-neutral implies.
Ms. Stolba. Well, yes, of course. But the point is that we
are not all going to make the same choices. I would add that
the feminist movement in the 1960's was all about giving women
as many choices as possible; it wasn't supposed to tell women
what to choose.
And I think when we get into discussions of parity in the
workplace, feminist groups and a lot of activists tend to want
to ignore the fact that 70 percent of women in their lifetime
have children. And many women, when polled, if you look at the
data of young woman who are childless entering the work force,
they are earning about the same as their male counterparts. It
is once they have families that they then decide--and this is a
private family decision--that the women want to take some more
time off work.
I think that men who want to do that--and more and more
young men are doing that----
Ms. Schakowsky. Let me talk about some women that don't
have choices.
Ms. Appelbaum talked about, as part of the explanation of
the growing wage gap, the influx into the workplace of women,
low-educated, poor women, as a result of welfare reform. This
was not a matter of choice. I think some may argue that the
wonderful choice my daughter has to stay home with her two
little children is not a choice that is offered to those poor
women.
Do you feel that we are always talking about a choice to be
home?
Ms. Stolba. Well, we are talking about choice; but we're
also talking about, as adults, taking responsibility for our
choices, and that is the issue in the welfare debate.
I would add that the arguments that are made, often
invoking single mothers, particularly ones that have just come
off the welfare rolls, point to the fact that we are one of the
last industrialized countries that doesn't have paid leave,
that doesn't have certain benefits. But if you compare the
U.S.' economy and women's participation in it to that of
European countries, you will find their growth rates are much
lower. Their wage gaps are wider. So even with those benefits,
it doesn't guarantee that women will have that kind of----
Ms. Schakowsky. I see Ms. Appelbaum shaking her head. I
want you to respond to that. But, in addition, would you
consider adding to your list, when you talk about what
government can do, we are reauthorizing welfare reform, making
it--there are even more work requirements and less educational
opportunities, so this issue of enabling women to diminish the
wage gap is limited now.
Could you respond now to Ms. Stolba?
Ms. Appelbaum. Just very quickly, it's just not true that
all countries in Europe have less female labor force
participation. If you take a look at a country like Sweden, of
course they have the same trajectory as we have in terms of
female labor force participation. They have a much narrower
wage gap. They do still have a wage gap, but it's much
narrower.
But if you take a look at countries like the Netherlands
and Germany, which are making a real effort to provide
opportunities for women, what these two countries have enacted
is an adjustment-of-hours act which allows any employee, male
or female, to request a reduction in hours of work, let's say
from 40 hours to 30 hours, for a fixed period of time, and the
employer can refuse if there is a business reason to refuse,
but not otherwise. This has enabled many parents of children to
share the responsibility of caring for their kids and also to
remain in the work force, to have the continuity of the work
experience, to work 30 hours a week and to continue; not to
have that all or nothing choice, you have to be here or not.
Each parent can take a day off and stay home with the kids,
so that children are in daycare, let's say, 3 days a week and
with a family member the other four, which I think many
families would find much more possible to manage.
Mr. Horn. We now yield 5 minutes to Mrs. Maloney for
questioning.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Chairman Horn and Ranking Member
Schakowsky very much for coming here. I have served with Mr.
Horn on this committee for many years, and he has elected to
not run for reelection. I think it is a true loss to the
Congress of the United States. He has been an outstanding
Member of Congress and one who has cared about many, many
issues.
I just have to mention his strong work on Governor's Island
that I believe helped force the issue, and the giving of the
island back to the city; all New Yorkers thank you for the
leadership that you played in that important project. And we
thank the President of the United States also.
I do want to thank also Sheldon Silver, the Speaker of the
Assembly, and State Senator Martin Connor for allowing us to
use their hearing rooms. We really truly appreciate it.
One of the reasons that I did this study with Mr. Dingell
was that there were so many studies that were coming out
showing women losing ground. Not only is the White House
Project that--we have Ms. Wilson here today from that one--but
the Catalyst, the Annenberg Report that in telecommunications
and in media jobs women hold only 3 percent of so-called
``clout positions,'' one from the scientific community stating
that women were paid a third of what male scientists were paid.
And we wanted to take a broader look.
With the great work and cooperation of the nonpartisan,
independent GAO, we looked at 10 industries that employed--not,
Ms. Stolba, a small snapshot--but 71 percent of the women in
the work force and 73 percent of women in management. So it was
a broad view. We used census data. And therefore it was not an
academic study in that we generated the questions.
We certainly want to go back and look at qualifications and
other items that you mentioned, but we were using the data that
were available to us.
I continue to hear about more reports. Ms. Mello came up
with her report, and again it is showing that women are not
doing so well. When you say that this is a woman's choice to go
out and start her own business, when I talk to women who go out
and start their own business--and the Small Business Bureau
shows that the great growth in small businesses is all women-
generated--they will say because they couldn't stand it. They
ran into a glass ceiling and they couldn't go any further, so
why continue, in their view, in being discriminated against?
I want to mention that I have started a Web site,
www.equality2020.org, and I'd like to put information up on
this Web site of other reports. Ms. Mello, you cited yours. I
don't have that; I would like a copy of it.
But I would also like to have Ms. Stolba, for the record,
the public policy foundation report that you mentioned; and I'd
like to ask the panelists, all of them, to respond. And you,
yourself, to the statement that you made that this particular
study found that single women who have never married, live
alone and have full-time jobs earn more than their male
equivalents.
You know, as a mother of two, and a very strong proponent
for children and families, in my view, if a woman has to be
single and childless to have parity with men, the majority of
whom who are married and have children, then this simply is not
parity.
So first, Ms. Stolba, how do you respond?
And how do you, Ms. Appelbaum, Mr. Robertson, and Ms.
Mello?
Ms. Stolba. Well, I would say that the point of citing that
study was to show that we do have equal opportunity. That is
not to say--first of all, we are talking about cultural
differences here as well. When woman have children, they tend
to be the ones, on average, to choose to spend more time out of
the work force than men do.
Now, you might not think that's a legitimate choice,
because it's hampering women from advancing. But I would argue
that's their choice. That's a personal family choice that women
make.
Men make that choice as well. I know many young men these
days who are taking parental leave to spend time with their
children, taking a year's sabbatical to be with a newborn. And
that is just as legitimate, and they won't advance as quickly.
I do think there are flexible, nongovernmental ways to
address some of these issues--for example, in academia stopping
the tenure clock for men or women who want to take a year or
two off to be with their children; in law firms to have a
partnership track where the partnership track time is slowed
for men or women who want to take that time off.
In certain businesses, however, the demands of being a
corporate CEO, for example, don't allow for as much
flexibility; and most corporations are pyramid shaped. Most
people don't get to the top, and if you want to get to the top,
you do make sacrifices. I think I am just trying to point out
here, not in a Pollyanna-ish way, that there is not
discrimination, but you make tradeoffs in life. And women, on
average, have tended to make different tradeoffs than men. That
doesn't mean they don't have equal opportunity.
Mrs. Maloney. Could you respond, Ms. Appelbaum? Ms. Mello.
Mr. Robertson.
Ms. Appelbaum. I would just say that women are making the
best choices they can, given the rotten situation that they
face. And in that sense, that is certainly true.
I agree with you that if what we have to do, that in order
to have equality or even earn more--because as we all know,
employers look askance at men who are single, live alone, have
no children, and were never married. These are not considered
good employees if they are male, only if they are female.
And we also know from the data-Ms. Stolba can verify it--
that men with children earn more than men without children,
everything else being equal, whereas women with children earn
less.
I think it is about opportunity and I think it is about
choice. The question is how do we provide women with the same
opportunities? What has to happen so that the choices they make
reflect their own preferences? Otherwise, I will tell you that
the problem is not going to be that women don't work and that
women don't earn enough.
The problem is that women don't have children in large
enough numbers to replace the population. Japan already faces
this; they have a shrinking population. Italy already faces
this; they have a severely shrinking population--Germany to a
lesser extent.
The United States would be in the same shape as Germany if
it were not for the fact that we have such a large immigrant
population. First-generation women continue to have large
families; otherwise, we would also be below replacement in
terms of children. If we don't make it possible for people to
combine a career and a family, we are going to face serious
problems, a waste of human resources as women drop out of the
work force or as they take part-time jobs that are way below
their qualifications.
One of the things we know about part-time employment in
this country is that half the jobs that are part-time are found
in 10 low-wage industry occupation classifications. So if you
decide that you want to cut back on your hours, in general, in
this country, you cannot cut back on your hours as a
professional woman in your current job. You must quit your
current employer and take a job in retail. And sure, you will
be paid the same as a man in retail trade, but you will not be
paid the same as a person with your qualifications and you will
not be contributing to this economy everything that you are
capable of contributing.
What we need, I think--it was put out by Ms. Stolba: There
is a view in this country that longer hours equals more
productivity. Longer hours equals more managers who don't know
how to manage. They manage by face time. You spend your time--
long hours in a law firm, long hours in a consulting firm, long
hours in a corporate headquarters, and then your manager knows
you are a hard worker.
It takes a lot more to manage by results than it does to
manage by face time. And here is what we have found in those
companies that manage by results--because, in fact, what I
study as a researcher is what goes on inside of companies.
Those companies--and there are many in the United States, that
do offer flexibility, that do give people flexible work
arrangements--find that the first thing they have to do is
educate their frontline managers, supervisors and line managers
to judge by the quality of the work. What is it this person was
supposed to accomplish and did they accomplish it; not, were
they here 60 hours doing 30 hours' worth of work?
So there are a lot of changes that have to be made. I
think, if we get to flexible work arrangements, we will also
get to much better management and better use of our human
resources; and we will have much greater opportunities for
women, as well as for men, to adjust their work lives so that
they can also have careers, be good employees; and do a good
job as parents, and as children responsible for the care of
their family members.
Mrs. Maloney. Ms. Mello? Could she have a chance to
respond? Because I think this is an important question, and I
will give my other time back. I just wonder how the other
people respond to it.
Ms. Mello. I would like to say that, as we have heard
today, there is still a lot of discussion and argument around
the statistics; and I must say that I think this whole issue
has suffered from the fact that the information that we have
had has been fragmented and anecdotal in many ways.
The Committee of 200, a group that has been around for 20
years, these are top women CEOs in the country who have gone
through this process in the last 20 years. One thing, when we
came up to do this index, was to create a big picture, to
really kind of create a combined, average global feel for where
we really stand and to create an index that can be published
every year so we can create a benchmark and start tracking it.
It is a clout issue. It is a combination of 10 weighted average
indexes all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous--why
aren't we head of charity fundraiser balls, but that is
significant when you get into it.
The bottom-line is to try to reduce the rhetoric and get
down to specific measures that we can refer to, the purpose of
that being really to begin a conversation about these issues so
that people become more aware of the fact that we are not
sitting in this valuable time arguing one statistic against
another, but we have a standard that we can refer to; and from
that basis, to make that information available to people who
are decisionmakers both in government and the private sector.
It will also highlight, for those of us who care about this
issue, when it is time to celebrate. I can remember when pay
parity was, you know, a lot lower; and so I am delighted that
it is getting up there, whether it is 100 percent or 7.8 or
whatever.
I do think that these are opportunities, and I second think
it is important to segment where we have concerns and where we
need to focus our attention and understand these issues
associated with hindrances to our success.
There is a lot of discussion about the need for parity and
the need for diversity in the private sector, which is my
sector, and I am sure in the government as well. There is very
little done in terms of trying to help people who are in a
position to make a difference know how to go about doing it,
how to make these changes happen.
And I have spent a lot of time with our corporate sponsors
and organizations talking to them about what they are doing
internally to make this happen. And guess what? The reason
isn't only because it is the right thing to do or that they are
going to get their hands slapped, but they are looking at a
marketplace where--you know the statistics better than I do--
but at least 70 percent, in the next 10 years, of their
marketplace is not going to represent white males and they
don't have a clue about what their market is.
So, from the standpoint of business in the private sector,
they are really beginning to get into these issues. The bigger
they are, the harder they are going to fall if they don't start
getting with it.
So we are trying to create an index that people can get a
handhold, and from there start conversations and start
evolving. I agree with Ms. Stolba that the private sector needs
to move on taking these initiatives, with the support of the
government as well, because the cost to society is too huge. I
mean, ultimately, the bottom line--and this is a personal
feeling--is that if we don't begin to kind of make this an
easier pathway, we are going to lose the most important 50
percent of our society, where we are going to have our national
leadership. We need good leaders in our country, whether it is
private sector, not-for-profit, government, or whatever; and if
they are hindered because they have to send their kids to
school or whatever, and society is not helping them with
raising their children, then that is a cost to society and, God
knows, we'll have lots of problems.
So it is really the loss of leadership opportunity, and
second, it is the responsibility for raising our young
children. It is not just mothers, it is not even just mothers
and fathers; but it is society's responsibility. And you know
the statistics, again, better than I do; but I would have to
say that we as a society have not gotten serious about dealing
with these educational issues and support structures for our
society.
So, anyway, I think that's where I would come down. I am
less interested in arguing whether the statistics are here or
there. I would like to get a generally accepted standard by
which to measure on an annual basis. We would like to get a lot
of publicity and vision on this so that people can start
referring to it.
It is like the Dow Jones in the private sector. If you look
at the C200 Index, you can get a feeling for how we're doing.
That is not to say that we are good, we're bad, we're
indifferent, but we know where we stand.
So I hope this will be a contribution to this discussion,
and I hope that people will take a good look at the index. It
is a very easy read, and I think it is a very important piece
of work. Thank you.
Mr. Horn. I am going to yield myself 8 minutes, which is
less than our colleagues have said here.
I want to ask Mr. Robertson: Your report indicates that in
most industries women managers were less educated, younger,
less likely to be married, or more likely to be part-time. How
important are those factors in explaining the pay disparity you
found during your study?
Mr. Robertson. They're very important. What we do in the
last part of our analysis, the regression analysis, is say, OK,
after you control for each of those, what are the differences
in salaries? And we found, despite controlling for those
variances, there are still differences in salaries.
And, of course, I think basically the value of our study is
that we have, in essence, maybe not answered the question of
whether there is a glass ceiling or isn't there? We have
provided some perspectives that bracket that answer. Basically
after controlling for some of these variables, that you would
expect to create salary differences there are still some salary
differences. Now that could be explained by some other factors
that we did not have access to and could not incorporate in our
model, such as job experience. We have at least bracketed down
somewhat the answer to the question we were asked originally.
Mr. Horn. Ms. Stolba, you made some interesting
observations about the choices women must make in attempting to
balance family obligations and employment opportunities.
Do you see any trends that indicate that young women are
aware of the consequences of their choices and are opting for
career advancement rather than family responsibilities?
Ms. Stolba. Absolutely. I think it starts at the level of
education and having seen various types of polling data of
college-age women in the last year, last 2 years, what you find
is that when you poll them, they expect to have a career.
And when you ask them, well, what about your long-term life
span? How do you foresee your work life? What do you see it
looking like? And there is where I think they are delightfully
pragmatic, because most of those who say that they want to have
children--and not all say that they want to have children, but
most do; and those who do, say, well, when I have very young
children, when I have children who are under the age of 5, I
will probably cut back on my work life. Or alternatively they
will go into fields where they feel they will have more
flexibility, whether that be the capability of telecommuting
and working from home; and so, keeping up a certain level of
work or not.
I think that is a very good sign of--these are the
granddaughters of the sexual revolution; these are the young
women who have watched their mothers and grandmothers go
through this struggle, and I think they are making very
intelligent and pragmatic choices about it. And I think they
assume that they will go back into the work force full-time
once their kids are in school.
Mr. Horn. Dr. Appelbaum, in your testimony you discuss the
need for greater flexibility and control over their work
schedules, such as job sharing, shorter work weeks, as well as
the need for publicly financed family and medical leaves.
Wouldn't that widen the gender pay gap rather than close
it?
Ms. Appelbaum. No, I don't think it would. What it would do
is enable people to continue to have a continuous work
experience.
What I think has to happen, however--I think one of the
most critical things that the Congress can do for working women
and their families is to close that loophole that allows people
to be paid less on an hourly basis when they work part-time
than they are when they work full-time--with the employer, of
course, deciding what is a full-time job and a part-time job.
We had that egregious example, I think you probably all
remember, from UPS in which part-time workers were working 35
hours a week and full-time workers were working 40 hours a
week, and since you are allowed to pay part-time workers less,
the pay for part-time employees was substantially below the pay
for full-time employees. I think we need to eliminate that. I
think that will enable men, as well as women, to reduce their
hours of work.
Today, if you reduce your hours of work, you open yourself
up to the possibility of far lower pay than a full-time worker
gets. If your family desperately needs that money, you may
leave your full-time job and take a low-paying part-time job
just so you can contribute. If your family can afford it, you
may leave the work force altogether. It is certainly not worth
it to you as a lawyer, for example, to take a job as a part-
time clerk in a WalMart or something like that. This situation
leads to that break in work experience.
I think that what people are looking for, what women are
looking for, what men are looking for, are greater
opportunities to combine a career and a family and to be
successful in both.
Mr. Horn. You said there are a number of large corporations
in this country that give women sufficient flexibility in their
work schedule. Could you give us some examples?
Ms. Appelbaum. Yes, of companies that give employees
sufficient flexibility, because flexibility is not just an
issue for women. And I think it would be a mistake for a
company to have a policy to say, this is only available to
women or only available to people with children.
Men also have responsibilities. Sometimes all they want to
do is finish up their degree; they would like a shorter work
week to go to school--if they are young, or they are taking
care of parents if they're old and so on.
But Bristol Myers Squibb is a company that immediately
comes to mind, which introduced a range of flexibility options
in its payroll department. It allowed for work sharing, it
allowed for part-time work, and allowed for compressed work
weeks. And prior to this initiative, this department clocked a
lot of overtime because you needed to have people in the
payroll department to deal with questions early in the day,
late in the day and so on. But with the compressed work week
they were able to cover the early hours and the late hours
without overtime; and with job sharing, they were able to fill
in where, with compressed work weeks, there are some days that
are not covered.
They found that in their payroll department they were then
able to offer the flexibility that the employees wanted and
have considerable savings in that they no longer have to pay
overtime.
The company that allows employees, male or female, to
reduce their work hours to 30 hours a week is Morningstar,
another pretty famous company.
Mr. Horn. Along that line where people can work in the
home, we had a full committee hearing. We also have had various
Appropriations--Frank Wolf, for example, has been a real leader
in this; Connie Morella has been a leader in this.
Ms. Appelbaum. That is another option that I think is very
helpful.
Mr. Horn. What I learned out of that, and it came up once
here, is the nervousness of the lower management saying, what
is left for me when everybody is at home?
Ms. Appelbaum. That is exactly right. And for that, we have
to emphasize training for lower-level managers so that, in
fact, they learn how to supervise the work that is being done
and not simply observe the worker.
Thank you, I think that's very good.
Mr. Horn. I yield 5 minutes to the ranking member, Mrs.
Schakowsky.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you. I wanted to take a personal
privilege just to thank the Committee of 200, which is located
in Chicago, for this incredibly important report. And I hope
that your aspirations are true that it does become the kind of
Dow Jones that we can go back to year after year.
Ms. Stolba, you made a statement again that sort of got me
going here. ``Delightfully pragmatic decisions made by women,''
young women. And I wondered, among other things, if as
delightfully pragmatic decisions were being made by young men,
that they might like to put some time into and investment into
the home--and let me say, my premise being that these
delightfully pragmatic decisions are based on a stagnant notion
of what the workplace is about.
Women are practical and do make decisions based on
realities. But I guess our intention here is to go beyond the
current realities. Is this the best reality for America, for
its children, for its families, for its economy, as Ms. Mello
pointed out?
So I wanted to ask you about young men, and then to say,
don't we want to think outside the box here?
Ms. Stolba. I agree we do want to think outside the box,
and I do agree with Dr. Appelbaum on a number of things that
she just raised in her last answer.
The polling data do show that young men have more of an
interest in things such as flexible work arrangements than the
generation previous. And I'll just cite a personal example of
my own brother-in-law and sister who are both architects and
who crafted a flexible work arrangement with their employer
when my niece was born so they both were working three-quarter
time--actually, I guess, half-time, but since in architecture
you do need a lot of face time in the office, they worked out
an arrangement where they were coparenting in fact.
And I think there is one point at which the Federal
Government could help us think outside the box on this, and
that would be to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow
for things such as COMP time and FLEX time. COMP time and FLEX
time are the top two demands of younger workers these days
because they want more control over their work hours.
It is not that they want to work less, it is not that they
have notions of wanting to climb the corporate ladder in an
old-fashioned boys club, maybe the way their parents did. They
want to have a feeling of more control over their schedules,
and they are also much more technologically savvy about it, and
understand that there is a lot of their work they can do from
home.
So I think encouraging businesses--freeing up, first of
all, the old Federal regulations that prevent businesses from
allowing flexible arrangements such as COMP time and FLEX time
are one good way of doing this. And when we start talking
about, isn't it unfair that women have to make the pragmatic
choices and men don't, then we're starting to talk about social
and cultural norm shifting. And these are seismic changes, and
I think we should be careful about trying to legislate them.
They are happening of their own volition.
You should continue to encourage equal opportunity and
uphold the antidiscrimination legislation that we have. But
when we start trying to talk about how do we get more men to
change more diapers, then I think we are in a realm that is
really not the Federal Government's realm.
Ms. Schakowsky. On the other hand, advocates who want to
seek parity, who want to create more equality should not then
characterize those choices as ``delightful'' necessarily. Maybe
necessary, but not necessarily the best outcome.
Ms. Stolba. I am describing their own descriptions of those
choices. And, again, I think the other thing to raise is that
we're all talking about child rearing and parenting as if it is
some burden to success in the workplace. I don't think most
people see it that way. We should get back to talking about
balance, because people take both of those roles seriously, and
obviously parenting much more seriously.
So, again, I don't like the tone of saying that this is an
obstacle that women have to overcome and, in order to overcome
that, we need Federal regulations and more men changing
diapers. So there is a tone shift that I think needs to happen,
which would also, I think, cool people's jets in terms of
overheated rhetoric that quickly comes into play in these
debates.
Ms. Appelbaum. I would just like to object to the idea that
we need to change the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow for
COMP time and FLEX time. There are numerous opportunities for
flexible schedules within the Fair Labor Standards Act as it
now exists. People who would be more affected if we changed the
Fair Labor Standards Act are not Ms. Stolba's architect brother
and sister-in-law--or the other way around, whatever it was.
They already have whatever they want--employers can give them
whatever they want in terms of COMP time. They are not covered
by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The people who are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act
are those women working at Wal-Mart, working as waitresses,
working in hourly paid jobs who have no supervisory, no
managerial, no independent decisionmaking capacity whatsoever.
Otherwise, they would be exempt and they wouldn't be affected
at all.
For those women, pay is very low. And if they do work
overtime, which--few of them have that opportunity, but if they
do work overtime, they depend on that time-and-a-half pay to
pay their bills, to buy clothing, food, whatever for their
children. So it's, I think, unreasonable to ask that they give
up that extra pay.
And the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act
are the only thing that we have that prevents employers from
working employees as many hours as they want, because we do not
have a maximum-hours work law in this country. All of Western
Europe, as you may or may not know, is subject to a maximum-
hours-of-work law. You cannot require an employee to work more
than 48 hours a week in all of Western Europe.
And we do not have such a provision; in this country, you
can be fired for refusing overtime. So the only limit on the
employer's ability to ask you to work however many hours in the
week is the fact that they have to pay premium pay, and that
does tend to moderate what employers would do. So I think we
need to keep that in mind.
If you want to think outside the box, you want to think
about amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, I'd have a
proposal. And that is that we go to an 8-hour day and a 36-hour
week so that, for example, people would work 5 days 1 week and
4 days the next; it would average out to 36 hours a week.
Employers could handle it because, with the 8-hour day, it
doesn't change their shift arrangements, and it gives every
full-time employee one earned paid day off every other week. I
think that would go a long way toward helping working families.
They would have that day every other week in which they
could schedule doctors' appointments, meetings with teachers;
you name it, they could take care of it. They could go to
banks, do their shopping, when they don't have to have their
kids in tow.
I think of all the ways in which this would relieve the
stress on working families. If you really want to change the
Fair Labor Standards Act, that is what I would propose.
Ms. Schakowsky. Thank you.
I just wanted to say that I think it would be unfortunate
if the effort to create parity in the work force by women is
characterized, then, as a rejection of the notion that women
embrace child raising in a really positive way. So when talking
about cooling rhetoric, I want to caution you about that.
All of the evidence is there that women do, in fact,
embrace child raising. The only issue is, does the workplace
accommodate that in a way that is compatible with the realities
of our society and the desires of women to make those choices.
Let me just read one statement, one conclusion, that I
think also contests some of the criticisms that you had, Ms.
Stolba, of the Maloney-Dingell report. ``In both 1995 and
2000,'' controlling for differences in ``education, age,
marital status and race, full-time''--so that's part-time
versus full-time--``female managers in each of the 10
industries earned less than'' full-time male managers. And
whenever we control as much as we can for all the factors, we
still find that the wage gap exists. Thank you.
Mr. Horn. Five minutes for Ms. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Following-up on Jan's question, even if
females have less education, and even if they have less
experience, which we did not control for because we did not
have the data in the census, but they are still doing the same
job as their male counterparts, shouldn't they get the same
amount of money?
That is basically what your report showed, Mr. Robertson,
that in all these areas they were doing basically the same job,
yet getting less money.
I wanted to ask Ms. Stolba, your comment that you don't
believe--you said it is a misleading term, indicating that you
don't believe it is there. But how do you explain a 1998 study,
done by Harvard University and the Washington Post, which
stated that 43 percent of men polled believed that a major
reason why women don't move to management positions is simply
because and purely because men don't want them to?
Does anyone want to comment on that besides Ms. Stolba?
You first, but anyone else too. I was just using your words
but it is a question to the whole panel. But you can start
first.
Ms. Stolba. I would certainly not deny that, again, there
are cultural norms that still exist in a lot of these big
corporations that we need to change. But I would caution, when
we talk about attitudes, first of all, this is not the same as
gathering statistics and hard data. These are opinion surveys
which are ambiguous at best and difficult to base strict
factual conclusions on.
The reason I challenge the ``glass ceiling'' phrase is that
I think it is deliberately misleading. It is not an argument
that there is no discrimination, that we don't need the
protections of antidiscrimination legislation. But people's
choices matter also, and choices have consequences inside the
workplace, outside the workplace; and those choices start very
early. It is a matter of what you choose to get an education
in, the kind of job you choose to go into, how hard you want to
work.
Mrs. Maloney. But I don't think women choose to get paid
less, which is what this report showed.
Ms. Stolba. This report, with all due respect, does not
consider what academic economists consider one of the most
important factors in terms of wage and compensation--
consecutive years of work experience. That is a very important
factor. And if, even holding these factors constant, there is
still a gap, that might be caused by discrimination. Perhaps.
But I am just arguing that the broader claims about
societal discrimination in the workplace that are being made
here today, based on this report, are overly broad. They're
not--the evidence that was gathered can't hold up those kind of
broad conclusions.
Mrs. Maloney. But even if a woman took 10 years off to
raise children, which is the average that they take off, the
numbers are astonishing.
Quite frankly, I was absolutely stunned that during 1995 to
2000, when we had great prosperity in this country, women
slipped--we did not spread the wealth, the disparity grew--and
I am concerned that now we're going into, and are, in a
recession, what these numbers are going to mean for women.
Ms. Mello.
Ms. Mello. Just a comment on that. I think the women who do
make the choice to become the CEOs, that do make those choices
and sacrifices and accommodations within their lifestyle are
still not making it, OK? You look at the compilation of the
figures that we gave you; the women in our organization are the
leading CEOs in this country, and let me tell you, we are a
small bunch.
Back 20 years ago, we couldn't find 200 of us. And today
they represent--it's still negligible, the women that have made
those choices, the sacrifices, have the education, have the
commitment, have the drive, have the leadership capabilities,
the numbers are negligible in terms of who they are on the
corporate Fortune 500 or 1000, even.
Mrs. Maloney. To add to your comments, many women have told
me that they consciously made the choice not to have children
because the society could not support them with adequate
daycare, and they are very bitter now because they did not get
the job and they did not get children. And I think--why don't
we have any women's charity chairs? Why would you say?
Ms. Mello. The reason they don't is they are not viewed as
having the power and the influence and the ability to draw in
the money. They don't have the contacts. They don't sit on the
corporate boards. They can't draw in their favors in the same
way that men do because they don't have the platform.
Mrs. Maloney. I've just got to say, anyone who says there
isn't a glass ceiling or discrimination, I think you are living
on another planet. Just yesterday, I had a staff member come to
me who is in school, an intern in my office. And her supervisor
was sexually harassing her, giving her all kinds of trouble in
a major university. The response of the university is, don't
bother us, go into court.
Now how in the world is a kid going to go into court with
no money and what kind of message does that send to our young
people? That people don't support them when they feel that they
have been wronged in whatever way.
And to sit there and to say, it is not a problem, when you
have Ms. Mello's report, Ms. Appelbaum's report, Mr.
Robertson's report, the Harvard report, all of these reports
coming out. It could say that maybe it's 1 or 2 percentage
points off, but it is not 26 cents off. It is not whatever
adjustment for whatever factor was not there. Granted, we used
existing data; to generate our own, it would have been far more
expensive. We used the data that every researcher in the
country uses, the Census Bureau data. But to say that it is not
a problem, I think you are an ostrich with your head in the
sand.
And I just want to thank all the panel. We have other
panelists coming, but if you would like to respond to any
point, to some of the points that we have been making--Mrs.
Appelbaum, you had your hand up.
Ms. Appelbaum. I wanted to respond to this question of
continuous work experience and your point of the widening gap
after 1995. There is no evidence that women worked less in the
second half of the 1990's than they worked in the first half of
the 1990's. If anything, every statistic showed increasing
labor force participation, increasing continuity, increasing
education, increasing preparation for high-level jobs as
professionals or managers.
So the explanation for the widening gap that you found,
whether the widening gap would be narrowed a few percentage
points, as you pointed out, if you add education in, but the
fact that it is widening speaks against this idea.
I would like to put in the record, because I would like to
find it, the studies that have continuous years of work
experience in them. Most have only years of work experience,
and I don't know exactly where the data on continuous years of
work experience comes from.
Mr. Horn. Without objection, your exhibit will be put in
the record at this point.
[Note.--The information referred to may be found in
subcommittee files.]
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you very much, Mr. Horn.
And to followup with Mrs. Appelbaum quickly, men take time
off. They take time off to go into the service. They often take
time off with midlife crisis, to study or whatever, or just
because they want to take some time off. And then they go back
into the work force, and they don't fall behind dramatically. I
think that is another point.
Again, I think a lot of these studies bring more questions
than answers, that we need to look at. But men take time off,
sometimes substantial time off. Many people go into government
to work at great personal loss of income to help the country,
and then they go back and they are not penalized in their
careers.
Is there any comment on that? It seems like the women take
time off and, baby, you can't get back in. The man takes time
off, you are a hero. You went and did something great for your
country. You served government, not the private sector, but
government. You served in the military. You did a great job.
But women take time off, and it is like, forget your
career, we want you to be on the factory floor.
Would somebody like to comment on that? I think it is a
noble thing to take time off to raise children. It is an
important contribution to the country, one that should be
valued, one that brings back understanding that could help the
work force, I would say and argue.
My time is up. Thank you, Mr. Horn. As always, you are a
generous, wonderful gentleman.
Mr. Horn. I know. You are so right. It is a real lovefest
here.
Mr. Robertson, you have heard a lot of discourse. What do
you want to say about that?
Mr. Robertson. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
Many of the questions that have been raised this morning go
obviously way beyond the scope of the work that we did. But
just making a couple of observations, to me--we have experts
sitting here to my left and some out in the audience--the
questions raised just show how very, very complex the issues
are. And I would like to go back to something Ms. Mello said
earlier on in the conversation, which I think was very
important and, I hope, wouldn't get lost.
She said something to the effect--and this is not a direct
quote--there are a lot of statistics going to be thrown around,
and different people can interpret the same statistics a
different way. And I think where she is coming from in terms of
if there can be some agreement, how to interpret certain
statistics or what statistics we should be using, I think that
would go a long way to help everybody talk a common language.
And this committee, the subcommittee, is doing exactly the
right thing bringing different views together, because this is
an important public issue. And out of that, hopefully some of
this common language will come about and we will make progress.
Mrs. Maloney. I think GAO is just the body to do it in.
Point of personal privilege, Mr. Horn. Could I introduce a
distinguished guest, Bill Perkins, who is with us, the deputy
majority leader of the city council from the Ninth District,
representing Harlem and the Upper West Side, who has a great
interest in this and who has come to join us.
Thank you for being here, Mr. Perkins.
Mr. Perkins. It is my pleasure.
Mr. Horn. Welcome.
Mr. Perkins. Thank you.
Mr. Horn. Dr. Appelbaum mentioned an idea of the 8-hour day
bill. I'd like to know from the rest of you what your thinking
is, if there are any policies that are currently on the books
that ought to be different. And I'd just like to go down: Did
the GAO have any thoughts on any changes in the law, labor
laws, one way or the other?
Mr. Robertson. No. That is beyond the scope of our work.
Mr. Horn. Anything?
Ms. Appelbaum. The Equal Pay Act needs to be amended so
that we don't discriminate against part-time workers. I'd like
to see the 36-hour week. I know it's a long way off, but I have
a lot of ideas around that one.
I'd like to see paid family and medical leave. I do not
think that employers should have to pay, because I think that
would end up putting an undue burden on employers, depending on
the age distribution of their work force. But I think we need
something along the lines of unemployment insurance that would
allow for paid family and medical leave.
Mr. Horn. Ms. Stolba.
Ms. Stolba. I am a big fan, again, of amending the Fair
Labor Standards Act to allow for FLEX time and COMP time,
mainly because these low-wage workers, when polled, say they
would love to exchange overtime pay for time home with their
families. So that is something they desire even if they are not
architects.
And the other thing I would raise, we need to consider
economic growth when we're talking about Federal mandates with
regard to 36-hour work weeks or federally mandated, paid leave.
These things cost money, and one of the enviable things about
the American economy has been its incredible growth; and if we
start issuing new mandates, that growth could be threatened. So
I think that is just something that we need to consider when we
look at these kinds of policies.
Ms. Mello. Well, my focus has been a little different. I
would love to see the 8-hour day, having come from a 12-hour
day and a 14-hour day in my career. But keeping that aside in
terms of the whole work force moving in the direction of
parity, that would create opportunity for society to be more
supportive of the issues of education and supporting children
and leadership within our organizations, would be--to the
extent that is supportive of that, I would definitely feel that
would be recommended for your consideration.
Mr. Horn. Thank you. And do we have any more questions
here? Because we need to go to the next panel.
Mrs. Maloney. No. Thank you all. You have all given us a
great amount to think about, and we will be in touch with you,
and certainly working with you in the future on this important
issue.
Mr. Horn. Well, if you can stay with us after panel two,
and you are worried about what they might say, why we would
welcome any thoughts you would have. This is a dialog.
But thank you very much for all you have done. These are
excellent written statements, and I think the question period
brought out a lot of important information.
Mr. Perkins. Mr. Chairman, I wonder if I might just take a
quick question because of a specific concern that I and members
of the Council have. We are looking at this matter, and we will
be having our own hearings on this at the end of the month.
One area of my particular focus is the impact on women of
color where the problem seems to be even more so. And I am
wondering if you have any thoughts about that and how that can
be overcome. Anybody?
Ms. Stolba. Well, I would just point out that actually the
wage gap issues, because rates of education among African
American women, in particular, compared to rates among African
American men, is higher. They are doing better in the work
force and they actually have always--they've always worked much
more so than white women, if you look at the history of women
in the labor force in America.
But I do think that there are--race, I know, was factored
into the equations of this report; and I would cede to Mr.
Robertson in terms of seeing those impacts. But I would point
out that educational achievement of African American women is
actually quite a positive story. So the hope would be, once
they are in the work force, that they stay in the work force,
that would be a point.
Mr. Robertson. Our study didn't look to see the impact of
race. What it did was basically controlled for race. And so
from that standpoint, I really can't address the question.
Ms. Appelbaum. Well, I do think that they're well-known
leadership problems that affect black women in terms of their
ability to rise in organizations. If white women run into a
glass ceiling, I think the effect is equal, if not stronger,
with respect to black women. They have fewer mentors in the
workplace, they have few people that they can model themselves
after. They have fewer people that look out for them and so on.
So we certainly have that issue.
And if the comparison is between black women and black men,
then Ms. Stolba is certainly right. But if the comparison is
between black women and white men, then there is quite a
distance left to go.
Ms. Mello. I can only say that race was not an issue and
not a focus of our analysis. I can tell you within our
organization of 441 leading CEOs in the corporate and the
entrepreneurial sector in this country and in the world, I have
to say that the African American women, black women, around the
world are a very small percentage of our organization, which I
think is representative of leadership positions within our
country on boards, etc. I mean, we are a good cross-section for
that. It is nothing we are particularly proud of, but that is
anecdotally what the statistics would tell you.
We have a lot of--several outstanding women who are African
American on our committee, but they are a small percentage to
the 441. I don't know if that is helpful.
Mr. Perkins. Thank you. It has been.
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much. We appreciate your work that
you have done, and it will be well used.
So we will now have Panel Two: Ms. Allison Schieffelin, Ms.
Renuka Chander, Susan Ness and Marie Wilson.
This is an investigatory subcommittee, so if you would all
rise and put up your right hand.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Horn. The clerk will note that their assistants behind
them--and we will get their names--and they took the oath also.
So on Panel Two, we will start with Allison K. Schieffelin,
former principal of Morgan Stanley.
STATEMENTS OF ALLISON K. SCHIEFFELIN, FORMER PRINCIPAL, MORGAN
STANLEY, ACCOMPANIED BY WAYNE OUTTEN, ATTORNEY AT LAW; RENUKA
CHANDER, RESEARCH MANAGER, OFFICE OF MEMBERSHIP AND MEETINGS,
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE; SUSAN
NESS, ANNENBERG PUBLIC POLICY CENTER, FORMER FEDERAL
COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION COMMISSIONER; AND MARIE C. WILSON,
PRESIDENT, THE WHITE HOUSE PROJECT
Ms. Schieffelin. Thank you very much. Good morning Chairman
Horn, Ranking Member Schakowsky and Congresswoman Maloney.
Thank you for inviting me to speak on this important topic.
Because I am in pending litigation, I'd like to point out that
there may be questions that I can't answer and I will defer to
my attorney, Wayne Outten.
I am not being flippant when I respond with a flat no to
your query: Are women breaking the glass ceiling? The glass has
not broken at all, but rather has proven extremely durable and
harder to see than ever. But I'm not here to present academic
or scientific proof of gender discrimination because the
existence of real boundaries to women's advancement have
already been proven.
I am here to try and demonstrate why and how, despite our
better understanding of the problems, discrimination is still a
substantial impediment to women in the workplace. In fact, I
cannot imagine, especially after hearing this morning's
testimony, what more could possibly be needed to prove that the
glass ceiling exists. Numerous important and independent
studies have yielded the same conclusions.
The General Accounting Office report that prompted this
hearing lays out the data on pay disparity at the highest
levels of corporate America. The chair of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, Cari Dominguez, was an author of the
glass ceiling report and led the Labor Department's glass
ceiling initiative prior to her appointment to the EEOC just
last year. As an aside and as an indication of Chair
Dominguez's conviction about the problem, the very first press
statement of her administration was here in New York when she
announced that the EEOC was filing a lawsuit against my former
employer, Morgan Stanley for pattern and practice
discrimination against me and other women and for Morgan
Stanley's subsequent retaliation against me for coming forward.
I am a coplaintiff in that case.
Professor Susan Estrich's book, ``Sex and Power'' contains
a cogent and thorough study of many more studies. She includes
the scientific work of Dr. Virginia Valian of Hunter College,
the statistical proofs of discrimination produced by the
Catalyst organization, and the groundbreaking MIT study which
documented gender disparities at the highest levels of
academia.
In a conclusive and poignant statement, Professor Estrich
wrote: ``There are lots of reasons that any individual, male or
female, doesn't reach the top of his or her profession. They
may lack the skills, the ability, even the luck. They may be
lousy politicians or not care enough or not want it badly
enough. But those are traits one would expect to find if it is
an equal world and a level playing field in both men and women.
It is true that not all men succeed. But some do. On a
percentage basis, it's rather stunning. Twenty-five years ago,
graduating business school classes included 20 to 25 percent
women. As of 1999, 99.4 percent of the CEOs and 97.3 percent of
the top earners are men. That is not what a random distribution
of success looks like by any measure.''
I believe my case demonstrates what a real glass ceiling
looks like today. I graduated from the Kellogg Graduate School
of Management at Northwestern University in 1986 and was
recruited into the associate MBA training program at Morgan
Stanley that same year.
Like many young women coming into the business in those
years, I had no reason to believe that gender discrimination
would ever be an issue. After all, I had worked in group
settings equally with my male peers throughout my academic
career, had been recruited by a top Wall Street firm, and most
importantly I had been told that I was part of the ``next
generation of women.''
I assumed that my civil rights had already been won, and I
did not have any personal experience of gender discrimination.
After a year of training, I took a position in the
Institutional Equity Division on the trading floor at Morgan
Stanley. The cat-calling, the pin-up posters and suggestive
remarks, struck me as typical locker room banter and I thought
I could be just ``one of the guys.'' I laughed and joked and
worked like hell. I loved the excitement and the pace of the
business and I jumped in with both feet.
Morgan Stanley included me in all of their recruiting
events for MBAs, and I frequently attended women's events as a
spokesperson for the firm. I was also invited to participate on
the gender task force. As an associate, I listened to the
complaints of more senior women who had hit the glass ceiling,
woman who were denied promotions and pay commensurate with
their male colleagues. I heard about women who were pregnant
and felt they needed to hide their pregnancies until in a bid
to get extra money at year end. Still I thought that I would be
impervious to the problems they faced because this was all
being addressed and remedied and I was that ``next
generation.''
In the meantime, my productivity and my responsibilities
increased. I was doing very well at Morgan Stanley by any
objective measure.
I loved my job, and at every stage of my career I made my
ambitions clear: I wanted to be a managing director at Morgan
Stanley. Nevertheless, and genuinely surprising to me, the
glass ceiling inevitably blocked my advancement. I was
repeatedly passed over for promotion to managing director
without explanation while many men less qualified with respect
to tenure, productivity, and overall firm contribution were
promoted ahead of me.
In 1998, I reluctantly filed a charge of discrimination
with the EEOC. At the time I filed my charge of discrimination,
there were only three female managing directors out of about 50
in the Institutional Equity Division. They were amongst the
lowest paid and least powerful managing directors. Two out of
the three women managing directors were just promoted at the
end of 1997. Two out of the three women were assigned ``off-
line'' or nonrevenue producing divisions. Each of those women
had career experience of more than 15 years in a division in
which a man could achieve managing director in less than 10
years.
When I filed my charge of gender discrimination, I never
anticipated the degree to which I put my career at risk and
unalterably changed my life. Chair Dominguez put it best when
she said ``kiss your Wall Street career good bye.''
The retaliation is far worse than the discrimination.
Morgan Stanley, with its unlimited resources, feels no risk at
striking out against an individual woman who speaks up.
I was methodically stripped of responsibilities and was
quietly but pervasively maligned. I was finally fired on
October 24, 2000, for what Morgan Stanley called
``insubordinate and inappropriate conduct.'' In truth, it was
the type of conduct that is typical on Wall Street trading
desks. The reality is that they fired me simply because I had
the ``audacity'' to speak out about gender discrimination.
And I'm going to go over 1 minute with your permission, Mr.
Horn.
Mr. Horn. Certainly.
Ms. Schieffelin. Morgan Stanley destroyed my career. They
destroyed everything I had put my heart and soul into for
almost 15 years. And the retaliation has had the effect, and I
believe the intent, not only to punish me, but also to send a
loud message to women that if they come forward, their careers
can also be easily destroyed.
In fact, the law specifically states that complaining about
gender discrimination is protected activity under Title VII,
but the time, money spent and risk to my career that has
accrued over the past 3\1/2\ years since I filed my charge
plays directly into the hands of Morgan Stanley. I have to
emphasize the incredible financial burden that accompanies my
legal battle. I'm not crying poverty. I'm just pointing out
that the money I earned on Wall Street allows me to bring a
serious problem to a forum that no average professional, either
at Morgan Stanley or any company in America, could ever afford.
When, as in this case, the corporate defendant delays and
delays a fair resolution, that alone serves to deter even the
most resolute plaintiffs.
So I understand that I may not have the profile of your
typical victim of discrimination, but I am the one that you see
here today because I can afford to be here. Glass ceiling
discrimination is everywhere on Wall Street. The high price has
strengthened my moral conviction that it is my right, and in
fact my obligation, to seek relief for myself and other women.
It's obvious to me now why women in high-ranking jobs that
earn a lot of money are loathe to put it all on the line, even
though they are very much aware that there is a substantial
disparity in pay and promotion between men and women. And as
one of my former colleagues put it, ``women who have made it
this far and want to stick it out make accommodations in their
own minds about what they can expect and create justifications
for the discrimination rather than take action which might
jeopardize their careers.''
I am now extremely sympathetic to those fears and I
understand why so many of the women at Morgan Stanley sought me
out in the Morgan Stanley ladies room, cafeteria, or nonwork
setting rather than public setting--I'm just to going to skip
over some of this and read you my conclusion.
I know that this case is being closely watched not only by
other investment banks, but also by other professional
organizations like law firms and accounting firms. We must win
this case. And I believe that we will win this case. I believe
in the power of the law. I believe that the democratic process
and the dedication of our public officials can overcome even
the most monied and powerful corporations. I want to thank you
for any action that you might take for the women who are
fighting this battle. I don't want another generation of women
to have to go through this.
Thank you. I'm sorry for going over.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Schieffelin follows:]
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Mr. Horn. Thank you. Now we have Ms. Renuka Chander, and we
are glad have you here.
Ms. Chander. Thank you, Chairman Horn, and good morning to
the congressional committee.
I am Renuka Chander and I'm a research manager at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Our
principal product is Science Magazine, and we conducted a study
of 19,000 life science members in June 2001. The report that--
the sample that I'm reporting on was 8,692, which is a 46
response rate. We sent out a fairly long questionnaire asking
traditional questions on current income, previous year salary,
total professional income as well as attitudinal questions to
describe how scientists view their jobs, what motivates
scientists, and what their future plans might be regarding
their careers.
As we all know, there is a gender gap in life scientists'
salaries. Males earn a median of $94,000, whereas women
scientists earn a median of $72,000. The findings of this study
are remarkably close to the studies that have already been done
in different fields. The difference is explained in part by the
fact that males are further in their career cycles, have worked
longer and more of them are in the high-income field of
medicine. More females also work in academic settings where the
pay rate is lower and they have had less time in the workplace.
A gender gap is widest among the top jobs level. Among
academic administrators where the gap is the largest,
admittedly our sample had a low number of observations.
However, for full professors there is a difference of 14
percent in salary between men and women.
Similarly in industry, there is a gender gap in the top
positions. In nonacademic positions, women earn--in senior
management, women earn 22 percent less than men and among
physicians, women earn 31 percent less.
Male directors and managers also earn significantly more
than their female counterparts, 19 percent and 18 percent,
respectively.
There is very clear evidence in this study of some
systematic male-female differences in pay. For more research-
oriented positions we found that the pay gap was less, but in
terms of the administrative positions, the pay gap was much
larger. Only in one job category did we find that women earned
as much as men if not more, and that is on the job of principal
investigator. There, the average was $97,000. Men earned
$95,000 and women earned $97,000 but only in that particular
job.
The second point I would like to make is about job
satisfaction, because we think it is very important. Males are
more satisfied in their jobs than females. In part, this may be
related to females being less advanced in their career cycle
and the fact that they hold lower level jobs, since high-level
positions have higher job satisfaction.
We measured specific aspects of job satisfaction and we
found that males are more satisfied with their job than females
on many aspects, including some aspects that are very important
to females. The aspects on which males rate their job as
statistically significantly better include salary and
compensation, job security, promotion opportunities, hours
worked, opportunities for sabbatical, autonomy, opportunities
for collegial exchange and recognition and prestige.
Women don't rate their jobs as better on any aspect
evaluated, and they rate their jobs as significantly worse than
males on a number of aspects, and on aspects that are important
to females.
The third and last point that I'd like to make is about the
effect of marriage on female scientists' careers as well as
time taken for personal issues. The career paths of female life
scientists suffer more from marriage and dual careers than the
career paths of male life scientists. This is not new, but I am
giving you the statistics that apply to life scientists. In
part, this is because female scientists are more likely than
males to have highly educated working spouses, and a spouse
that is also a scientist.
About a third of men, male scientists say that their career
has been affected by their wife's career. But two-thirds of
female scientists say that their careers have been affected by
their spouse's career.
And the last point has to do with taking time off. Female
scientists are more likely than their male counterparts to have
taken 6 months or more as time off work for personal, medical,
or family reasons. Nearly a fifth of female scientists have
taken this type of personal leave--about 18 percent--compared
to only 3 percent of males.
Now, we found--this is based on questioning of these
people, males report a higher rate of being accommodated upon
their return to leave than females. 47 percent of males were
accommodated; only 30 percent of females were. And maybe this
is because males return to the same employer more often, 55
percent, than females, 41 percent.
That concludes my testimony on this issue, and I thank you
very much for the opportunity to testify.
Mr. Horn. Thank you. The evidence you have is going to be
very helpful.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Chander follows:]
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Mr. Horn. Our next presenter is the Honorable Susan Ness,
Annenberg Public Policy Center, former Federal Communications
Commission Commissioner.
Ms. Ness. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you,
distinguished members of the subcommittee, Congresswoman
Schakowsky and Congresswoman Maloney, for convening the hearing
and inviting me to testify today. I am currently a visiting
professor of communication at the Annenberg School for
Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and also
serve as the director of information and society at the
Annenberg Public Policy Center.
The study that I'm going to talk about today: Progress or
No Room at the Top? The role of women in telecommunications
broadcast, cable and e-companies, was released last year under
the direction of Dean Kathleen Jamieson as a result of the
request that I had made based upon the experience that I had
during the 7 years that I served as a commissioner at the FCC.
Basically, during that time, I saw a dearth of women in the top
echelon positions at communications companies. Indeed, as I
went from convention to convention, virtually no women were
there as keynoters or as members of the super panels other than
government representatives who were women.
Indeed, as the Annenberg study documents, only 9 percent of
the board of directors of telecommunications, media and e-
commerce companies are women. Only 13 percent of a total of 757
executives are women. And more strikingly perhaps, only 3
percent of those who have achieved the position of executive
vice president and above are women. Those are positions that
Catalyst calls ``clout positions.'' Not one of the 25 largest
media conglomerates listed in Broadcasting and Cable Magazine,
and that represents hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues
and enormous clout, not one of them has been headed by a women
in the 7 years that I served as Commissioner. Not one.
I would have expected better results to have occurred from
the e-commerce companies, companies that were established
subsequent to the resurgence of the women's movement 30 years
ago. One would expect that they would not have established
practices that might have been based on outdated views of women
in business. But, no. The researchers found only 6 of 147 e-
commerce company board members were women, and only 4 percent
of the executive vice presidents and above were women. These
are in the e-commerce companies.
Well, what does this suggest? First of all, it suggests
that the passage of time alone is not going to be effective in
increasing the representation of women on boards and in the
executive suites of communications firms or in any industry for
that matter. You can go across the board, lawyers, school
administrators, scientists, you name it, all documenting
similar results.
It's also been documented that when companies have a fully
integrated work force at all levels of the enterprise, these
companies see improvement in their bottom line. It stands to
reason, communications companies are seeking to win as many
consumers and viewers as they possible can. They should not be
undervaluing the opinions and experiences of 50 percent of the
population. I believe Ms. Mello made that point on the earlier
panel as well.
More importantly, when companies fully integrate family
friendly policies into their corporate culture, they have a
happier, more productive work force and they are better able to
attract and retain not just women, but also family oriented
men. That has a significant benefit in reducing costs, reducing
the costs of new hires, new trainees, etc. There are tangible
benefits to be had for corporations willing to address the
matter of inclusion of women beyond token members on the board
of directors or in the top-line executive succession.
Ironically, in the wake of the Enron debacle, some predict
that more women will be selected to fill nonexecutive vacancies
on the boards of corporations. Why? Because women score very
highly on the credibility and integrity scales, qualities today
that are very much in demand.
The Annenberg Report suggests several concrete steps that
can be taken to increase the number of women. Among them,
companies should conduct a self assessment to determine whether
their corporate culture and policies are impeding their ability
to attract and retain women. These efforts have to be initiated
from the very top. They should ensure that there are qualified
women included in any applicant pools for vacancies--and I want
to underscore that minority women are very important in this
whole discussion--they need to be in all of the applicant pools
and any job advancement for managers should be tied to better
outcomes.
Mentoring is also vitally important. It should be
encouraged to steer women along the paths better destined for
top leadership and not dead-end positions. In filling executive
or board positions, corporations should engage search firms
with a track-record of locating qualified women.
Finally, trade associations should seek out and publicize
women as keynoters and plenary session panelists.
Access to capital remains a stumbling block for many female
entrepreneurs wanting to buy communications companies. Congress
should consider establishing a viable tax certificate program
for female and minority first-time purchasers of communications
firms.
So in conclusion, women are woefully underrepresented on
corporate boards and in the executive suits of top
communications companies. This is not going to change based on
passage of time alone. You need to have real efforts underway
to accomplish that. The inclusion of women beyond token numbers
in boardrooms and at all levels of the enterprise can create
positive tangible results to the bottom line, but it takes a
sustained commitment from the top to make this happen. And
hearings, such as the one you are having today, go a very long
way by shining the light on this issue and encouraging the
private sector to do what needs to be done to get there. Thank
you all very much.
Mr. Horn. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Ness follows:]
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Mr. Horn. And we now come to our last presenter in panel
two. That is Marie C. Wilson, President of the White House
Project. And you might tell us a little bit about the project.
Ms. Wilson. Well, the White House--I'm Marie Wilson
President of the White House Project, a national nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing women's
leadership by enhancing public perceptions of women's capacity
to lead and fostering the entry of women in positions of
leadership, including the U.S. Presidency.
I've worked on this issue in one way or another for 24
years and find this fascinating. It's really interesting. I
continue to work on it in another capacity as president of the
Ms. Foundation for Women where we work on it all across
America, across race and class. And this Thursday the Ms.
Foundation will be celebrating 10 years of Take Our Daughters
to Work. A third of American adults have participated. So if a
third of American adults have been that concerned about their
children, we are right to be here and concerned ourselves.
Today I want to focus on one thing alone, and that is
perception. So I am so glad to follow Susan Ness, the
Commissioner, because perception--having gone at this every way
that I can think of in 24 years, one of the ways that the White
House Project has approached most recently is to look at the
media and to look at what Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of
Annenberg has instructed me to, how do we normalize this whole
area of women across race leading in America and how do we
change the culture so that we change this permanently?
So I thank you for pulling the data together, Congresswoman
Maloney, this has been a great help. And all of you who have
worked on this, Ms. Schakowsky, very much.
Mrs. Maloney. And like-minded men, Mr. Horn and Mr.
Dingell.
Ms. Wilson. I thank you like-minded men, Mr. Horn and Mr.
Dingell, who is not here and I hated to call attention to that.
At any rate, I do want to say that we looked at something
that is a little bit parallel to your studies. In the White
House study, we were looking at how many women appear on the
Sunday morning talk shows. Because, like your study, we are
finding that they are in no way appearing in proportion to
their representation. Even though they are not in enough
leadership positions, they are not even appearing in the ones
in proportion to the ones they are. We called it ``Who's
Talking'' and we can say with absolute certainty that women are
neither seen nor heard on Sunday morning talk shows.
And I want to say a minute's worth on why those shows are
important. Those shows have an agenda sitting effect in this
country. That is agreed by communications scholars. They tell
us what is important. They tell us what is not important. And
more to the point, they have an authority setting effect. They
tell us who we should listen to, who the experts are. They tell
us who should lead, and who will continue to lead and they
profile leaders every Sunday morning.
Before I give you the numbers I just want to say something
about September 11th, because after September 11th, you will
find that the data really changed on these shows and that's
when people in our country turned to television and said who do
we listen to and who did they hear? Well, they didn't hear
women and they did not hear women in spite of the fact that
three women Senators chair the three most important
subcommittees on terrorism in the U.S. Government.
And I think, particularly in this setting, when it was a
war that dealt with an incredible position of women in
Afghanistan, to not hear women's views was outstandingly bad.
We studied we studied this week, ABC; Face the Nation, CBS;
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN; Fox Sunday News, Fox; and
Meet the Press, NBC. And of course these have tens of millions
of viewers. We did not count by the way the interviewers, we
counted the guest appearances on those shows because that is
what we are looking at. They are the ones that are to be seen.
We studied it over a period of 18 months from January 2000
to July 2001. Just to summarize the findings, men outnumbered
women 9 to 1. There were 245 repeat guest appearances by male
U.S. Senators, only eight by female U.S. Senators. You know, if
they had invited a few back, they could have changed every
statistic. Women represent only 6 percent of all appearances by
elected officials. And as you well know, women comprise 14
percent of the House and 13 percent of the Senate. Women spoke
fewer words then men by 10 percent--I heard that chuckle--were
slightly more likely to be less prominent and in the later
segments of the shows. That did surprise us. And in every
category of speaker on every topic, women were underrepresented
according to the pool they represented.
So after September 11th, men outnumbered women 13 to one in
the 7 weeks, a drop of almost 40 percent in women's
representation compared to men. You can see that when it came
to different issues like war and terrorism, we were not ready
to look at women.
The impact of this has something to do and is formidable in
terms of the priorities of our Nation, whether women were
setting those priorities and whether women have an opinion to
give and whether that opinion is important.
Two things I'd like to add that I think are important.
First of all, these shows are intimate. Television is an
intimate thing and when people come into your living room, when
they are there every Sunday, when they are the leaders, you get
connected to them. You build constituency if you are on them.
You get voted for if you are on them. They are not without
power.
The second thing, if only when only a few women are on them
the corollary happens, then you start to say, oh, there are
only a few women who are competent in America. So tokenism has
a terrible price here. I'd like to summarize a couple of
things, and we can talk about them if you are interested. One
of the things we found, just for an example, is that the former
heads of the Republican and Democratic Senate campaign
committees were on the shows 24 times, and 16 times in those 18
months while the current chair of the Democratic senatorial
campaign, who is a woman, was never on.
We have several examples that have to do with intelligence
after September 11th where they had to reach underneath Senator
Feinstein to actually bring some men on those shows after
September 11th. Likewise with Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Nancy
Pelosi, people who have expertise that was relevant but did not
get on.
Again, I just want to say what these do, they bring voice,
they tell constituents of the women that are sitting up front
whether your constituencies know that you are there or doing a
good job. Rosy Galar mentioned that when we brought it to
Congress.
The White House study has put light on this. We will
continue it. We think that we will continue to make women
visible, of course, as much as possible. But we think the
political parties need to be promoting the women in those
parties. We think the talk shows and the producers need to be
telling the bookers that they need to bring the women in. And
we are glad that you are continuing to attract people to this
work and have them hear it because they need to. I want to
remind you that I think our country thinks it is a fair
country. They want to believe that things are fair and we have
this done. But it is far from done and your report will help us
get there and to be a real democracy.
I would like to submit my report but I would like to also
tell people further they can go to www.theWhiteHouseProject.org
and see it again. I thank you and I look forward to answering
questions.
Mr. Horn. Thank you.
[Note.--The publication entitled, ``The White House
Project, Who's Talking? An Analysis of Sunday Morning Talk
Shows,'' can be found in subcommittee files.]
[The prepared statement of Ms. Wilson follows:]
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Mr. Horn. I yield myself 5 minutes to start the
questioning.
Ms. Schieffelin, could you describe the scope of your
responsibilities while you worked in sales and trading at
Morgan Stanley, and is it a highly competitive job? I know you
have a problem that you might not want to----
Ms. Schieffelin. No, I was just giving myself a second to
think. The incredible growth in the securities industry over
the last 15 years, in part because of the outrageous bull
market, has created an incredible demand for young
professionals, and in fact, young males rose in that time from
very junior administrative posts to the most senior managing
director levels in short periods of time.
That's not to say that there's not a very competitive
environment for these jobs. All of the business school
applicants applied to jobs on Wall Street. And in fact, the
percentages out of every business school out of the last 15
years that applied to Wall Street versus consulting or product
management or communications rose because the most profitable
jobs and the stories and anecdotal evidence of these young Wall
Street high fliers were tremendous. So there was incredible
competition.
My particular job responsibilities were very broad because
I worked in a very specialized area of the industry called
convertible securities that involved the sale and trading of
derivative instruments and complex swaps. It also involved
working with every department of the Equity Division: in equity
trading, in options trading, in initial underwritings. We
raised billions of dollars, particularly for some e-commerce
companies that I'm sure Morgan Stanley doesn't want to submit
the research reports to today. But the responsibilities that I
had were very far-reaching, both with respect to primary
issuance of securities and day-to-day secondary trading of
securities, including very complex securities.
Mr. Horn. How many women held similar positions in Morgan
Stanley? Were you it? The typical token?
Ms. Schieffelin. For most of my career, I was the only, or
one of under three women in the convertible department. But the
better measure is of the entire institutional equity division.
And if you look at the entire pool of applicants that you look
at for men that went through the ranks of promotion, so you are
looking at associates, vice presidents, principals, and
managing directors, you will see that there were plenty of
applicants, but that mysteriously, I guess now predictably,
since you all know what I'm going to say, that at each
successive level of pay and promotion, that pool of applicants
looked less and less like the pool of total applicants.
So it's not that there is a dearth of women who are
interested in finance or who have studied finance and, as was
pointed out earlier, there are plenty of women in my graduating
glass out of Kellogg and all of our partner business schools.
There are tons of them. But even though many of my women
colleagues from Kellogg have achieved great success, I'm
certain very few achieved that success on Wall Street, not
because, again, because of lack of interest, but because of
lack of advancement opportunities on Wall Street.
Mr. Horn. Have you looked at data on the schools of
business administration versus the schools of law? As I
remember, law is now about 50-50. What about the schools of
business?
Ms. Schieffelin. When I looked at Ms. Estrich's data in the
Sex and Power book, she talked about very low percentage, 25
percent in the 1970's. I believe that my graduating class was
much closer to 50 percent, and having had the experience
anecdotally to be conducting employee interviews and super
Fridays where we invited male and female applicants to come
into the firm, and having hosted cocktail receptions for MBAs
and women's dinners, I can tell you that the women applicants
coming out of the business schools are far more numerous, and
many more of them--that's such a bad word--than in the 1970's
have skills and proficiency in math and sciences and the
quantitative areas, and yet still they don't end up in the line
positions, rather revenue producing positions. The aggressive,
trading floor positions--working it out everyday positions that
the men attain much more easily, even without the advanced
degrees.
Mr. Horn. Well, for the other three presenters, based on
your studies, were you able to determine whether the women have
lost or gained ground compared to men between 1995 and the year
2000?
Ms. Chander. Ours was not a longitudinal study it was just
a ``one of'' study. So I can't answer that question.
Ms. Ness. The Annenberg Center is conducting a yearly study
to update the statistics to be able to answer that question.
And those results should be out within the next couple of
weeks.
Mr. Horn. Ms. Wilson.
Ms. Wilson. We don't have a longitudinal study either, but
what I think you can see from our study that would say we have
gained some ground is that even though there were only a few
appearances by Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, the
fact that we had two women in the area of foreign policy each
of these women are in is actually progress, but that would be
the progress that I could document.
Ms. Chander. May I just--I just remembered something. Our
entire membership, which is made up of life sciences and all
the other disciplines, is 80 percent men and 20 percent women.
Among the life sciences we have some of the younger members,
the female member percentage is 28 percent, so I guess you
could call that some kind of progress.
Mr. Horn. Has science got the data in terms of the various
science majors in the United States for the Ph.D. which you
have to have, really, if you're going to be in most research?
And as I remember in the schools of engineering, chemical
engineering is almost 80 to 90 percent women and very few men.
So I'm just curious what people have looked at. It's very easy
to get that data.
Ms. Chander. Right. Right.
Mr. Horn. Maybe science wants to look at that. I don't know
if they have before.
Ms. Chander. I know that the American Chemical Society does
an annual survey, and their statisticians have concluded that
there is no significant wage gap between men and women. And I
think I heard a quote about an engineering survey that
suggested that there was no wage gap. But in our study,
whichever way you looked at it, there was a significant wage
gap, even when you held certain factors constant.
Ms. Schieffelin. Mr. Horn, can I add something? I think you
are really talking about the pipeline issue. Are there enough
women that are coming through, where are they coming from? And
the fact is that at least on Wall Street, I believe that the
pipeline issue has absolutely no merit, and I'll tell you why.
In part, because as I referred to, there has been a ton of
growth over the last several years in the securities industry.
But more important, unlike in industrial companies where you
see that the average career span required to reach a level of
senior authority would be 25 to 35 years, men in the securities
industry can achieve the highest levels of management in as
little as 7 years. And commonly under 10 years. So while you
might say that they just haven't come up yet, in fact in the
last 20 years we've had many, many, many generations of people
coming through the pipeline. So that pipeline question----
Mr. Horn. Thank you for that clarification. We'll now yield
5 minutes to the ranking member, Ms. Schakowsky.
Ms. Schakowsky. I really want to thank this panel for their
testimony and the last panel as well. Ms. Wilson talked about
perception and I wanted to refer to the first two, and is it
Schieffelin?
Ms. Schieffelin. Schieffelin.
Ms. Schakowsky. I want to at least thank you for your
courage to take on your employer and also acknowledge what you
were saying, that you had the wherewithal to do that, and you
are doing it in many ways on behalf of all those women who
can't, and maybe they are the next generation that you will
pave the way for. But math and science, one of the perceptions
is that women just aren't that good at it and aren't going to
achieve. And what you're telling me is that in some ways, that
stereotype is reinforced by barriers within the workplace
itself. That even for those women who have achieved the heights
in terms of academic achievement and professional achievement,
those barriers are there.
And I think really for all of the panelists, the question
is why? What are those employers, what are those institutions,
what are they saying is the reasons? I noted in your written
testimony, there was no answer for why you were not promoted.
What at least on paper are they telling us about why women
aren't on the talk shows why they are not advancing in the
communications industries and in science and in the securities
industries? What are we hearing?
Ms. Schieffelin. It's very interesting, because in my
entire career at Morgan Stanley, despite the annual 360-degree
thorough review process, that at not one point was I ever told
by my management that I lacked leadership or interpersonal
skills. In fact, there were no major criticisms of my skills in
any of my reviews going back to 1995.
So I have to point to Ms. Wilson's argument and tell you
that after the fact, Morgan Stanley said that even though I
probably did not know it because I had never been told that I
lacked leadership and interpersonal skills, even though I ran
the MBA program and I ran a bunch of initiatives for them in
computer development, all of a sudden there is a perception out
of nowhere that women are not leaders. And that's the only
thing I can think of because it struck me so hard when Ms.
Wilson presented that in our perceptions of men versus women.
Ms. Schakowsky. Ms. Chander, why? What's the explanation
when challenged? And your report has now been out for a while.
Is there any excuse given?
Ms. Chander. No, I have not personally challenged anybody
about this, but I have spoken anecdotally to various persons
and I don't know what to make of it, but there was expressed
surprised from many men that the wage gap was that significant.
I can only conjecture on my personal belief that I think
women accept these lower levels of pay and they continue with
their work life.
Ms. Schakowsky. And maybe for the reasons that Ms.
Schieffelin said that, challenging is risky. And that would add
to maybe part of the answer. Is it unconscious? Is there a
level of on which this kind of what turns out to be
discrimination is unconscious? I leave that as an open
question, too, Ms. Ness?
Ms. Ness. Part of it is tied to cultural aspects so it is
not perceived as discrimination. If an executive just picks
from among his friends to fill the highest level position, it's
not a question of academics. It's not a question of experience.
It's not a question of leadership skills. It is really who your
buddies are and who they are in those circles when the time
comes to expand or to be promoted.
An example of progress: After the study, we met with the
heads of several of the major trade associations. As a result
of that meeting, NCTA, the National Cable and
Telecommunications Association, which had no female members on
its board of directors, revised its bylaws because there are no
women who are the CEOs of the multiple system cable operators
[MSO]. The bylaws previously required board members to be a CFO
and an MSO, so it was not possible for the NCTA to have a woman
on its board based on its own bylaws. NCTA has changed its
bylaws and now CEOs of programming companies who are members of
the NCTA are now eligible. There are now two women on the NCTA
board.
It does make a difference, but it only happens because
people talked about it, and met on it, and raised the issue.
Last, the notion that you can't have kids and be the head
of corporations is just bunk. Within the communications arena--
--
Ms. Schakowsky. If you are a woman.
Ms. Ness. If you are a woman. Exactly right. Within the
communications arena, I can point to many, many CEOs who are
extremely successful CEOs and extremely successful parents. It
can be done.
Ms. Wilson. I just wanted to followup on this whole
business of are we looking at stereotypes? Is it
conspiratorial? How does this happen? We also went to meet with
the executive producers of the Sunday shows because I think all
of us are not into reports to beat and punish; we're into
reports to move things along. And we went to--I sat with some
women who are incredibly astute, thoughtful, who were the
producers and who were very upset to find that these Sunday
shows were not reflecting women because they were women.
The first meeting we had--I won't name the show--the woman
said, it's only because women are not in these leadership
positions that they are not there. And every time you can show
us, we have gone through your study and they're just not there.
And so we said we called attention to this piece that I
mentioned about the Intelligence Committee, and we showed them
how often they had to dip under the women who were underneath
the ranking member or the chair of the committee to go over
Feinstein. They were shocked because I don't think they meant
to dip under her.
I think it's that whole business that if we are not
attentive all the time to this, and also not vigilant and also
not held accountable that you do think, oh, it is intelligence,
it's war, we forget the number of women who are into this, not
just at the national level, not just in the military, but in
the State levels who are kind of risk management opportunities.
And so it is a matter of the people at the top, the people
who are heading up the parties saying we want these women seen,
and it is also a matter of the bookers looking beyond, that is
their job. And since then, I have talked to people who have
booked on these shows and they said yes, it is a matter of
looking beyond, because they are there.
Ms. Schakowsky. I watched for a difference since the
release of your report. I haven't really seen any. I saw
Hillary Clinton was on after the weekend after you had released
it, but I haven't seen much since. Are you keeping track?
Ms. Wilson. We're keeping track, absolutely. And we will
release a report soon so we can tell you whether anything
happened. I can only tell you that at least in talking to one
woman that has sometimes been on the talk shows, she said to me
when I was managing--it was Donna Brazile who told me when she
was managing Gore's campaign, that she hardly had been on at
all, but she had been on three times since the report came out.
So she thought it might have made some difference. But I do
think that calling attention to things makes a difference, and
we'll be providing the names of people as well. So----
Ms. Schakowsky. You ought to put Nancy Pelosi on the list
as the highest ranking woman, and since Mrs. Maloney has
released ``Woman After Woman,'' she ought to be on the list
too.
Ms. Wilson. People thought we did this to promote Pelosi,
but that is not why we did this.
Mr. Horn. Mrs. Maloney for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank all of our
panelists. I believe all of you have made a tremendous
difference. One of the reasons that I did our report was
because of your report that prompted me to think more about the
subject and want a broader view of it. I keep my own count. I
think you have made a difference on TV, Ms. Wilson. I think
they have changed it a little bit. All of your reports are very
important.
One of the things that you said, Ms. Ness, that mirrored
what Ms. Mello had said earlier, you stated that passage of
time alone is not enough to get women in the top positions.
Quite frankly, I have talked to firms in my area and they have
noticed that women at the top have decreased since the 1970's
and 80's. There are fewer and they don't know why.
What needs to be done to get women into these clout
positions? And I ask all the panelists if they would like to
share their views on it.
Ms. Ness. Certainly, the visibility that you are providing
today, the visibility by virtue of the discussion on the talk
shows makes a difference in waking people up to the fact that
there is a huge disparity. Mentoring at the highest levels is
extremely helpful to make sure that women are taking the right
steps that will lead to positions of power and leadership
succession and not into more dead-end, more traditional jobs,
where women typically end up.
The studies have demonstrated that where there are women
who are EVPs, the women often are in the public affairs
position or in human resources, but not in management
positions. So getting women to understand those pathways is
vitally important and doing it both at the top levels and also
early in their careers. And these concepts should come from top
down. That is very important, because unless it is a commitment
at the top it doesn't happen. And we heard story after story,
where women were at the top of these companies, you ended up
with a more balanced board of directors, you ended up with more
female executive vice presidents and the like.
So it does matter. Shining the light on this issue makes a
big difference. Focusing on family friendly policies is vitally
important. I can't underscore that enough. One consulting firm
found that it was not able to retain women, and after they
examined the problem, they found that some of their managers
were calling meetings at 5 o'clock in the evening for 7 o'clock
that same night. These were not emergencies. A lot of women who
take primary responsibility for picking up their children at
day care couldn't do it. If they had had a day's notice, they
might have been able to attend.
So the policy at that company changed. Instead of managers
being valued for working really late and calling late meetings,
those managers were criticized for not managing well. And as a
result, little by little, the policies changed. Those policies
became much more family friendly, and the firm was able to do a
better job retaining and promoting women to partnership.
Mrs. Maloney. Would anyone else like to comment on this
question?
Ms. Schieffelin. I have to add something, which is that in
the line positions when you talked about the difference between
line and staff positions, it is incredibly important on Wall
Street. Because in the line positions on a trading desk a
woman, in order to be successful, has to be as aggressive and
as outspoken and as demanding of the trader's time and
attention as the men are. But those are not traits that are
appreciated in women, although they are absolutely requisite
for success in a trading environment.
So I see that women were pushed off of line positions into
staff functions that are less promotable in part because the
aggressiveness is bitchiness or snippiness when it comes from a
woman. That same behavior is so revered in men in line
positions on Wall Street.
Ms. Wilson. I want to add one more thing to this that I
think is very interesting. In a Deloitte and Touche poll and
confirmed by a Roper Starch poll, that close to 79 or 80
percent of women for women to be seen as competent leaders in
business, they have to be seen as a leader in politics because
that is the front end of where people see and learn to trust
women. And right now, if you look at where the people of
America trust women to lead in politics, they trust us in
Congress, they trust us in city council----
Ms. Schakowsky. Not enough, 14 percent.
Ms. Wilson. They don't trust us enough to get more of us in
there. Let me say they trust us because men and women vote
equally for them. I should put that as the indicator of trust.
And they are just as likely to vote for a women as a men in
those positions, but when you get into the mayors of large
cities, when you get to actually the Governors, when you get to
the Vice President or the President, that gap widens.
And so we really have to--that's why to have women who are
at the very top be seen is important, not just political women,
not just for the women in politics, but women up and down the
line and having done focus groups with men and women of
different races and classes around this issue, they feel until
they we have women in those positions, they do not feel
respected in their daily lives.
Mrs. Maloney. Since you say that women politicians are
important for moving women forward in this country, when you
look at language that the press uses to describe women
politicians--in the last fight for the $20 billion that the
President promised us, male members who spoke up and fought for
it and issued reports that we were not giving the $20 billion
were called effective, I was called extremely shrill in
continuing to point that out. And when I was elected to
Congress, one of the major papers attributed my election to my
``puppy dog enthusiasm.'' I don't think any male politician in
Congress has ever been called puppy dog in their entire
careers.
I think it is unusual to have Ms. Schieffelin here. I think
your courage speaks for all women. And that every woman is
standing on your shoulders. How do you respond to the arguments
made earlier that women choose to work less hours and are
therefore especially less likely to advance? Did you say that
women were working less hours in your competitive positions
that you were in?
Ms. Schieffelin. Absolutely not. In fact, quite the
opposite.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you. Very, very briefly. I know you
worked much, much more. I hate to ask a personal question, I
wonder if you would share with us, do you have children?
Ms. Schieffelin. I am single and I have no children.
Mrs. Maloney. So therefore, your alleged discrimination we
heard a lot that if women had children, they can't handle it, I
would argue that they are better capable of handling it. I
thank you all for doing this. Especially the chairman, for
coming to New York for a field hearing. I am deeply
appreciative as are the people of my district and across the
country. And Ms. Schakowsky.
Mr. Horn. I thank both you and Jan. And a hearty thank you
to the staff, J. Russell George a New Yorker, and he is the
chief counsel staff director. Dan Moll, our deputy chief of
staff for the full committee was here. I don't know if he is
back here or not. Bonnie Heald to my left is the deputy staff
director, and Justin Paulhamus is the majority clerk. There he
is.
Now we get to the minority staff, David McMillen,
professional staff member. And we have also many people to
thank on Mrs. Maloney's staff in particular, and that's Orly
Isaacson, senior legislative assistant to Congresswoman
Maloney; and Ben Chevat, Mrs. Maloney's chief of staff, Minna
Elias, that's the New York chief of staff; Phil Craft, the
deputy chief of staff for Mrs. Maloney; Jessica Fox, director
of constituent services for Mrs. Maloney. I am beginning to
think she has as many assistants as the President of the United
States.
Mrs. Maloney. No, the whole staff is working on this
because we think it is important.
Mr. Horn. Yvonne Morrow, director of constituent services
for the Speaker of New York State Assembly, Stanley Silver, we
thank very much for the use of this room in particular. And our
faithful court reporter who has to untangle all of what I have
said, Joe Strickland. Thank you, Mr. Strickland, and we
appreciate all of your work. And with that, we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:50 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]