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Friday, June 09, 2000
By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
More women are working in the United States today than ever before, and many are thriving in fields and jobs once dominated by men. They are starting new firms in expanding numbers.
At the same time, more women than men work in lower-paid jobs. And for many, equal pay for equal work is still a dream. Women, on average, earn three-quarters of what men make.
Close to home, activists and academics say, it's even worse. Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania lag behind other regions of the country in key areas, including equality of pay and the upward mobility of women in the work force.
"Pennsylvania has a long way to go to deal with the question of women having a full place in the economy," said Linda Tarr-Whelan, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women and president of the nonprofit Center for Policy Alternatives.
So does Pittsburgh, said Audrey J. Murrell, an associate professor of business administration, psychology and women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
"The situation is not good -- in terms of mobility, in terms of career advancement," said Murrell.
Noting that all the Fortune 500 companies based here are headed by men, Murrell says this region has one of the highest disparities of women versus men in executive and managerial positions. Women frequently feel underutilized, she said, and often mention fatigue, frustration and discouragement.
On the bright side, Pittsburgh has a relatively healthy number of woman-owned firms, but the six-county metropolitan area ranks low in terms of the percentage growth of their numbers, as well as total employment and sales at woman-owned concerns.
Strengthening women's economic capacity was one of the key platforms of the U.N. conference on women in Beijing five years ago that was signed by 189 governments around the world.
The conference put women's issues, including their place in the economy, on a world stage. Progress, or lack of it, in the five years since is being assessed this week in New York at U.N. Women 2000: Beijing Plus Five Conference.
"Before Beijing, women were pretty invisible and their voices weren't heard on the economic issues," Tarr-Whelan said during a break in conference activities. "Beijing has made a big difference. And the question about empowerment and the issue of women's role in the economy is right at the center."
Murrell has studied the economic status of women in this region and believes it deserves low grades. She gives Pittsburgh a C+ for participation and employment of women, an F for lack of mobility among women in the work force and a D for earnings.
Nationally, women make an average wage of 77 cents for every dollar made by men. Both Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh are below that.
The Pennsylvania average for women is 71.8 cents to a dollar for men, ranking it 41st among the states, according to the Center for Policy Alternatives. In the Pittsburgh region, women earn between 61 percent and 71 percent of what men earn.
Murrell's study put the median income for white females with some college education at $23,463, compared with $34,112 for white males. For African-American females with some higher education, the median income is $23,108, compared with $27,054 for African American males.
On the entrepreneurial front, women now own more than one- third of all businesses in the United States and women are starting new businesses twice as fast as men.
The National Foundation for Women Business Owners estimates that there were 62,300 women-owned firms in the Pittsburgh metro area last year, roughly a third of all the firms. They employ 201,000 people and generate nearly $27.7 billion in sales.
While that is a significant, Pittsburgh ranks in the bottom 20 percent of major metropolitan areas (41st out of 50) in terms of growth in the number, employment and sales of women-owned firms between 1992 and 1999, the foundation said.
Pitt's Murrell said women-owned businesses here are concentrated in the service sector and that local women lag behind in new computer-related areas and in the traditional construction industry.
"So even though it's promising that we're getting women to create businesses, we need to break through in representation across industries," she said.
Statistics, as always, don't tell the whole story.
"There is enormous amounts of work that still has to be done, but there has been measurable progress," said JoAnne W. Boyle, president of Seton Hill College and a member of the 49-person Pittsburgh delegation to the Beijing conference.
The Beijing conference, Boyle said, gave her and other local participants a platform to discuss women's issues in forums ranging from Girl Scout troops to universities.
The world and local attention, she said, helped develop and focus the college's National Education Center for Women in Business. The center is, among other things, a clearinghouse of information for businesswomen and a sponsor of Camp Entrepreneur, a summer camp for girls to learn about starting businesses.
Although women remain scarce in top corporate jobs and boards, Boyle sees talented women gaining ground in some old-line businesses and in new technology firms. That gives her hope for the future.
"There are certainly some leaders, future leaders in the pipeline," she said.
Women are attending business and other professional schools in increasing numbers. Management textbooks once ignored women, she said. Now, case studies involving women-owned businesses are sprinkled liberally among the choices.
Banks that once gave mostly lip service to lending money to women-owned businesses are no longer ignoring their potential. PNC Financial Services Group, for example, last year invested $250,000 in the center's women's business Web site www.e-magnify.com.
It also has an alliance with iVillage.com, the popular women's networking Web site.
"There has been a significant increase in the awareness in all industries that serve women ... that women are an increasingly powerful lever in the economy and that they need to pay attention to the success of women business owners as well as the success for men," Boyle said.
Boyle said economic development was a common thread among those who attended the Beijing conference five years ago. She said the concerns of young women she met from around the world are strikingly similar to the concerns of students she meets on Seton Hill's Greensburg campus.
"They want basic freedom," she said. "They want access to education. They want to be able to make choices for themselves."