Long Report (2400)

For millennia, men have controlled, more like limited, the economic power of women in most cultures—European, Asian, African, and American. Exceptions have existed, most notably monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Catherine the Great, Empress Dowager He, Empress Dowager Zheng, Queen Amina of Zazzau, and Empress Candance of Ethiopia. They ruled kingdoms, wheeled the power of great armies, and their words became law. The list excludes the hundreds of women who ruled matriarchies found in a variety of cultures such as the Polynesian, Celtic, and Picts. They retained their positions with difficulty. Men challenged them. So the women ruled with uncommon ferocity.

Women rule again—in a way, according to Fortune magazine:

Female CEOs in the Fortune 500 aren’t quite the norm yet, but they have been making strides.

As of January 2018, there are 27 female CEOs on the list. However, by April 2018, that number will drop down to 24, as HPE’s Meg Whitman, Avon’s Sheri McCoy, and Staples’ Shira Goodman have all announced that they are stepping down from their roles this quarter. The list below excludes those three women.

The women run a diverse range of companies—from consumer goods behemoths like PepsiCo to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin—but they are, predominantly, white. At the moment, just two names on the list are women of color: Geisha Williams of PG&E Corporation and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo. None are African American.

At the same time, women continue to earn less than men. “The ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings was 78.6 percent for full-time/year-round workers in 2014. This means the gender wage gap for full-time/year-round workers is 21.4 percent. Women’s median annual earnings in 2014 were $39,621 compared with $50,383 for men,” according to a IWPR post. Essentially that means that the employer profits more from female workers than from male workers. Therefore, women find it more difficult to generate wealth than men during their working lives.

Sociologists, researchers, and commentators have attributed the disparity of wages to a variety of factors: out-and-out sexism of the Harvey Weinstein kind, cultural (the female approach to work seems more cooperative while the male version is competitive), sexism (women are supposedly too emotional; they are the “gentle” sex; they are the mothers and guardians of our children who “need” the protection of men), and preferences/societal dictated (women “select” financially less rewarding work; they supposedly don’t do “dirty” jobs; they supposedly don’t do math and science). Some explain why an employer pays a male employee more than female, most do not.

Whatever the reason and regardless of the truth behind the reason, women as a group cannot financial compete with men because of discriminating salaries. This contributes to the widening gap of wealth as more women enter the workforce.

Aside from the sexual harassment that plagues women more frequently than men, women face other burdens that men do not. They bear children. Giving birth to one child removes a woman from the workforce for three to nine months, compared to her male counterpart. It interrupts her career, which sets her “behind” the male counterpart. The burden of rearing a child falls on the woman. Companies, state, local, or federal institutions could be opened to provide 10-hour a day child care. In addition, local communities could extend the school year to 11 months, improving the education of children as well as providing child care opportunities for mothers and single-parent fathers.

I have not included the history of women, who, in most cultures, did not have the right to hold wealth, land, or jobs. I have not included the contribution women made during World War II as factory workers, or they sacrifices they made when the war ended and they gave up their jobs to the returning men. I have not gone into a variety of ways society—women and men—relegated women to more “feminine” pursuits, which generally were lower paying. It all contributed to the widening gap, especially as women make up a greater part of the workforce and as more women graduate from college than men.