1% Going to Bodies Not Brains

When I was reading the Sunday paper, a story in the business section caught my eye. It was rather depressing. The article was about the difficulty women have of making into the one percent (which means you earn $845,000 or more each year).

According to an analysis just released in the American Sociological Review, “Due to labor market inequalities that women face, marrying a man with good income prospects is a woman’s main route to the one percent,” wrote Jill Yavorsky (University of North Carolina-Charlotte), Lisa Keister (Duke), Yue Qian (University of British Columbia) and Michael Nau (Ohio State University).

The article goes on to state,” Most college graduates, half of professional-school graduates and a third of business owners are women. Yet married women are 99.1 percent more likely than single women to be in a one percent household. The equivalent number for married men is 70%. And, just 4.5 percent of women earned enough alone to enter the one percent.”

This really made me mad. We have been preaching to our girl’s that they can break the glass ceiling and get to the big money. Women have pushed themselves to get into the best schools, taken on huge debt to add on master’s degree from ivy league schools and according to this article there has been relatively no change in the numbers for the last 20 years!

What’s more, “women don’t get as many opportunities within traditional corporate structures. Men have more options when it comes to starting businesses, attracting investment or rising through the corporate ranks, the article said.” “Women experience significant obstacles in climbing organizational hierarchies that often intensify over their careers,” said the study authors And, “men still dominate many of the highest-income professions including finance, hedge funds and top-tier law firms.”

Now you understand why I was depressed. The last thing I want to tell my daughter is to forget working to make it to the big money and instead show-off her boobies until she attracts some asshole with big bucks and spends the rest of her life answering to him, picking up after him, raising his children and having him cheat on her so she can make it to the big bucks. I have seen this all my life and that is not the message I will put out there because, frankly, those are rarely the women I respect.

Instead I’ll tell young women to get started building their companies and their fortunes and to stay active in politics to make certain that women are treated equally, paid equally and are represented by women who will protect their bodies and their rights. We have another election coming up and I hope enough people have learned that just because a man knows how to work the system to make money for himself doesn’t mean he understands how to run the country. And women need to either push more men out of the one percent or make certain fewer people are in it.