… And I think they always have. Doing this for almost 45 years, I’ve come to lots of conclusions and this one is a certain one. There are a few reasons that women have to work harder than most men… Notice I said ‘most men’, not all.
First of all, women have to overcome the fact that they are, well, women. For a reason I’ll never figure out, women are not normally expected to be as good at business as men are. I’m sure there are hundreds of psychological reasons for this, but the reasons don’t matter, I still believe it to be true. Because women are taken for granted and still imagined as the “weaker sex,” they have to just plain old outwork most men to be successful in the eyes of the business world. And, when they do, their performance goes well beyond what most men do.
One of the reasons that women even have an advantage in the work world is that they don’t have the “male ego” to get in their way. The automatic competitiveness that men have with each other doesn’t seem to exist in the makeup of women. Businessmen, upon meeting, have a tendency to size each other up from an inherent “my dad’s bigger than your dad,” or “my button is bigger than your button” or anything else along that line. Women don’t need to prove they are bigger, faster, stronger, meaner, etc. Even when they are competitive, it doesn’t come across as threatening to most men. So that ego “stacking up” isn’t even there and doesn’t dissipate energy.
The biggest challenge that women have is well, again, being women. The prospect of being a business person along with being a wife and a mother takes three times the effort and don’t let anybody kid you. The hardest job in the whole world is being a mother. There is nothing in business that is as difficult, challenging, treacherous, or consequential as being a mother. Nothing! If a woman is all three of these things, they have to be better than men.
One of the reasons that some women stand out in the business forum is that there are so few of them. The ones that survive and blossom just have to be better than men in order to do it.
Arguing that all of this isn’t fair, isn’t right or should in some artificial way be equalized is a waste of time and effort. Life isn’t fair and trying to make it so is stupid. In some industries women make less than men probably because of the few years of the “mommy track.” If a guy took two or three years off from his profession to raise kids, his salary wouldn’t advance either. He’d probably have to start from behind where he even was when he had to take the paternal break. For the most part, any professional loses their edge when they are out of the workforce for 18 months to two years. Arguing the unfairness of this isn’t going to change the facts.
For the most part, women have to work harder and run circles around men in the same position. Sometimes they are paid less because of the mommy track time they had to be out of the business workforce. I suggest that if a woman…or anyone…feels or knows that they are being paid differently than their counterparts for exactly the same work, find another job. Whining about this kind of inequality is a waste of energy. It hasn’t changed in 1000 years and it probably never will. Argue about it if you wish, just please don’t do it with me.
