Why Only Few Women Reach Top Positions at the Workplace

Researchers at the Indiana University, working together with colleagues at the Cornell University, recently determined that hectic jobs, which involve more than 50 hours of work per week, tent to hinder women's performances. This may explain why so few women make it to top positions.

For years, women's rights groups have been saying that there are too few women occupying managerial and professional occupations. The new investigation might help researchers get some fresh insight into precisely why this is happening.

Typically, women have more familial obligations then men, and this accounts for a large part of the difference in the hours the two genders put in. Men work longer hours than women, and the relative difference between the two has largely remained constant.

At the same time, the differences between the number of women and men working full-time jobs has been diminishing constantly. What these findings imply is that, while more females are employed with full hours, the number of those who work more than their job description has remained constant.

IU sociologist Dr. Youngjoo Cha, one of the investigators behind the new study, explains “women, even when employed full time, typically have more family obligations than men,” PsychCentral reports.

“This limits their availability for the ‘greedy occupations,’ that require long work hours, such as high-level managers, lawyers and doctors. In these occupations, workers are often evaluated based on their face time,” the expert adds.

Over time – as indicated by data from the US Census Bureau – the average wages paid hourly to overworkers have increased considerably, compared to those of regular, full-time workers. Giving that most overworkers are men, this shift in pay naturally put them ahead of women in terms of benefits.

“Gender gaps in overwork, when coupled with rising returns to overwork, exacerbate the gender gap in wages. New ways of organizing work are reproducing old forms of inequality,” Cha goes on to say.

Between 1979 and the late 1990s, for example, the percentage of men who worked 50+ hours per week rose from 15 to 19 percent, but registered a small decline in the 2000s, most likely due to recession. Over the same time span, overworking women grew in numbers from 3 to 7 percent.

Between 1979 and 2009, the real wages of men who worked long hours increased by 54 percent, whereas the wages of women in a similar condition rose by 94 percent. During the same interval, the waves of standard full-time workers rose by only 13 percent (men) and 46 percent (women).