The High Cost of Undervaluing Work by Women

Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke bluntly in Beijing last week about women and work: “Much of the work we do is not valued,” she told the United Nations Conference on Women. “Not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.”

That’s not mere sentiment--a plaintive “woman’s work is never done” cliche.

Rather it’s an economic insight for a changing world--and a changing America.

Clinton was talking broadly about caring for children and elderly relatives as well as producing machines on assembly lines and sowing crops in the fields.

And she was referring not only to massive injustices directed at women in less developed countries but to costly, if less painful, discriminations against women’s work in her own country.

Trends in women’s work in America are both dismaying and encouraging. The steady rise of women’s earnings toward parity with those of men has stalled. In 1979 women’s earnings were 62% of the men’s average but grew to 76.8% of men’s earnings by 1993.

However, the female wage ratio slipped back to 76.4% in 1994 and has continued to decline, to 75.8%, through mid-1995.

One reason is that the traditional women’s professions of nursing, teaching and social work are coming under pressure from cost-cutting and reforms in medicine, government and the schools. Whatever the merits of such reforms, they do not promise a continued increase in women’s wages, says Audrey Freedman, a New York-based labor economist.

Yet other trends counter such gloom. Women-owned businesses in the United States are growing rapidly. They now number 7.7 million and employ 15.5 million people, or 35% more than all the companies in the Fortune 500 employ worldwide.

Such statistics, compiled by Dun & Bradstreet for the National Foundation for Women Business Owners are important, explains Sharon Hadary, research director of the foundation. “The fact that women-owned businesses account for $1.4 trillion in annual sales impresses the banks,” Hadary says. “That makes it easier for women to get financial backing.”

Entrepreneurship is growing. Fortune magazine reports that women, like men, increasingly are taking the leap to start their own companies because they’re “fed up” with the stodginess of traditional corporations.

Role models are changing for the better. Where questionable male deal-makers hogged business headlines in the 1980s, today the pages of Forbes tell of Linda Wachner, who took the money-losing franchise of Speedo bathing suits five years ago and nurtured it back to a business worth $400 million today. The Speedo triumph was only a sidelight to Wachner’s day job, which is running Warnaco Group Inc. and earning an annual income of $10 million.

The world of female entrepreneurs also features quietly competent business managers such as Ann Gaither, who runs the J.H. Heafner trucking company in Lincolnton, N.C., near Charlotte, and Kathy Prasnicki, president of Sun Coast Resources, an oil distribution company in Clear Lake, Tex., near Houston.

The underlying trend is an increase in economic options for women everywhere. It’s a trend that has gone furthest in the United States, where women hold more than 40% of the managerial jobs and attain higher levels of education than in other countries, according to “America’s Competitive Secret: Utilizing Women as a Management Strategy,” a book by management professor Judy B. Rosener of the University of California at Irvine.

This is economics, not sociology. An economy that encourages all its people to use their abilities to the fullest extent builds human capital. There’s a connection, in short, between the attainments of U.S. women and the report out of Brussels last week that once again named the United States as the world’s most competitive nation.

But so much more needs to be done. For all their growth, women-owned businesses employ only 13% of the work force. And while it’s a time of widening opportunity for educated women--and men--the mass of workers are struggling with stagnant wage levels, insecure employment and a worrisome lack of skills.

Outdated and inadequate education leaves even high school graduates unable to function in modern industry; lack of child care and community or business programs for adolescents leaves families harried and burdened. “These are problems that cut across class lines and affect families everywhere,” says Belinda Walker, a lawyer and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, an organization that channels philanthropic donations.

Is there a connection between the lack of innovative thinking and dedicated effort on such problems in the U.S. and the fact that educating and caring for the young is women’s work--and undervalued? That would be a good bet.

And the cost of such neglect is high. A report last week by the Justice Department said violent crime among juveniles is rising and predicted that arrests of youthful offenders will double in the next 15 years.

Clinton in Beijing last week offered one solution: “If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish.”

She wasn’t mouthing sentiment. She was stating a goal, an ideal, a challenge.

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Quest for Economic Parity

In 1979, the median full-time weekly salary for women as only 62.5% of what it was for men. Although the ratio of women’s to men’s earnings has increased to more than 76% since then, analysts have recently expressed concern over what appears to be a developing downward trend.

1979: 62.5%

2nd quarter 1995: 75.8%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics