Academic and Occupational Discrepancy

When it comes the issue of women and their place in the workforce, I am extremely unqualified to express an opinion. First and foremost, I am not a woman. Therefore, I have never experienced the cruel double standard that so often holds them back in terms of both salary and position; I have never experienced the stress of juggling the dual responsibilities of raising a child and building a career; and I have never experienced the arbitrary marginalization or ridicule that many professional women face each and every day at the office. But my incompetence at addressing this phenomenon doesn’t end there: I am not just a man, but an unemployed man, one who has never even entered the corporate sphere where this discrimination takes place. All of my awareness of the problem is secondary, stemming from both indifferent fifteen second news clips as well as desperate, impassioned articles like Sarah Kendzior’s “Mothers are not ‘opting out’ – they are out of options.” If she wasn’t advocating as loudly as she is, I would have never known that, “for nearly all women, from upper middle-class to poor, the ‘choice’ of whether to work is not a choice, but an economic bargain struck out of fear and necessity.” And if it wasn’t for some further research due to the requirement of writing this essay, I would have never known that, on average, in 2012, year-round female workers made about $12,000 dollars less than year-round male workers, or that this figure is a huge improvement on those of the past (catalyst.org).

The reason that I make such a point of these disparate corporate abuses of women is because this reality is completely incongruous with the only relevant arena in which I have had the opportunity to observe their competence: school. Through shrewd personal observation, in both high school and college, I have witnessed intelligent, motivated female students exhibit a slew of scholarly attributes and skills that their intellectually equivalent male peers simply do not utilize. While one could justifiably accuse me of making an overgeneralization, I stand by this statement, because for years and years I have watched smart girls attend more classes, pay more attention and take better notes during those classes, put more effort into their homework, studying, and other assignments, and generally function as better students than their male counterparts.

Researchers have even conducted several studies whose conclusions support these claims, including one “Evaluation of Comparative Academic Performance of Undergraduate Students at University Level,” which found that less than 50% percent of male students perform at a GPA level above 3.00, compared to almost 60% of female students (Journal of Animal & Plants Sciences). And Christopher Cornwell, an academic and researcher at UGA Terry College of Business, prefaces another recent, applicable study with a claim that is similar to my own: “You can think of ‘approaches to learning’ as a rough measure of what a child’s attitude toward school is: it includes six items that rate the child’s attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility, and organization. I think that anybody who’s a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.”

The more that I read and learn about the imbalance between the achievements of women during their formative academic years and the lack of respect that they receive in the white-collar world, the more I realize that something is being lost in translation. One of the main designs of school is to provide the student with the proper preparation to land a good job. So the fact that so many women are consistently killing it in the classroom, yet still getting murdered in the job hunt and on the pay scale, shows just how flawed our society is. We have set ourselves up to fail by ignoring the results of the public education system that we commissioned to create the most qualified candidates. We have set ourselves up to fail by ignoring the full value that women can bring to a company. We have set ourselves up to fail by neglecting to pay them appropriately in the instances that we do utilize their skills.

With the ways things are now, I can envision two possibilities for the future. The first is a bright one, in which effective employers cease to discriminate against women as a result of the natural forces of the market. In this future, if an employer wants his/her company to succeed, they will hire the best candidate for the job, regardless of gender. And in this future, the best candidate for the job will increasingly turn out to be female. But the second possibility is much bleaker. In that future, we continue along the path that we have been on for decades, and we suffer the exact fate for which we have been preparing ourselves all along. We have set ourselves up to fail, and that’s exactly what we do: we fail miserably, we fail divided, and we deserve every bit of our failure.