International Women's Day

Last Wednesday was International Women’s Day. There were a few articles in the paper regarding ‘the status of women in Canada’. I use quotes because that’s my theme, not the authors’. A couple of the articles focused on the fact that despite having greater numbers (50.5% of the population), we still have only a few seats at the table (so to speak) of power.

I am fully in support of more women being in positions of power. I think that if more women were in Parliament, then the government might more adequately achieve the goals that we want them to achieve. It is true that the glass ceiling still seems to exist, but I think that rather than banging our heads against the same ceiling for the same reasons, and railing against the same machine that has been holding us back, perhaps we should step back and ask ourselves some questions. The first, and perhaps most important, being why.

Why have we plateau’d? There was tremendous growth in the numbers of women becoming ‘independent’ in the eighties and nineties (in the ‘western’ world). Women started to have a serious impact on every aspect of politics, policy development and actual legislation once we gained the right to control our own fate and our own bodies. We constitute one of the biggest consumer groups. We get more education. We get our own jobs. We buy our own homes. We raise our children without the help of their fathers when we have to.

So why are there so few female CEOs? Why are there so few women on the boards of the companies that employ Canadians? Why are there so few women at the vice-president level? Or at the director level? Or even at the senior manager level?

One theory is that corporations are still too male-dominated. Even in Canada, where we like to think that we are about as progressive as a people can be, the corporate world is probably one of the last great hold-outs of the ‘old boys club’. This theory posits that it will just take more time. That we just haven’t hit a critical mass yet, whereat those of us above the glass ceiling will have made enough little cracks with our high heels in the glass, to destroy it completely. That’s the theory anyway.

Another (not very popular) answer might be that not enough of us want to get above the glass ceiling. Certainly, most of us would love the salaries that come with CEO jobs, but are most of us willing to make the sacrifices that would need to be made to get, and keep, them? You don’t hear too many people talking about that.

More later peeps...